Dayglo

James Meetze

Selected for the 2010 Sawtooth Poetry Prize by Terrance Hayes

Sand grains on a bikini bottom, in the spare, gentle lyricism of these poems, become stardust, and also moments in history. Dayglo never shies from the hurts of reality—a dead bird on a car, an imagined mushroom cloud, a childhood home visited much later and found destroyed—yet it is filled with the light, from sun to “icky cinematic / light” that pervades the mythic landscape of California. Surfers’ locutions like “dude” and “no way” are colors of paint in a mirage depicted and embodied.

“Think of Thoreau inhabiting a city like San Diego, perhaps on a beach where ‘when brightness becomes your halo / it’s just sun / and nothing holy,’ and you will have a sense of the wonders of this collection. . . . Like the images of (sun)light and water that recur throughout Dayglo, James Meetze is a poet of irrepressible latitude and depth.” —Terrance Hayes, judge of the 2010 Sawtooth Poetry Prize

“James Meetze is, in some sense, a ‘landscape poet,’ except that his landscape includes ‘FA-18 Hornets’ that ‘boom above the freeway / as eucalyptus leaves rustle.’ He has a feel for his hometown, which is also mine. In fact, San Diego, with its ahistorical ‘Dayglo’ pastels, best glimpsed in passing from a freeway, is where we all live now, somehow, or soon will. James Meetze is a poet for this time and place.” —Rae Armantrout

“Meetze’s Dayglo is a conscious artifact of writing, the way lyric experience changes and is changed by the act of writing, by the object of the book. These poems speak out of a deep sense of isolation, an isolation of place, memory, and desire. Meetze’s work resonates with the best traditions of the west coast, Jack Spicer, George Stanley, and Robin Blaser, as well as that of New York, especially the work of James Schuyler, to make something wholly his own. The sun over everything, beautiful and merciless.” —Ryan Murphy