The Demotion of Pluto: Poems and Plays

Deborah Meadows grew up in Buffalo, NY in a working class family, attended SUNY-Buffalo, and worked in a factory. After graduation in 1977 she moved west to work in a poverty program. Then she ended up as an emerita faculty member in the Liberal Studies department at California State Polytechnic University. She moves from Buffalo, with an acute class consciousness based on her working class roots, to California and the world of higher education. But her books of poetry and strange plays and profound reflections appear from a publisher back home in Buffalo! So give thanks to God that there’s a literate, artistic, class-conscious theoretician teaching in California. In this book of daring and almost impossible plays and poetry you can look over her shoulder as she reads and thinks widely: from bipedalism to regime deferral, from Sophocles to sedatives, from Calvino to Claymation, from Michael Fried to Sigmund Freud, from Leo and Hercules (a pair of literate chimpanzees) to Niedecker and Zukofsky. And of course there’s still room for humor: Twin sisters speak: Fetch: When you see him, kick him in the balls! Kinsan-G: Not me! There’s an app for that. Sure there is. But kick him in the balls nonetheless. —John Tranter, poet In Deborah Meadows’ The Demotion of Pluto runs of poetry bleed into plays. The title play recasts Sophocles’ Philoctetes; Obstacle Plays riffs on Michael Fried’s Art and Objecthood that considers minimalist sculpture as both theatrical and an obstacle; and Nothing to Do works intensive differences between brilliant and crumbling minds situated in the aftermath of street struggle.