Deborah Meadows, Neo-bedrooms

 

So the story involved (as a mode) a crisis of confidence, so begin to hear as many upon a time, pulled up stakes, no longer housed with hucksters but conditional subtle ones—calibrated a wisp, tongue flap, holy allegory in smithereens, our task, our grief. (“keep profane objects close, the argument”)

Los Angeles poet Deborah Meadows’s latest [see my review of her 2013 selected poems here] is the poetry title Neo-bedrooms (Bristol UK: Shearsman Books, 2021), an assemblage of lyric bursts, language riffs and meditations, composed through folding one line overtop another in sequence, akin to a suite of sequences assembled into book-length shape. “Nothing is given that condences down.” she writes, to open the poem “Hammer of Justice.” “Can we consider this defaced old-age couple a form of iconoclasm?” Her writing exists as a rush, propelled by cadence and carefully-placed words. As part of the prose sequence “Croud-prone,” she writes: “Funeral comes forth once. Heavy-laden steps, that uncanny shift from / time to not. Cloud’s perimeter somehow contained in front right here: / haloed filthy puddle. Clouds.” There are echoes in her work of the prose poems of Rosmarie Waldrop, although looser in her lyric, and without Waldrop’s specific complexities writing between a German structure and an English tongue; Meadows follows a delicate line up against instability and insecurity, writing on making, thinking and artistic production. “When field workers transferred all of it to written form,” she asks, as part twenty of the twenty-five part sequence “keep profane objects close, the argument,” “did they aspire / to scripture? A song of ‘I’ for loss, deadened by type, a song of ‘I’ for / legitimacy, deadened prior where few makers, many users glom on like / a fad, and a figure emerges without intending it only one might go on / to play the pro’s—told enough to be credible, a figure preserved in oil: / who knows, we might have been left behind.”