Deborah Meadows; Representing Absence
Winner of The Gertrude Stein Poetry Award 2004
Series No.: 117
ISBN: 1-931243-77-8, Pages: 83
In Representing Absence, Deborah Meadows draws on a practice of poetry composition as palimpsest: writing on top, or through, other writing, evoking writers such as Charles Baudelaire, Herman Melville (in the excerpts from “The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick”), Dante, and video artist, Bill Viola (in “Not a Treatise on the Line Segment”).
To return to the 19th century of Melville becomes a study of social practice and discourse, both its encyclopedic project and attempts at democratic meeting under the long shadow of remembered monarchy—the sound of naturalized assumptions that haunt us today. “Will Narcissus result in carnage…” sets action against a place where “originals are required: cement / banisters merge public and private lives….” Floodlights are directed toward point of view, limited social voice, and violence of the factory, whaling fleet, and property lines.
Deborah Meadows teaches at California Polytechnic State University, Pomona, and has been part of writers’ and scholars’ exchanges with Havana, Cuba.