I am concluding my week of blog entries on the poet’s notebook with some reflections on the poet Sam Truitt’s marvelous recent book, Tokyoatoto (Station Hill Press, 2020). This book-length poem was composed in a small pocket-sized notebook during a ten-day trip to Tokyo in late Fall 2019, five months before the Covid-19 Pandemic shut down international travel. The poem begins in New York City as the poet travels to JFK Airport and concludes with his return. Impressions, thoughts, sights & sounds, and memories were jotted down in real time. Having lived in Tokyo from the age of three to seven, and having not set foot in the city or elsewhere in Japan since that time, the book enacts T.S. Eliot’s poetic dictum “to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Truitt expresses something similar early in the poem when his plane begins its descent into Tokyo’s Narita Airport: “Gliding downward through clouds & then under & cotton & black mountains in gold light I found myself inexplicably sobbing now gliding downwards tears in & spilling from my eyes toward the most beautiful place on Earth 52 years coming home.”
Returning to Japan at the end of his fifth decade of life, Truitt records the shifting parameters of his consciousness through words. He reveals the nature of this poetic project while waiting for a Tokyo subway sometime over the days following his arrival: “one senses a web each of us hold together & against & around us like a net knit of civility not docility as there are some faraway landscapes in our mind & in our heart & our bodies are dreaming all of them uniting to listen to the underground hum its magic.”
The book offers a sketch of those reflective moments in life when we try making sense of things, when we seek to express the accumulation of where and who we’ve been as we slide perpetually into the future. What it’s like, how one things moves into another, what we remember, the lacunas of what we forgot, what we’ve read, the mystery, and all the saw-toothed fragments of memory that weave continually through what we see: coalesce. The ever-expanding geometry of our consciousness reveals itself, momentarily, before the pattern changes.
It’s no coincidence then that the majority of Truitt’s odyssey occurs in transit: via foot, taxis, buses, subways, trains, and airplanes. Here’s some text from the flight over: “as we scoot over Siberian ice & crags & rock & out the grey & purple river-looped land in the orange light band I guess must now be south as north becomes it.” Or a moment toward the end of the book recorded on a subway: “& then I am in the subway wondering where exactly I am though knowing inordinately & knowing I need to do a quick search of my body to locate the ticket…” The movements that propel the poem frequently open up to flowerings of philosophical insight and questioning, such as the following moment in the middle of the poem: “you could say sex alone makes it worth it yet even sex wears thin & then you’re stuck with a habit of working within a structure…” No conclusion, though, is given much time to marinate before the focus leads elsewhere: “& so it goes back & forth until it is gone.”
The structure and physical layout of Tokyoatoto is significant. Each page of typed text (one section per page) is presented opposite a facsimile of the handwritten page from the original notebook he kept from November 23 – December 3 2019, with almost no alterations or additions. Why is this? As Robert Creeley famously put it, “Form is never more than an extension of content.” The inclusion of the original handwritten notebook in the published book captures what it’s like to make sense of the intersections of past and present, place and moment, self and others, matter and spirit, and the familiar and the foreign as they’re consciously experienced in the flux of time. What unfolds across the work is an experience of the unified field without a deliberate fielding of the experience.
Note on author: Sam Truitt is the author of the ten books in the Vertical Elegies series. He is the co-editor of In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley and Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer, and a host of the podcast Baffling Combustions. The director of Station Hill Press and president of the Institute for Publishing Arts, he lives in Woodstock, NY.
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