Upcoming Readings Update

Check out the following dates on which I’ll be reading in a town near you:

May 26 / 7:30PM: The MERC Theater, 42051 Main Street, Temecula, CA 92590. Capping off my residency at Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, I’ll be giving a reading at The MERC Theater in Old Town Temecula.

April 21 / 3PM: Featherboard Series, Aggregate Space, 801 W. Grand Avenue in Oakland, California. With Claire Becker and Sean Labrador y Manzano (http://featherboard.wordpress.com/)

April 12 / 7PM: Russo’s Books, 9000 Ming Ave # I4 Bakersfield, CA 93311
April 12 / 1PM: Taft College, in the Cougar Room, 29 Emmons Park Drive Taft, California 93268. Here, I’ll be giving a talk on memory and mythopoesis and reading from a new manuscript, as well as from Dayglo.

Upcoming Readings

On Sunday, January 29th, I’ll be reading at the Tongue & Groove reading series in Hollywood with Heather Havrilesky, author of Disaster Preparedness and others.

New Review of Dayglo

Thanks to the folks at Shawn Kemp Carwash for their December 30 review of Dayglo.

The Hanged Man

Last summer, Ryan Murphy and I undertook that awful task of writing a collaborative poem, which we called “The Hanged Man.” Some sections of it were kindly published in issue the twelfth of Spinning Jenny. Thanks to C.E. Harrison for seeing the value in two guys trying to out poem one another.

from Phantom Hour

Sections from my new book-length poem “Phantom Hour” have been appearing in some journals of late. Thanks to the editors at AGNI, Eleven Eleven, and Nimrod, where it was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. A few sections have also appeared on Peacock Online Review thanks to Sophie Sills. You’ll be seeing more of this poem in the near future too.

Poetry Daily

Today you can find the poem “Blue Window” from Dayglo featured on Poetry Daily.

New Review of DAYGLO

Mark Wallace reviews Dayglo at THINKING AGAIN.

Beautiful poems aren’t my forté, and I’m distrustful of poems that make an uncritical attempt to be beautiful, but the genuine lyric beauty of the poems in James Meetze’s (pictured above) new book, Dayglo, brings along with it the right degree of social and political awareness to make the beauty both earned and subtly undermined whenever necessary–and it turns out to be necessary a lot. Dayglo is full of remarkable insights into the physical and social landscapes of Meetze’s southern California home. These are indeed landscape poems, but they’re very aware of all the social constructions that shape ideas about landscape; these are landscapes filled with people and their contradictions.

If The New Sincerity ever really existed (did it?), Dayglo is the epitome of what it should have been: sincere while crucially incorporating irony, lush while never taking its eye off what is also annoying and frustrating about Southern California culture and politics. The book’s title poem is a successful attempt by Meetze at a longer, more philosophical lyric that’s almost painfully well-attuned to California’s immediately powerful physicality. “Mountains of earth rise from marshland/where we live background lives/ with basketball hoops in the driveway./A sporting chance for light to fill us./ Our digital children and their rapid-fire,/ virtual dreams, I see them bug-eyed in back seats,/ combat in every eye’s reflection.”

Several of the book’s later poems continue the title poem’s big camera-eye view of California environment and culture and take it into a broader historical scope, signalling that Meetze’s ambitions, so well-realized in Dayglo, are only continuing to develop.

Meta blog in which I redirect you to a post written for another blog

Because I’m leading a 6-week workshop in “Memoir Poetics” at San Diego Writers Ink (follow link to see class info), I’ve written a brief post for the organization’s Fresh Ink blog, titled “On Poetic Memory & Mythopoesis In Brief.” It is brief, but scratches the surface–I hope–in some small and revealing way, of the ideas I’m currently working with. You can read it here: On Poetic Memory & Mythopoesis In Brief.

Poetics of Place: One-Day Class at San Diego Writers Ink Saturday, April 9

In line with the scope of DAYGLO, I’m teaching a one-day class this Saturday, April 9th, in the poetics of place at San Diego Writers, Ink. We will be exploring particular ways of seeing our environment from the perspective of the poem and writing from this perspective.

Go HERE for details. I hope to see you there!

Reading Tonight at San Diego Writers Ink

If you’re in San Diego on Friday, March 18th (tonight), please do come out to my reading at The Ink Spot 710 13th St. Suite 210 in Downtown. Starts at 7:00pm and we’ll adjourn afterward to The Cask Room for wine.

I’ll be reading mostly from DAYGLO but will also unveil an excerpt from my new manuscript, Public Face.