Dayglo

James Meetze

Selected for the 2010 Sawtooth Poetry Prize by Terrance Hayes

 

An extended bio from the author

 

 

My father was a Lt. Commander in the Navy, which brought him to San Diego in the late ‘60s. My mother came to San Diego with her sister on a whim. She taught kindergarten. I was born three weeks late in San Diego and raised in a suburb that was then mostly citrus and avocado grove. I have two older half-sisters (also teachers) who turned me on to bands like The Smiths, Joy Division, and The Cure when I was still too young to mope. This was when I fell in love with music, and probably when I developed an interest in lyricism and language. I was a California boy, so I was also very interested in skateboarding and surfing. I remember being excited when I got my first pair of Jams, which were de rigueur.

It was early on in high school that my American Literature teacher, Gerry Schimke, handed me Ginsberg’s Howl. I was the only student who wasn’t allowed to choose a poet from his list of American poets we were to research and report on. It’s probably passé, but I opened the book (I still have that very copy) and knew I wanted to be a poet. Luckily, Ginsberg made no secret of his influences, so I read Whitman, Lorca, Blake and Williams. To this day, the long-lined long-poem in the Whitmanic tradition still gets me off more than any other verse. I decided that I’d be a poet. I wrote poems about the ocean, mostly. I adopted a sort of neo-beatnik-surfer affectation. My parents weren’t too excited about it. Nor were they entirely enthused about my desire to study poetry in college. So that’s what I did. I began at a community college in San Diego, where the teacher was too obsessed with Anne Sexton, and refused to “understand” my poems. In retrospect, I don’t blame her.

I moved to Lake Tahoe to work at Kirkwood Ski Resort. I did that for a year. Then I moved to Santa Cruz, where I enrolled at Cabrillo College and studied with Joseph Stroud, a lovely poet. I also had a professor named Mike, an old Buddhist with a white beard, who told me I was Hart Crane reincarnate. I read Hart Crane for the first time. I wrote. I had a baby boy, whom we named Brighton, after New Brighton Beach. I got serious about studying literature and also worked in a nursery, where I learned the names and growing conditions of numerous plants.

I transferred to UC Santa Cruz and entered the creative writing program. My first workshop there was with Andrew Joron and it was his first workshop too. He turned me on to Ronald Johnson and Barbara Guest, whom I later got to know in person. Then Peter Gizzi returned from sabbatical and I took his workshops and became even more serious about reading. I fell in love with the work of James Schuyler. Nathaniel Mackey was there too. On my first critical essay, it was on Robert Duncan, he wrote “A lackluster attempt.” I worked harder on my critical chops. I met a lot of real poets. I was a part of a real poetry community. I had a close encounter with a great white shark in the water at Waddell Creek and quit surfing.

I moved to Oakland and entered the MFA program at Mills College, where I worked with Elizabeth Willis and Stephen Ratcliffe. I fell in love with the Renaissance. I wrote poems about love and music. I fell in love with letterpress printing and typography in the Book Arts program and started Tougher Disguises Press because “no one listens to poetry.” The Bay Area literary community was this tireless and awesome animal. Then I got tired and moved back to San Diego, in part because I wanted to write about James Schuyler. I started surfing again. I sold medical equipment but spent most of my time in the office writing Dayglo. I found a bunch of unpublished Schuyler poems. That story is in my introduction to Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems by James Schuyler.

Rae Armantrout and Eileen Myles were there. They hired me as an adjunct lecturer at UC San Diego, where I taught for the past 5 years. I fell in love with teaching. I now teach at California State University, San Marcos, and in the MFA program at National University. Brighton is nearly a teenager and loves skateboarding and surfing, but not poetry. I fell in love with a girl named after one of my favorite Cocteau Twins songs. By the time anyone reads this, we’ll be married.