On the Seawalla community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

Many, if not most, poets are thieves, but for over nearly three decades now, Deborah Meadows has been more of a scavenger than a thief. In the early 2000s, she wrote her way through Moby Dick, using chance operations to find words by Melville from which to launch her own words and thoughts.* In 2006, she expanded her field to include textual material from Rabelais. In a 2018 book, Lecture Notes: A Duration Poem in 12 Parts, Meadows writes through lecture notes on art history. The publisher’s web copy reads, “Handwritten meets the ready-made in Lecture Notes.” The product of a working class family in Buffalo, New York, Meadows is a rigorous avant-gardist whose world has been shaped both by economics and by art. She lives in the Art District of Los Angeles, a place that informs her work within and outside of gallery spaces and lecture halls, and spends time in the California mountains. She has published many more books than I have listed here, each one rigorous, difficult, and rewarding.

Now, she has produced Bumblebees, published by Roof, a press known for work by Language poets and others. Roof books tend to be less autobiographical than analytical, more intellectual than emotional. This is the first of Meadows’ books to be titled after an animal, and it represents a turn for her from linguistic abstraction to a pronoun, “we.” Of course, what would bees be without a we? Or we? Like bees, she’s out scavenging, dancing, but the particular flowers are art and her ideas about it. The art that fascinates her in this book appropriates material such as dirt and land (Robert Morris), old postcards (Sandow Birk), and war-damaged remains (Phyllida Barlow), as well as the assemblages of Janice Lowry. Appropriation as recycling. It’s no accident, for Meadows is deeply involved in thinking about the environment. The table of contents points us to ant hills, understories, mushrooms, insects, more mycology, and then back to poetry and art.

Is this eco-poetry? If it is, it comes with a difference. Eco-poetry, in my experience, usually emerges from encounters with nature and writing about nature (there’s still a lot of tattered Wordsworth in contemporary poetry). A recent example of such work is Stephen Collis’s brilliant book, The Middle (Talon Books, 2024). As Collis writes in his introduction, “Each poem finds itself somewhere on a mountain, in the company of trees, or the ghosts of now-absent trees[.]” That one of his primary guides is Dante doesn’t subtract from the long heritage of British Romanticism in his poems, though that heritage has been diminished by global post-Industrialization. “What to make of a diminished thing” (Robert Frost) is necessarily the new nature poetry. Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, a Marshallese poet known for her climate change work, has written calls to action in poems such as “Dear Matafele Peinam” in which she lists climate disasters from typhoons to floods to hurricanes, in places like the Philippines, Pakistan, Algeria, Colombia, and her own Pacific islands. Her work is intended to be spoken, as it was before the United Nations in 2014. Another approach is direct confrontation with the desecration of our environment. In Plastic: An Autobiography (Nightbooks 2021), Cobb writes about a large Japanese car part that she found on a walk and kept for a long time in her bedroom. Eventually, she travels to find the source of the part. A Toyota factory in the American south is the source of her and our Nile. The absurdity is telling. It’s the analytical-absurd, you might call it. And whose autobiography, then, is it — hers or the car part’s? It’s all of ours. After all, we’re finding that our brains are filling up with micro-plastics, as are the stomachs of albatross.

[left — Robert Morris, “Scatter Piece,” 1968] The plasticity of mind that obsesses Meadows originates in the plastic arts — conceptual, yes, but tied to material objects that have been thrown away or recycled and/or decomposed. Hence, the long poem “On the accidental disposal of artwork mistaken for litter,” which was inspired by an interview with artist Robert Morris about his late ‘60s installation “Untitled: A Scatter Piece.” Morris used ordinary materials in his less than ordinary work; he was quoted in his New York Times obituary as saying, “Plywood was cheap, plentiful, standard and ubiquitous” and “It was unstressed as an art material, an ‘ordinary’ material in the industrial world. The tools required to work plywood were common and readily at hand; the skill required to manipulate them was relatively undemanding; carpentry was another ‘ordinary’ everyday skill in the urban late industrial milieu.” And, as Meadows notes in her Morris poem, “Everyone [is] a collector.” The man on the dump was as much a connoisseur as any gallery owner. She observes:

How avant-gardism became

a conversion project. Not what

it was. Its sharp edges worn,

domesticated. Linked-in.

One can imagine a long avant-garde poem written in the form of the site, Linked-In, one that lists its subjects’ job qualifications. To sell oneself is art, but there is a form for it as sure as sonnets or the self as a ready-made worker.

The language of capital is scavenged by Meadows for her own use. The opening phrase of “Formative Period” mixes contemplation with economics: “Left with contemplative surplus.” Contemplation is always in surplus in Meadows’ work, but in this book it is more explicitly connected to community. This poem refers to Simon Forti’s bear-movement dances; Frederic Rzewski’s “minimal piano”; Sandow Birk’s Los Angeles postcard paintings; and Phyllida Barlow’s art based on war damage she witnessed as a child. There’s even a brief bow to a Led Zep “memory worm.” Meadows is the bumblebee that wanders between them, suggesting spatial and conceptual connections, rather than temporal layers. “Formative Period” rushes forward, propelled not simply by the names (and work) of artists, but also by Meadows’s fine ear:

[lines] wrapped with line, a sort of language of architectural

plans corroded by overwritten horizons, draft elevations,

open space, Frederic Rzewski’s minimal piano plinked

falling rain, entangled farmed or farmer, famed fungal

spores, antidote to theories of sublime experience,

dangerous heights, soaring ego-capped mount, yet down

at the base we mailed draft essays, exuberant voice

came across, lifted up, made artists the talk to have …

… and the poem goes on, barely ever more than a comma to denote a pause in the rush of thoughts that dance between piano music, fungal spores, the ego-capped mount of (maybe) Shelley. It’s a poem as installation of sounds, images, and perceptions ending with an acknowledgment that the poem runs less on language than on its physical vibrations: “nothing to say but vocalize just to feel / vibratory life attach to skein of star life.”

The centerpiece of this collection is the title poem. Bumblebees are communal animals. They forage and pollinate. They are not Thoreau: they cannot do this alone. (That he couldn’t either is a different matter!) Bumblebees are like people, then, people who speak, people who install art for a community to heal, people who picket, are unionized. “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.” People, like bees, work. Their dances are art, at least to us. Their pollination provides us sustenance. Page after page of this poem consist of “we” statements. This, a confession, for us all: “We made terrible mistakes, got off the train at the wrong stop, miscalculated how much our earth could take.” I find Meadows’ use of the word “we” to be moving in the way that John Ashbery’s brief autobiographical reference in April Galleons once astonished me by coming so close to his self, to his feelings. But unlike Ashbery’s reference, hers is to a group, namely ours.

Years ago, in a class on literature and creative writing, I asked a student to make a final project out of her semester’s work by crumpling up and tossing her poems and notes into a waste basket. She was a star softball player, one of the best pitchers in the country. Luckily, I had a look at her project before I went home that night. In the morning, the project had gone missing. It took me some time to realize that a custodian had dumped it out as “trash.” The plastic container remained. This, of course, became a teaching story about the significance of context. One day a collection of poems, the next a dumpster’s contents. Robert Morris’ “litter” was art. Deborah Meadows’ poetry doesn’t look like Morris’ art, but she composes it out of a similar process. Bumblebees has the kinetic energy of recycling, rearranging, assembling. And that — she would have us realize — is not simply a way to look at art. It’s also a method we can follow in our attempts to mitigate the planet’s degradation.