Deborah Meadows


Deborah Meadows is an American poet and playwright and essayist.

Life

Meadows has published more than ten books of poetry, as well as essays, plays, and lithographs. She was nominated for Los Angeles Poet Laureate in 2014. From a working-class family, Meadows was born and raised in Buffalo, New York where she graduated from St. Martin's elementary school, then Nardin Academy. Meadows has described Buffalo as “rich in modernist art such as the Albright-Knox art collection.. with works of artists such as Clyfford Still, Jasper Johns, Rothko, etc. … Art Park on reclaimed land in the Niagara River gorge opened to include site-installed works, early conceptual and performance art, offered opera, and theatre...” as significant to her thought.
She graduated from SUNY, Buffalo where she studied literature with the postmodern critic and novelist Raymond Federman, literature professor Myles Slatin, and with Eastern philosophy scholar Kenneth Inada. She went on to complete an MA in English from CSULA and MFA from Antioch University, Los Angeles.
Active with readings, her work has been widely anthologized. Meadows has been active in international cultural affairs, traveling a few times to Cuba where she met with Cuban writers such as Reina María Rodríguez and Antonio José Ponte, and she has traveled to and worked with poets in Buenos Aires such as Romina Freschi and Jorge Santiago Perednik. She has also been active with her faculty union and various issues involving access and equity in public higher education. She lives with her husband in downtown Los Angeles’ Arts District, and is an Emerita faculty member at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, is dedicated to critical pedagogy and interdisciplinary practices and “whose poetry is distinguished by its Experimental_literature|experimental aesthetics, marked by philosophic and politically engaged matter”. Meadows is a juror on the panel for The America Awards for outstanding contribution to world literature. She served on the board of the Los Angeles River Artists & Business Association from January 2013 to December 2016, and served as the 2014 president.

Poetry

Meadows's Translation, the bass accompaniment: Selected Poems is the sounding of consciousness, but not singular, not just her own: these poems are patterns pulled from texts in order to make a new accompaniment, to expose “the syntax of exploratory thought”... This capstone book looks back on Meadows's prolific writing life, and I believe that Meadows's poetry stands out among contemporary experimental poetry in two ways: in her treatment of matter, including political and economic realities, and in her use of and trust in sound.... Simultaneously lyrical and conceptual, Meadows's work is exemplary among contemporary poetry. In fact, it challenges the clunky, western-world, Cartesian construct that would differentiate between somatic experience and conceptual practice.
: One thinks of Ponge, in that this is a kind of exploration which doesn't depend on the ‘surreal’, as so much ‘prose’ ‘poetry’ does. This is that which tends to BE thinking rather than mimic it.
Poetry capable of elevating the reader into new ways of thinking about language often runs the risk of isolating and ostracizing the reader through challenge and difficulty in the breakage of paradigms.... In Deborah Meadows's latest collection of writing, The Demotion of Pluto: Poems and Plays, these fine lines are approached and often transcended through the poet's consistent use of external influences and forces.