Deborah Meadows, Bumblebees

 

We broke the silence.

We misread anguish as threat, flail for oxygen as attempted assault, taken down, wounded.

Warhead accidentally slipped to the Mediterranean Sea, then upon rescue effort, we fumbled it lower, unreachable trophy, case deterioration.

We installed temporary art in the park from thrown out materials to disrupt continuity of hatred in the community, to heal.

We had a crazy hunch how things so heavy got here, disturbed bones, patterned thought, quarried first causes, harp recordings.

Power lines in the city-edge plant we hacked just coming online, restoration play, just kind of electrical charges, juice suspended.

We picketed, not to violate the code, Nuremberg, not to bomb the open market in Guernica, Spain, not to have allies violate the principles in Palestine.

Please Respond, Break Silence. (“Bumblebees”)

The latest from California poet Deborah Meadows, the author of more than a dozen titles—including Translation – the bass accompaniment: Selected Poems (Bristol UK: Shearsman Books, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Neo-bedrooms (Shearsman Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]—is Bumblebees (New York NY: Roof Books, 2024), an assemblage of declarative, expansive and sequenced prose poems. Bees, of course, are the literal ‘canaries in the coal mine’ when it comes to climate change, and poets have been engaged with bees with this in mind for moons, with recent examples being Toronto poet Andy Weaver’s Were The Bees (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2005) [see my review of such here], the late American poet ‘Annah Sobelman’s In the Bee Latitudes (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2012) [see my review of such here] or the climate-overt Listening to the Bees (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2018), a collaborative work by scientist Mark Winston and Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar. Constructed as a book-length suite, Meadows’ Bumblebees is a collection on elements of natural infrastructure, “the daunting complexity of earthly existence in the climate-changing present’” (as Carla Harryman writes as part of her back cover blurb), from bees to mushrooms, all of which are under global threat due to climate change. “We made terrible mistakes,” she writes, as part of the title sequence, “got off the train at the wrong stop, / miscalculated how much our earth could take. // Maintenance of vision is marking our minds as we convene a / forest of signs and get on.” Her poems stretch, extend and endlessly thread, providing mitochondrial connections between pages, between poems, that hold the collection together as an impressive single unit of composition.

The pacing, the patter, especially across the title sequence, is quietly performative in a way one can hear the sentences lift from each page, writing chemical impact, climate emergency, stolen lives, declarations and elegance, a language of hoping against hope even through all the worst of what is already happening. A highlight among highlights, it holds as the foundation for the collection as a whole, a narrative that furthers and furthers along, a conversation that allows for endless variation and possibility. “We didn’t need squirrels to learn how to chatter; we followed / our conscience.” she writes, “Thigh-deep we face the sea’s extent: good primates like us / groom, spell, frame retreat as The Sentinels of No Outer Point.”

 

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.”

Deborah Meadows, Translation – the bass accompaniment: Selected Poems

Of disagreements on the history and function of the apostrophe, some sources say it’s used for missing letters or had a start as a printer’s mark to indicate omission, but more interesting is the claim that the “cumbersome name for an awkward mark” is rooted in the Green phrase to “turn away” from the audience when addressing another person. (“Apotropaic Shuffle”)

The postman recently delivered a hefty work by American poet Deborah Meadows—her Translation – the bass accompaniment:Selected Poems (Bristol UK: Shearsman Books, 2013). I have to admit, I’ve long been a fan of selected poems, and revel in the possibility of getting at least some kind of overview (one version of such, certainly) across an author’s work so far, especially an author that I wasn’t previously familiar with. Vancouver poet George Bowering has had about half a dozen so far, each one with an entirely different flavor, and each edited and compiled by a different editor, none of which were the author himself. Meadows, on the other hand, gives the impression in her “Prefatory Note” that the selections were hers, which I understand entirely, but am not sure I actually agree with. Shouldn’t some kind of editorial distance exist? And why isn’t there an introduction of any sort? Selecteds, in my opinion (as anyone who follows my reviews already knows), should have an introduction. While I understand the argument that the work should stand on its own, I enjoy seeing at least some kind of context presented for the work, the selection and the overview (an oversight in previous selecteds by such as Dennis Cooley, Lynn Crosbie and Monty Reid, as well). Why has this particular selection been made, and why are we paying attention to it? The author, at least, does provide a bit of insight in her opening note:

The bass guitar creates patterns that make music into a visceral experience—they are what infect the body. The poems in Translation, the bass accompaniment: Selected Poems are in dialog with other authors, and here, experimental poetry engages logician Quine, encyclopedic novelist Melville, philosophers Irigaray and Deleuze, theologian and synthetic philosopher Aquinas, poets Dragomoshchenko, Heijinian, Raworth, Baudelaire, and Celan, Soviet cinematographer Vertov, video artist Bill Viola, and others.

Already, that’s quite a heady and intimidating list, and the poems within the collection select from nearly a dozen works produced over the past decade by presses such as Green Integer Press, Tinfish Press, Krupskaya Press, Shearsman, Factory School, Mindmade Books and BlazeVOX [books]. Just who is this Deborah Meadows? There is quite an acoustic gymnastic in Meadows’ work, with leaps and bounds, as in her multiple-book sequence, “The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick.” Her essay-poems are deep and playful explorations of logic and discourse, engaged with opening up a series of questions through the text. The range of her poetic constructions in such a relatively short time are remarkable, and remarkably broad and precise, willing to move into another territory once a particular project is complete. The lengthy sequence “The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick,” for example, reads as an ongoing study of the novel, chapter by chapter, as complete as had she sketched out her theory in prose;

Chapter 68

Skin remains a question:

“what and where is the skin of the whale?”

What and where is the mind?

            Inscribed upon, see through

            a brittle clarity, read through spectacles

that make a skin

over skin.

Upon the printed page or

            written into flesh as

warm-blooded as ‘we”

yet indecipherable.

Quarters for a child

            assuming one more tender

            than skin—

bulk mysterious, yet

            phenomena present how

            rocks connect

            to pyramids, as made things.

Borneo

man of nature, specimen body

with skin parsed for warmth.

Specimen-skin made, marked, for sale.

Comfortable with risk, copied

            to dominant collection of twoness

dispersed by instruments

            identical

to how small easy pieces

can be rendered

and teach these fine creatures how.

There are trace echoes here that connect to entire traditions of British and North American avant-garde writing, managing to blend the two strands together; through her particular blend of lyric, the sentence and theory, I can hear resonances of Karen Mac Cormack, Norma Cole and Tom Raworth, for example. It makes me wonder just how I have managed to have not heard of her or her work, prior to this.

Of self-emptying systems: nihilism. How can “yes” displace “no”? Sunyata replete.

But a substitution theory: the word for the thing, the thing for the other thing, has a “universal” appeal. It’s money. And little in the way of theorizing can interrupt its commerce, its erotic appeal. This rainy heartbreak, that dime-store by the ear of the mob, face out loud. Keep ocarina far from selvage: blew, then method and mathematical certainty. Haul and scrape good Word for importation to godhead, poached and re-set, spring mechanisms and all. Executed by market track, human capital, finance group, our prize, seminar on human entourage if you have the software, foundlings’ Houdini, erased land, term professor, robot message. Hard to see the go-between we are. (“Procuratio”)