from http://www.herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/

Here Comes Everybody
Writers on writing

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Deborah Meadows has lived with her lover, Howard Stover in Pasadena, California since 1986. Together they built a small house in the Piute mountains on weekends, and, separately, have worked on various peace and social justice issues. She grew up in Buffalo, NY in a working class family, attended SUNY, Buffalo, worked in factory and various manual labor, and in 1977 moved west to work in a poverty program after graduation. She teaches in the Liberal Studies department at California State Polytechnic University, California where she has worked as a labor organizer on education equity issues, curates the Poetry and Jazz series for her students, participates in travel exchanges with writers in the campus’ Cuba program, and contributed to curriculum design in the campus’ interdisciplinary program.

Her works of poetry include: Representing Absence Green Integer (2004) selected for The Gertrude Stein Poetry Award 2004
Itinerant Men Krupskaya Press (2004)
“The 60’s and 70’s: from The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick” Tinfish Press (2003)

Her literary essays have been published by Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics, Jacket (online), How2 (online), New Review of Literature, and Raintaxi (online).

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

My childhood was a mixture of sacred and profane expressions, so though we learned to sing Latin and English hymns, we also played jump-rope songs that dragged the mighty through the mud while bodily counting rhythm, shook to newly-produced rock and roll pop tunes on the radio, and were made to memorize catechism questions-and-answers, an activity to which I’m temperamentally unsuited, and to memorize poetry, for me a welcome haven. In fourth grade, we were assigned memorization of Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat.” I felt great pleasure in the unknown words and multi-syllabic vocabulary, in the musical structure of stanza and refrain, in the lovely journey the two lovers take to the “land where the bong trees grow.” But by then, I had written many poems and plays so could better admire mastery of the language and musical movement.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Much of what I read is outside the literary genre, but I’m not sure that would especially surprise anyone.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Like the prior questions, my reading of ancient Greek and of Buddhist texts began early, in pubic libraries during my high school years, and continued by becoming a formal undergraduate major at SUNY, Buffalo with English as a second major. But my relation to those studies has fluctuated over time. Halfway through my undergrad. 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 novelists 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 version 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, but 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 postmodernist projects that undo the universal story, that hold up the nature of language-derived assumptions and varying knowledge projects to, sometimes even indeterminate, scrutiny, that new disjunctive questions, and possibly their applications, may be developed in areas of social justice when the imperial “I” and homogenizing story of certitude is removed so other ways can be seen and experienced,-- even articulated for the first time as worthy of inclusion to older structures as well as requiring brand new structures previously nonexistent.
Having said all this, it’s important not to let the world of ideas be the sole turf and private property of professional philosophers.

3A. How important is philosophy to your writing?

Part Two, a few notational mentions, in relation to my recent poetry, “The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick”: We know that Melville wrote earlier work very sympathetic to mutineers, was himself a mutineer having jumped ship in the Marquesas, so can we, I ask, turn to Moby-Dick as Melville posing the question: what happens when the urge to revolt is repressed? What happens in the 19th century, a century of revolution breaking out all over, when the urge to revolution is repressed? Of course, his novel proposes one answer through the tragic arc of death and destruction, a “restricted economy,” so, I ask, might a reading- and writing-through move toward a “general economy” of excess. This is continued in my poem derived from Rabelais (who Melville cited in passing) an excerpt of which is linked to the online site: www.moriapoetry.com as well as in other unpublished poetry on, in part, the relation between source and commentary, pets, and parasites.

Another face of both western and Buddhist studies in the area of logical paradox is forthcoming in “Logic with Mr. Quine” from the WinteRed chaplet series and a poem sequence entitled “her coral involutions” that brings Irigaray and Deleuze to read the Blue Cliff Record, currently unpublished.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

I read many of the fine translations of contemporary writers offered by Burning Deck Press, Green Integer, University of California Press, Circumference magazine, of contemporary Pacific Rim writers in Tinfish Press, among others. And these presses are often my first introduction to some of our contemporaries abroad though I also see old friends, too. Recently I have been very interested in the poetry of Arkadii Dragomoschenko (Russian) and Reina María Rodríguez (Cuban), but I read widely and have enjoyed teaching ancient world and medieval texts such as Homer, Popol Vuh, Greek tragedies, Socratic dialogs, Jewish commentaries, the unknown African author of Gassiere’s Lute, Tu Fu, Basho, Firdausi, Sei Shonagon, Dante, modern writers such as Breton, Jabès, Paul Celan, Mallarmé, and so many others.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

Yes, important, sure, I learn from others but there are, and have been, periods I don’t read poetry.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

Although I enjoyed Charles Olson’s groundbreaking Call Me Ishmael on the sinking of the whaleship, Essex, I’ve never been able to complete reading his Maximus Poems. Each time I try, I reach a feeling of being talked down to by someone who assumes a “guru” role that I find very un-liberatory, too much to bear as a woman writer in this society. I have a similar reaction to Yeats.
Another poet I know has argued that Olson’s poems, though flawed in the way I mentioned, have made possible poets’ works such as Susan Howe. So that helps me value his work.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

I suspect your seven year old may have written poems, so it’s probably too late, but I’d say this and hope your child would offer an interesting participatory revision of:
Poems are all around us like air and sound, and they’re made of air and sound, and they’re sometimes the songs we learn to sing and other times the ones we make up when we feel like it. Or the words when we finish.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

As a teacher, an ongoing discussion I seek to sponsor with my students is on ways of being engaged as citizens—that that engagement can be expressed through one’s self-sense as a poet is as fine and welcome as any other way.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**a pleasant smell
Chiseled**to take a hinge
I**je
Of**de
Form**desires matter

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

Text and body are expressed sonically and visually, but there’s an integration of ideas and body through carrying large structures. I mentioned early experience of rapid jumping and turns with jump-rope songs as well as solemn ritual movement associated with Latin hymns (not to mention yogic “yoking” of mind and body), but these early experiences become both incorporated and thrown away with maturity.

Don’t most of us associate work and pleasure with bodily activity and expression? So, unlike Rene Descartes (and which cultural historian pointed this out?) who had a domestic staff performing his, in effect, bodily functions leaving a disembodied mind, don’t most of us find the integration of mind and body second nature? I appreciate Rosmarie Waldrop’s critique of some western philosophers as writing ideas negating the presence of the body, and how she requires the “missing meat.”
Having said all this good stuff about mind and body, it’s important that we look at the subtle ways the two make gaps in experience as source of human plaint and particularity and make the apparent ground of compassion and desire.

posted by Lance at 6:12 PM