[03/20/26] Meetze, James: 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.

"When wound is world and world is flat then we are again at war with knowing. To what end when the clock ticks past our hunger for sense? No one wins a castle." -James Meetze from "(worldview)"