About Me:

Deborah 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]).

Online Electronic Poetry Center author page: http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/meadows/

Audio Files at PennSound author page: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Meadows.php

The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) Blog, 2009 and 2023 Volumes.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100327223738/http://pippoetry.blogspot.com/

Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Meadows

Poetry Foundation site:  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/deborah-meadows

Online interview at Jacket magazine: http://jacketmagazine.com/32/meadows-iv.shtml

Interview with Lance Phillips. "Here Comes Eveerybody: Writers on Writing" https://web.archive.org/web/20100227185510/ttp://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2005/01/photo-credit-courtney-gregg-deborah.html

Essay by Jill Magi: "Go to rest, our result”: Imminent Returns and Reading Deborah Meadows’ Goodbye Tissues” November 28, 2011

http://jillmagisblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/go-to-rest-our-result-imminent-returns.html

Early Influences, and Later:

Much of my poetry practice is informed by early life experience and access to philosophy, art, and literature that too often is reserved by and for social elite.  My father and my brother were ironworkers, and my mother worked in our home. Looking back I see the dominant program for those growing up in the working class was then, and remains, one of assimilation. Yet like many others, I came to question that set of truths and sought ways both to have access to and participate in education, art, the larger world of democratic forms and class issues. What might equality and respect look like in life? As an adult that exploration took many forms: poetry, travel, teaching, work in labor issues in particular with my faculty union, California Faculty Association, work on forest issues in the Piute Mountains where my husband and I built a small, solar-powered house, printmaking, and critical writing. Nature, camping, and walking are central to my experience of the world. Careful listening, looking. Early on I benefited from access to art and was deeply influenced by endless hours spent with the modern art collection held by the Albright-Knox Art gallery and great libraries in Buffalo.

Starting at age thirteen, I left my little neighborhood each morning for Nardin Academy, an academically elite (and with hindsight, socially elite) high school on the North Side requiring me to take two city buses, Niagara Frontier Transit. My time with various people widened my references, deepened my sympathy. Not least, this was also a complex time of civic unrest played out on the streets and on the level of buses. During those years I also worked at Buffalo Paper Stock, a factory on Seneca Street. The cumulative result of my high school years, both in and out of the factory and elite school, Nardin Academy, went beyond advanced academic training to a full and varied experience of life and people outside my neighborhood, an access to art, ideas, and, most importantly, an access to a way of being involved with art that did not require becoming someone else.

But in Buffalo at that time, as in other northeastern cities, art was abundant, available, and, in my then-limited view, unthreatened.  Later at SUNY, Buffalo I studied literature with great writers and critics such as Raymond Federman and Myles Slatin in an English department noted for radical politics and an emphasis on innovation in scholarly thought, classics, and on experimental literature. I studied philosophy in what was then one of the largest philosophy departments with a regular background on Ancient, early modern, and later a focus on Eastern philosophy with Kenneth Inada and on existentialism. My thought was deeply influenced by Land Art and other installation works at the newly-developed Art Park on the Niagara River and by the seemingly boundless Lockwood Library noted for housing many manuscripts including those of James Joyce and works of historic and social interest such as those by Emma Goldman. I had great access to canonical works but also to works that celebrated avant-garde re-interpretations and sought new directions with high energy and brusque determination.

I bicycled not only to attend SUNY, Buffalo but to favorite nature spots such as Whirlpool Park on the Niagara River, Sherkston quarry in Ontario, and a place of solitude in Chestnut Ridge Park that, years after I left Buffalo, was put on the map as the Eternal Flame. While my reading of ancient Greek and of Buddhist literary and philosophic texts began early, in public libraries during my high school years, and continued as my undergraduate majors at SUNY, Buffalo in Philosophy and English, my relation to those studies fluctuated over time. Halfway through my undergraduate studies, especially through reading Early Modern philosophers, I turned away with restlessness from self-reinforcing traditional disputation (how many angels can dance on a pin sort), and turned once again toward Eastern philosophy and toward western phenomenology and existentialism, at the same time studying experimental authors such as Joyce and Beckett. I found they were asking similar questions about the nature of fiction, a view of authority as conceptual structures, and an unpacking of historic authority as linguistic creation. At the time, I youthfully thought that I needed to reject the one to embrace the other but realized then, and now in differing ways as my projects change, that these approaches all have limits, frustrations, can question in some terms and frames that may not be especially useful in others. Further, I see how they may offer astonishing syntheses and significant dislocations.

After the 1970s, these studies were made deeper, I feel, by philosophic developments such as postcolonial and feminist questions that were the, too often unacknowledged, beginnings of projects that undo the universal story, that hold up the nature of language-derived assumptions and varying knowledge projects to, sometimes even indeterminate, scrutiny. this continued a look at new disjunctive questions and possible applications. My study developed in areas of social justice where the imperial “I” and homogenizing story of certitude is removed so other ways can be seen and experienced,

Having said all this, it’s important not to let the world of ideas be the sole turf and private property of professional philosophers.

Though i wrote poems, plays and made paintings since early childhood, it was during the 1980s, with my study at Cal. State, LA, I once again began to write poetry, and to think of myself as a poet. I also read in several areas, began teaching, visited the petroglyphs of the Coso Range, attended various art and music events, and worked with my husband building a small house in the Piute mountains a few hours from where we live in Los Angeles. Nature, music, justice, walking.

I began as a faculty member of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona in 1989 and was named Emerita faculty member in 2012, and for a few years, continued to teach a course or two in the Liberal Studies department. My approach has been a critical pedagogy influenced by Paolo Friere’s ideas. My years co-teaching and developing curriculum in the Interdisciplinary Program were important to my pedagogy. During these years I began an MFA at Columbia University that extended a scholarship, and later I completed the degree at Antioch, LA. When a US Treasury Department license for travel to Cuba on academic exchanges was granted to my campus, I was part of faculty and student exchanges to and from Cuba. I was able to extend an international interest by meeting with poets and scholars who came to our campus and on reciprocal trips to Havana the summers of 2000 and 2002.  I attended the Encuentro conference in Havana during Jan. 2001 when I was invited to join an international group of poets for a series of week-long readings and presentations hosted by Reina María Rodríguez and poets and faculty from SUNY, Buffalo English department. 

Conversations with numerous contemporary poets, reading philosophy, contemporary experimental poetry, and critical works all shaped a practice of reading-through and writing-through works, a practice of re-casting canonic materials to explore new hermeneutic framings with a deep consideration for sound in poetry. Writers that have been important to my aesthetic include many in translation such as Arkadii Dragomoschenko, César Vallejo, and classics such as Homer, Popol Vuh, Greek tragedies, Socratic dialogs, the unknown African author of Gassiere’s Lute, Tu Fu, Basho, Firdausi, Sei Shonagon, Dante, modern and contemporary writers such as Thoreau, Melville, Fernando Pessoa, Rosemarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian, Inger Christensen, Jabès, Paul Celan, Mallarmé, philosophers Quine, Luce Irigaray, Deleuze, J. L. Austin, and so many others.

International poetry involvement has included exchanges with poets in Buenos Aries, Argentina where I read poetry, by invitation, as part of the II Lecturas de Primavera Buenos Aires 2006 organized by Casa Carriego and Casa de la Poesía de la Cuidad in coordination with the cultural ministry of Buenos Aires. I was invited to read poetry and gave a paper entitled “Rosmarie Waldrop’s Poetry:  Embodied Thought and Linguistic Gap” for the Another Language – Contemporary US-American Poetic Experiment in a Changing World conference at Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, Germany 7-9, 2005; furthermore, my poetry and essay was published in Another Language – Poetic Experiments in Britain and North America. LIT-Verlag: Muenster, Hamburg, Berlin (2008). I was a Visiting Writer for the University of New Orleans Madrid Program in 2005, and I barely returned to the states when the sorrow caused by the New Orleans flood followed.

In Los Angeles I’ve enjoyed the salon series at Sun & Moon and the Poetic Research Bureau reading series. I served on the board and a term as president of the neighborhood nonprofit Los Angeles River Artist and Business Association. My published reviews and essays consider several writers in the area of experimental literature including on the work of: Dennis Phillips, Rodrigo Toscano, Raymond Federman, Rosmarie Waldrop, Mark Nowak and Cuban writers Antonio José Ponte, Virgilio Piñera, and Reina María Rodríguez.

It’s been my good fortune to work with the talented publishers who have brought out my books of poetry: Green Integer, Tinfish, Shearsman, Mindmade, Belladonna*, BlazeVOX, Factory School, Krupskaya. I was selected by the judges of Krupskaya for book publication; received the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Literature; and I was nominated, but not selected, to serve as Los Angeles Poet Laureate in 2014. I have given poetry readings locally, nationally, and internationally, at small salon-style readings, as well as off-site reading for MLA, participated in the &Now conferences, and in the 12th International Melville Society Conference. I was interviewed for the radio program "Cross Cultural Poetics" by Leonard Schwartz at Evergreen State College, and this and other audio recordings are linked to my author site at PennSound, and the Electronic Poetry Center holds links to my work. Two recent reviews of my poetry include an essay by Carla Harryman in Matters of Feminist Practice and in the Summer 2018 Online Edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books Greg Bem. I was selected to serve as juror from 2000-present for The America Award in Literature (Green Integer). I am a seven times recipient of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona Library's Golden Leaves Award. As a printmaker, my works have been included in several shows, one awarded in the Ink & Clay Show at Cal. Poly. State University, Pomona, The Main Museum (Los Angeles), The Muckenthaler Cultural Center, Brand Library, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, and other works feature as my poetry book covers. My plays have had staged readings in various locations in Los Angeles, and there was a short run of “Some Cars” fall 2015 produced by Padua Playwrights at the Moryork Gallery, Highland Park. During the pandemic my poetry was part of Kaufman Music Center’s, Broadcast from Home by Lisa Bielawa, and my last book Neo-bedrooms was published plus the online chapbook Bumblebees.

(Los Angeles 2023)