JAMES MEETZE
James Meetze is the author of six books of poetry, including Dayglo (2011), winner of the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, & Phantom Hour (2016), both from Ahsahta Press. He is editor, with Simon Pettet, of Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems by James Schuyler (FSG, 2010). His poetry has been translated into Spanish, Turkish, Finnish, Serbian, & Croatian. He is Professor of Writing & Chair of Honors at the University of Arizona Global Campus & teaches in the Depth Psychology & Creativity Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. He divides his time between the coasts of California & Croatia.
THE LONG NOW
In this visionary work, James Meetze deepens his investigation into time, language, & moral attention. Unfolding across forty interlinked sections, The Long Now tracks time at multiple scales—personal grief, political fracture, digital delirium, & the slow patience of stone—asking what it means to be present inside forces that exceed us. These poems are less attuned to prophecy than séance, less forecast than deep listening: an ear pressed to history’s pressure & intimacy’s cost.
Moving through clocks & ruins, screens & myth, daily labor & lyric fracture, Meetze treats language as both wound & instrument. Words falter, loop, shimmer, & bruise; yet they still cling to breath, memory, & the body. The sequence resists resolution in favor of orientation, testing love, work, masculinity, nation, ecology, & faith not for purity but for use. Haunted by futures it will never inhabit & pasts that refuse burial, The Long Now understands time as weather one learns by standing in it—& answers not with comfort, but with vigilance, abrasion, & a low, enduring chant.