Photo of Andrew Maxwell (left) by Alan Bernheimer. Photo of Deborah Meadows (right) by Howard Stover.
I interviewed Andrew Maxwell by email at a thoughtful pace that extended from April to August 2015. As a frequenter of the Los Angeles-based Poetic Research Bureau, which he codirects, and as an avid reader of his work, I found the interview to illumine Andrew’s life and work: his philosophic dispositions, his recondite yet populist interests, and his consistent commitment to community through dissensus — a rare tolerance for disagreement.
Note: To celebrate the recent release of Andrew Maxwell’s Candor Is the Brightest Shield, I interviewed Andrew by email at a thoughtful pace that extended from April to August 2015. As a frequenter of the Los Angeles-based Poetic Research Bureau, which he codirects, and as an avid reader of his work, I found the interview to illumine Andrew’s life and work: his philosophic dispositions, his recondite yet populist interests, and his consistent commitment to community through dissensus — a rare tolerance for disagreement.
“Frequency.”This single-word line begins one of Deborah Meadows’s poems and suggests radio listening as a poetics: an act of receptive agency, tuning in, selecting from a cloth of constant notes, words, thoughts, events, static. Meadows’s Translation, the bass accompaniment: Selected Poems is the sounding of consciousness, but not singular, not just her own: these poems are patterns pulled from texts in order to make a new accompaniment, to expose “the syntax of exploratory thought” (9).
