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Deborah A. Meadows: California Poets Part 7, Five Poems


Deborah A. Meadows


July 1st, 2024

California Poets: Part VII

Deborah A. Meadows

Five Poems



Dendrochronology

 

It picks up a reflective

surface, pain there, reliable

desert horizon, its double—

weird, long portrait, how solitude

is laid down in singular stripes.

 

Radii made of lumber, house staff

vacuum halls twelve stories up,

lost pants beside koi fish pond,

historic feminists in Valencia,

miniature model of utopia

harbored thin people, Tarzana

Pho shop, aerospace, and fashion,

then on 395 toward Lone Pine:

a tiny house on wheels—

nomadic when hassled,

re-purposed, elegant, free …

 

Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest

 

Our globe, our lucky horseshoe:

it speaks for itself, so

ignore all prior verbiage,

scale of shipping containers,

grit and grain forgotten or redressed,

palm trees and helicopters.

 

Read variations on an oxygen-isotope

theme, early coins first to designate

numerical face value follow, and

windswept time in the Great Basin

Ecotone

 

Right where dendrochronologists date

growth, preserve likelihood, we read

how Methuselah gets hyped, could have

had a Matriarch Grove. At altitude:

alternate tunings, a ranger station.

 

Soaked the area, tested well,

core samples show fifty centuries

in a living specimen, botanic strata,

its singular scar, accident, afflicted

ring, crooked life

 

takeout boxes cast here

as nodal moments, with crane arms

held out: dancers swept clear

of vortices’ turbulence, not

 

some sort of flashy apex or

dyadic glance to bridge theory

and wet chemistry

 

                        without

underbrush nuance, that is.

 



Dear Henry,

 

pulse of the tree’s sap, per minute

wilderness reduced to labeled perfumery

 

took down sails at bridges, slunk by

with favorable currents—

ducks depart in parallax view,

season departs lengthwise

 

low fare, frostwork, windowed

opening lines, retrieve escaped farm

animal with rope and barrow,

wait for summer again

 

new skin, ore war, running after

attributes different from the soul,

shadow and tail, anguish over lost

friend, rock cap fern, who will they

be who find our fossil remains?

 

how many hundreds make one

complete being? hasty minded

slacked, word for a thing will tell us

lifeways, creel, stanza to spring,

well-made

 

what is happening now, as he sat

in his boat: frogs, bullfrogs, terrenity

 

light prevails over shadow, variations 

by lily pads,

 

after the dancers departed …

What’s the word for something hypothetical

and preposterous? Speculative, I suppose.

 

andropogons: rain dance, split beard, broom edge

 

anguish over lost friend, compatible as a distant

ideal, falling short other than snapping turtle

 

each station on a walk is storied

ice bears a record of wind

a nation also

 

John Brown, his fate overshadows

beauty in the world

 

to find sympathy with another exceeds

beauty, intelligence

 

how ice patterns vary:

feather, fibrous flame

underfoot as mackerel sky

            overhead

on winter ice, we walk the sky

 

operculum

how this lifts us, prove a new species

dentation, new thought, new friend

 

clause in will: no statue made of me

 

to live in the forest

why things have their names

how grieving a death makes

bird song

less

 

ripeness must serve a transcendent

use, highest use a poet can pluck

 

life begins with a spirit level




Parable of the Mavericks

 

bark, stapled, more and more quilted

re-purposed fabric, collective high

lights, tree glamour, an inferior sort

of truth, light against side of face

light on skin bared by muscle shirt

 

wharf scene over by then, a Chevy

sled monstrosity slides by,

preceded earbuds, their private sound

 

beating heart of celery: we were unable

to work, ill, we lost the habit.

Where was the outside force that made us

show up? made to look like this?

 

We were living like this for a long time.

Old habits created a “crisis mode.”

Patterns then spread abroad, spread thin.

 

*

 

We are born afflicted. Against cure, responsible

agents, zoned for fast living, taxing effort.

We cultivated small differences in style.

Spacey, we forgot to call.

 

We wrote under international influences:

fumeroles, hot springs, mud vents.

With awakening came the realization

we are creatures.

 

Distant bombing hit us hard. Defenseless

creatures, we said, mixed up in a political

quagmire.

 

We got off the teeter-totter of if-then logic,

expansive refusal opened other logics.




Different kinds of Air

 

Hunch that dark matter is another

kind of gravity

 

dark matter a construct another Priestley

might send the way of phlogiston

 

clay wine cup of the moment

conservation of matter unto dust

 

life in the Western Asset Plaza

 

gravitons on the doubling side

collaborator on motion

 

who lives here? a divided mirror, sheepfold

stop out means of printing, purveyed

ink wash-drawn circle,

 

earlier generations of Cambridge

botanists and botanical travelers,

how classificatory method grew

from moral charge, creation,

 

localized violence over unequal

distribution when numbers

in settlements were small

 

deformed, windswept shine

terrestrial petri dish

 

in it or part of surface pattern

read for pure complexity:

that contradiction, word cover

absolved of grief

 

to parade for tourist throngs

in native dress, to escape

a school’s claim,

move to outer edge,

liminal, possible

 

temblor as composer, earth

soundings engage our bodies

imitation slip-fault



 

Taiga


Suppose Earth-tilt not up to arrogated language, vacant stage for humans, self-enhancement, landscape, movie set beach vanishing view, camera iris screw-down.

 

On the impulse to imagine old things, stressed or torn connective language, a word or phrase here or there, and we’re implicated.

 

Not that time here folds back on itself, a worked-against force, something windy days can exemplify except when they can’t.

 

Crow, crows’ monstrance plan underway, face into wind of history, Mojave, thick thighs show hideouts are hideous parody of present time.

 

Shortcoming of shifting cloud shapes as two sides’ struggle for civic time.

 

No soil samples here. Stones in the gullet of premiere singers, their charges.

                                                           

Now they were shooting with the sun high, a lull in wind created a false sense of perpetual stillness for several frames.

 

Crows are movement. Animal sounds. Customary costume for herders.

 

A customary move to show by withholding, to separate commentary as a taint on truth, that old-time objectivity. Yet loveliness, fascination as another branch of Eros rooted in particulars.

 

Wide belt, bright orange over dark tunic. Motorcycle beside yurt. Knots hold tarp cover in a system.

 

Tied by neighborly bonds that could be made tighter as filial bonds, a strategy that 19th ideologies sought to imprint with neologisms, a social way to change herds and herders.

 

My camp is near the cooperative. Handsome workhorses. Calves communicate with cows. Milk, milk. Child labor, all labor.

 

Each with a personality that somehow makes generational knowledge ambivalent, or maybe to say daily round shadowed here.

 

There are some but not many like them, attentive to their animals, each other, with an evenness of temper, thorough calling.

 

Big open land, low sun, shadowed hills. Shamaness Baldshir. Camel in foreground. Séance at midnight. Ritual robe warmed by fire jangles iron.

 

Dense with preparation and wardrobe assistants, she might need us seated here enclosing arc, firelight on our permitted faces, camera active, cradled with repetition.

 

Is possible to conjure our dead? She spins and chants over and over near collapse, then faint with the effort, our intermediary succumbs to the iron weight of garb.

 

“The wooden earth is my cradle,” she chants. Animated outfit. “My all-powerful horse is my intermediary.”

 

Outside theatre of ritual enactment, we long for home each time, for each seasonal place as if it will drink our memory without us.

 

Riding from becomes riding toward so entrance to another plain exits geographic inner expanse, interior continents and lost cameras of thought.

 

From metal jangle-cloak to blue satin. Long panorama: wedding party arrives on horseback. Couple walks clockwise round yurt.

 

With time, all becomes nourishing, grasslands become milk after passage through taiga land, herds’ circuitous intestines, so bless and knot old technique.

 

Make milk offerings, then enter. Drink from common cup. Father gives ties for yurt, Buddhist lucky knot.

 

Those in camera range ostensibly extended nod to record-making activities that will be shown, will be lost again in the press of image-time.

 

Mother gives mortar and pestle. Food is blessed; couple is blessed. Bride makes her first milk tea for all.

 

A shy sweetness stimulates old-timers to reach for snuff bottles in convivial cover for the strength of emotions provoked by ritual of life’s passage.

 

Poet is called upon, recites for newlyweds. Old-timers sing sentimental song. “Overtone song, please.” Throat-singer performs. Toast newlyweds: happiness, large herds.

 

It’s still rich as chamber music interpreted in the old way; all pass summer seasons’ fluorescing final shimmer.

 

They are adept in other settings, other cook situations refine feel for material, those that transform with no charities’ purview here or there—only fire to help.

 

A thought about flow with and without sense: how things jump a track, lessen sum of parts, theorize measurable terms.

 

Singer and blacksmith. Carved figures, animals. Sacred Tree. Fairy tale of naked boy and fox.

 

Subtractive activities foreground sound, ribbons express wind, strips are hair, product of hands made to carry away by fortunate.

 

By flesh we’re known as soft potential, by garb a stable truth to live by communicating sometimes your mother, sometimes your son, the tack and saddle for yaks.

 

Festival of Mutton Breastbone. Slaughter by reaching into knifed-open animal. Wrestlers and praise-singers. Men show flesh in struggle.

 

What turn form took is taken away, reshaped comestible, skinned nearly alive, many quick work hands, remainder seeps into ground, little to glean.

 

Whether rehearsal or real thing blurs with repetition, or each wrestler gently becomes the role before melting to thin air, standard clothing.

 

Cheer on men’s wrestling match. Winners are clear winners until next year’s match-up. Nomads leave for Winter camp, dismantle yurts, take down yurt crown.

 

Properties to bundle, dissatisfaction rides human life, or makes its expression possible as a driver for more, more movement, more return, more variation, invention.

 

As premature animals form a thin lining to this season’s, wait for their shadow to reach across the plain behind low hills, discarding permanent ownership in the hunt.

 

On the way to White Lake, hunters hunt. Back then, my mother lived with reindeer, milked them. Our reindeer became state property; we began to call it “reindeer cooperative.”

 

To have learned how they think, how they respond to sound, to be adjacent, bare, unlicensed long-learning still transmitted now with little waste.

 

Filmed subjects in a world without homegrown camera operators surely will produce versioned lives robust in other technique. 

 

Suppose entropy a process to film, linguistic transference water, an element we swim through, divert to channels flickering between danger and valued resource, transparency.

 

Young people no longer know our ways, no longer live independently. Back then, everyone spoke several languages.

 

Cycles, then interrupted cycles telling by exception, dims cautionary counter here on river banks and flats with elders in decline.

 

Bear hunting in the old days. Up river, reindeer-nomads of taiga. Some reindeer for riding, all others as herd.

 

Others are coming, we are coming, altogether a union of people and herds, salutations, and warm gripped hands, weight of bodies, resonant, spare.

 

Reindeer nomads meet this time of year. Trade goods, complaints and wishes for chief. Prepare deer whistle for stag hunt.

 

How government-issue uniforms assault the eye, so when examples arrive, are they recognized as outsiders or of this ethnicity come back to peer into the trade fair?

 

Airplane lands with Christian delegation. Pilot and copilot, uniforms. More wrestling, then reindeer race.

 

The camera held steady, and held many in what appeared to be a history painting, but then again not: various scenes are united in one’s mind.

 

Antique picnic games dispersed to our county parks, flow, circulate as phantom signifiers here on the title page of a tall stack of drafts in other languages, their tug of war.

 

Know manageable units of distance via strength of pack animals, exchange of essential goods, authentic out here, not staged but created.

 

Now we leave for Autumn camp, five days away. Shamaness animates shamaness clothes. Magpie, fainting: “protect me.”

 

A calling answered by summoning unseen world right behind this one, making manifest with chant, smoke, clothes, entrance to whorl using her as vessel.

 

Just outside this circle, winter will express itself against our inner visual lives where streams shimmer come spring and ultimately convince with force and duration.

 

Hardly a conclusion: that slip to roadside attraction, vast time of nomadic practice slipped past governing design now slip-knotted in net of preservation, docent instruction, film.

 

Big city attractions for children. Culture reduced to simulated yurt with elderly docent, to merry-go-round of fiberglass reindeer.

 

From what is imagined lost, imagined saved, that baby must be twenty-nine or thirty by now passing into it all again with difference, a lull in wind, stillness with crows.

 

*

 

“Taiga” (Neo-bedrooms, Shearsman Books, 2021) is in response to Ulrike Ottinger’s 1992 eight-hour ethnographic film, Taiga that follows nomadic yak and reindeer herders to their various seasonal camps.



Interview


July 28th, 2024

California Poets Interview Series:

Deborah A. Meadows, Poet, Playwright, Essayist

interviewed by David Garyan



DG: Art has had a major impact on your creative development. What artists do you most admire and what connections do you see between them and your poetry?


DM: First, thanks for the generous invitation for my work and this interview. In a portion of my forthcoming book titled Bumblebees (Roof Books) art is scattered, decomposed, held in the mind, re-assembled in the face of climate change and social injustice. So, yes, art is an influence on my poetry, and not only early exposure to contemporary painting and sculpture in the Albright-Knox Museum and ArtPark in Buffalo, NY, but a long life of study and experience that includes interest in petroglyphs of the Coso Range, cave paintings such as Chauvet Cave, portable art of Scythian nomads, items and structures related to ceremony and ritual. Artists, theorists, and philosophers form much of my reading, and sometimes all of those expressions are bundled in artist movements and artist collectives who create new ideas such as Robert Smithson, Pierre Huyghe, Agnes Denes, Eva Hesse, Marcel Broodthaers, Bill Viola, Rothko, Brancusi, Duchamp, Sol Le Witt, and more. Certainly land artists, assemblage artists, body and performance artists, minimalists such as Agnes Martin are important. A long time subscriber to October magazine, I’ve enjoyed reading with and against the ongoing group of authors and theorists there. I reach toward exciting ideas from artist movements in my work, and some of my work is ekphrastic in, perhaps, an “expanded field” of that practice.


DG: In 2006 you traveled to Argentina and met Romina Freschi, with whom you did a written interview later. What are aspects of her work you love the most and what other Latin American writers do you admire?


And before this, in 2002, you had also visited Cuba. What literary exchanges did you have there and what fascinated you most about the country?


DM: I will answer these two questions together. Of travels nationally and internationally, the faculty exchanges with Cuba were exciting and complicated. Our campus, California Polytechnic State University, Pomona attained the special Department of Interior license to both host scholars and authors to our campus and, in turn, to have members of our faculty and student body travel there on academic exchanges. I was glad to be part of that and participated in travel there beginning in 2000, so we are discussing events quite a while ago. One of those occasions, I was part of the Havana poetry conference “Encuentro Internacional de Poesía del Lenguaje” where there were many poets from SUNY, Buffalo, and I also met Buenos Aires poet Daniel Muxica. He, in turn, invited poets, including me, to the Buenos Aires Conference “II Lecturas de Primavera Buenos Aires 2006” that included poets from Mexico and South America. Earlier in 2002, together with poet Jorge Santiago Perenik, he translated some of my work for the conference that was published in Los Rollos Del Mal Muerto. During the conference, I visited with Daniel and Jorge, and I was introduced to poet Romina Freschi who interviewed me for her publication Plebella: Revista De Poesía Actual. And later she invited me to co-translate poetry of Daniel Muxica, published in Shearsman. I do admire her poetry and so was very happy to provide a cover blurb for her book length English translation titled Echo of the Park by Romina Freschi (Eulalia Books, 2019). Here it is in part, and I’d recommend her work to your readers:

“Romina Freschi’s Echo of the Park explores dualities of capture and flight. Held by power, routine, poison, cultivation, gravity’s many forms? Her language honors ecstatic break through, a feathered bird named Sor Juana, an interspecies heart, introspective focus, and passage to deep grief, and altogether punctuates turbulence with a rare calm. A philosophic poet, Freschi might appreciate that scientists consider nanotubes a “cage” or possible holder, yet nanostructures make the butterfly’s brilliant blue and Vantablack such an absorption.”


DG: Apart from poetry, you’ve also written plays. To what extent does the performative nature of theater influence not only the poems you write, but also how you deliver them?


DM: Theatre is important, now and during the decades I taught a variety of interdisciplinary courses that included Greek tragedy, Shakespearean plays, Beckett, Popul Vuh, and on. Bodies on stage can be a language of desire, injustice, social inequities, tragic irony of human intent, and on.


I’ve had plays published, and some of those became staged readings, and “Some Cars” was produced for a short run at the MorYork Gallery. I am drawn to theatre and am lucky to be able to see the Wooster Group when they come to RedCat theatre, and productions by Christiane Jathahy, Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate and other RedCat offerings. Many micro-sized spaces and other local venues have offered interesting productions as well as large spaces in Hauser and Wirth, or performances by opera company The Industry at Union Station and recently at MOCA. Author/performers who I find important include Carla Harryman, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Kate Valk, the theatre group Four Larks, among others.

I wrote a bit on theatre, and Philippe Quesne’s ‘La Mélancolie des Dragons’ for Journal of Poetic Research here:



My poetry reading is a reading, and my plays have involved trained actors, but, once in awhile, as an amateur actor, I read a scene from one of my plays as a performance in the sense of facial expression, pauses, body movement. A recent example is a scene-reading from “Guide Dogs” I did with Geoffrey Gatza in Buffalo, and another example is a scene-reading from “Dragon Boat” with actor/author Gray Palmer a few years back at Poetic Research Bureau in LA.


Beckett is an important writer for me, and his use of bickering is wonderful and varied: exploratory, desirous, defeated, circular, fragmented, exploitive, exposed. I see a divergent theatric line from Socratic dialogs to Beckett’s Estragon and Vladimir.


DG: Moby Dick has had an incredible influence on you and in fact your collection, Itinerant Men, is essentially a philosophical examination of the book. Can you talk about when you first read the novel and how you went on to choose what aspects to include in your own book?


DM: I was interested in exploring how ideology and underlying cultural assumptions—in particular assumptions around class, race, and gender—may be embedded in the syntax and vocabulary in 19th century language, literary language, so Moby-Dick seemed a good place to begin a long poetry project. But, of course, Melville’s work is so interesting and not necessarily typical. So I read each chapter then used a randomized way to select words, phrases, and sometimes just a syllable to build out a consideration inflected with philosophic and critical approaches. This project engaged all 135 chapters and the epilogue, and they are published across five volumes (and selected in others). They are: Chapters 1-20 in Representing Absence (Los Angeles: Green Integer Press, 2004); Chapters 22-51 and 80-114 in Itinerant Men (San Francisco: Krupskaya Press, 2004); Chapters 60-79 in “The 60’s and 70’s:  from The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick” (Kaneohe, Hawaii: Tinfish Press, 2003); and, Chapters 115-135 and Epilogue in Thin Gloves (Los Angeles: Green Integer Press, 2006).


Other Chapters not listed here first appeared in Jacket, American Letters and Commentary, New Review of Literature, in Another Language – Poetic Experiments in Britain and North America.  LIT-Verlag: Muenster, Hamburg, Berlin, Mirage, Generator, Pom2, and in translation as "La teoría de la subjetividad en Moby Dick (fragmentos)." Trans. Jorge Santiago Perednik. ed. Daniel Muxica. Los Rollos Del Mal Muerto. Buenos Aires, Argentina. No. 7, (Verano De 2002).


All has put me into a deeper appreciation of how many authors and artists have created work in relation to Moby-Dick, and the list keeps growing! An example is my reading with several other poets anthologized in After Moby-Dick: An Anthology of New Poetry, eds. Elizabeth Schultz and Kylan Rice, part of the “Melville’s Origins” program, the 12th International Melville Society Conference where we read at The Strand Bookstore Rare Books Room, NYC, 2019. Another example of the many authors who have created work in relation to Moby-Dick is the interpretive performance of by Wu Tsang that was held at nearby Hauser and Wirth last year. 


DG: In your essay “Icons and Iconoclasts” you offer an in-depth analysis of how images—and by extension the ideas behind them—enter the cultural consciousness and are subsequently reproduced, thus gaining legitimacy. The essay is fascinating because of how it shifts between the layers of what an icon is—a religious thing, an image, and the person behind the image. The essay was delivered in 2008, just as social media began making its full presence felt. To what extent has technology either changed or affirmed the arguments you made and how has it impacted the creative work you personally do?


DM: Ah, thanks, that essay was an extension or consolidation of materials for a senior course I developed that began with a look at the pervasive presence of the Virgin of Guadalupe we could collect in our area. And we moved on to other religious and secular icons, Warhol’s Mao, soup cans, Bill Viola’s video art, to political, revolutionary, and uplift icons. Paired with a consideration of iconoclasts, we viewed Landau’s The Sixth Sun:  Mayan Uprising in Chiapas, (wherein street banner images of Subcomandante Marcos become conflated the Virgin of Guadalupe), read Beckett’s Godot, considered cartoonists,’ poets,’ and playwrights’ uses of irony, parody, satire. Why not explore icons and iconoclasts, powerful images that embody or mediate presence of something or someone absent? Icons often provoke worship, uplift, an erotic economy, identification between viewer and purported presence, aura, even relation with others in community. Yet as means to advance orthodoxy, icons have provoked varying political and social responses including iconoclasm, ways to disfigure, detourné, or overthrow icons, knock down city-square statues, their conventional structures of thought and belief. How interesting that “icon” gets into the Oxford English dictionary in the late 19th century, but “iconoclast” gets in by 1598, and the word “iconoclasm” gets in by 1798. Maybe I should look up “hologram”?


DG: In the introduction of your essay “The Poetics of Drifting Devotions” you describe what you felt walking the streets of Havana—from the perspective of an “I” that was beginning to embody multiple senses of being within the one person experiencing that multitude. You write: “we must be various in reading, or in expression, so that we might understand that the self is both socially-constructed and has the capacity for honesty, that we can still tell if someone is a phony or a good person within the realm of social simulacra.” It’s been twenty years since that essay appeared. We seem to be approaching a Borgesian scenario where the map is as big as the empire it portrays, except in this case, it’s not the map but the internet that’s taking over the very reality it depicts. In a sense how close are we to the death of reality, to the collapse of the empire of tangible things, to the complete erasure of the distinction between what’s phony and real—a society where there’s no truth or even the things that created it, only signs, just mere maps that both tell us where we came from but also assert where we must go?


DM: In Deleuze’s writing on Proust he seems to argue that Proust’s novel is not about memory but enacts a search for truth; hence, Deleuze approaches it as a philosophic text, or at least sympathetic to philosophers’ love of truth. Has living in a flurry of signs been more interesting for Proust’s century or ours? The drift, the dérive, agile knowing, being alert to cultural assumptions propel ethical evaluation, especially in godless quarters, where perhaps the responsibility increases.


As for the primordial relation between art and technology, I listen carefully to the elaborate and sophisticated conversation given how the ethical, political, and aesthetic implications are developing. I admire artists who create interesting meetings of art and machine. But aggressive, extractive electronic technology is a concern, sure. Why do we love our inventions, even those dangerous ones? Flawed, anti-heroic, fumbled human effort is material for poetry. Much of my life has been here in Los Angeles and there in the Piute Mountains where my husband and I built a place that has solar panels, no cell service or internet, and where I use pre-electronic technology to cut firewood for heat and use a rake and wheelbarrow for fire clearance. As for the relation between representation and world such as your Borges reference, well, that’s a physical touch deeply held in the body and in the mind. We’re certainly not the only creatures who map a world, play an interior cinema, follow a scent trail. And just when the map seems total, along comes ground penetrating LiDAR …


I hear there’s a renewed interest in “vinyl”, meaning LP’s, long playing records. So many of us have been charmed by NASA’s Golden Record sent on Voyager, and how many of us experienced setting a needle on a spinning disc to listen to music, existence of an atmosphere, rather than a soundless vacuum, assumed?


DG: Sound is a very important component of your work, both in terms of its acoustic qualities but also the so-called accompaniment of influence every author has to deal with—the so-called bass guitar, in your words, that drives the “dialog with other authors.” Can you talk about these multi-faceted conceptions of sound as they relate to your work and how has the nature of these conversation changed for you over the past ten years, since the release of your selected poems?


DM: Our bodies have resonating chambers and we move on a beat, sure. We are sounding instruments, first, and other items and poetic techniques are important signifying extensions of bodies. Birds, their song are an old unit. Music can be irresistible. As for acoustic influence, I would hope we can hear examples in each other’s poetry. Chapter 114 from Itinerant Men may call up Hart Crane, as one example.


DG: What are you reading at the moment?


DM: In the recent two years, I’ve been part of the Cixous reading group: (https://cixousreadinggroup.wordpress.com) and that has shaped a portion of my reading.


I’m reading the recent edition Laura Hinton’s Chant de la Sirène, Issue 4, 2023\24: Climate & Poetics that features extended thought by writers and thinkers I admire on climate change. Here: https://www.chantdelasirenejournal.com/cdlsissue4climateandpoetics


I tend to read various works by Deleuze, Manuel De Landa, Critchley, Thoreau, by feminist philosophers Irigaray, Cixous, among others, and chapters in political critique, theory of knowledge, ecology, physics, botany, geology, astronomy that interest me. Also these works:


Everything and Other Poems by Charles North


The Formless is What Keeps Bleeding by Cindy Rehm


Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage, ed. by Daniel Sack


Phantom Pain Wings by Kim Hysoon


Well-Kept Ruins by Cixous


From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate by Nathaniel Mackey


The Reciprocal Translation Project: Six Chinese and Six American Poets Translate Each Other, eds. James Sherry and Sun Dong


Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington


The Years by Annie Ernaux


Septology by Jon Fosse


What Do Pictures Want? by W.J.T. Mitchell


and portions of online works in HyperAllergic, PennSound, and by subscription October, The Nation Magazine


#########



Author Bio:

Deborah A. Meadows grew up in Buffalo, NY. After graduating from SUNY, Buffalo in Philosophy and English, she moved to California where she taught for many years. She is an Emerita faculty member at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, lives with her husband in Los Angeles’ Arts District/Little Tokyo, and has published over a dozen books of poetry most recently Neo-bedrooms (Shearsman), Lecture Notes, a duration poem in twelve parts (BlazeVOX [books]), and The Demotion of Pluto: Poems and Plays (BlazeVOX [books]). Her book titled Bumblebees will be published by Roof Books, the first portion of Bumblebees is an e-chap published by BlazeVox, Spring 2022, with illustrations by Geoffrey Gatza. www.deborahmeadows.com


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