Sam Truitt and the Poetic Continuum

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX broadcast (aired March 26th, 2024) featuring award-winning poet Sam Truitt.   Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com. Visit:  samtruitt.com, samtsong.com, Station Hill Press

 Sam Truitt was born in Washington, DC, and raised there and in Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of the ten works in the Vertical Elegies series, among others in print and other media, including most recently TOKYOATOTO and the forthcoming STATE/SHAFT SHAFT/STATE. Among other recognitions, he is the recipient of numerous Fund for Poetry awards, a Contemporary Poetry Award from the University of Georgia, and a Howard Fellowship. He is also the maker of numerous works in mixed media, including the aforementioned STATE/SHAFT SHAFT/STATE and other series like DICTE and numerous works in Intermedia with musicians and filmmakers. Truitt earned a PhD in English from the University at Albany and a MFA in Creative Arts from Brown University. The director of Station Hill Press and president of the Institute for Publishing Arts (including, among other projects, the podcast Baffling Combustions and the Station Hill Intermedia Project), he lives in Woodstock, NY, where he is the co-founder of the non-profit Woodstock Center for Awakening, which will host the second Woodstock Community Festival of Awakening in August, and is a volunteer ambulance driver for the Woodstock Rescue Squad. 

 On TOKYOATOTO

“Sam Truitt has added a wonderful new innovative example of one of my favoirte genres – travel poetry. By way of two ‘T squares’ (Times and Tiananmen) on the way to Japan, he generously expands the notational into double accordion-fold expanses; one typed and sculptural, one handwritten, drawn notation condensing sound, thought, perception and time.  The reader is invited into the poet’s process alternating between quicksilver caught thought to poems lifted to the next level of line-break shape and form…”

---- Lee Ann Brown, author of Philtre: Writing in the Dark 1989-2020

 “…the intimacy of writing as note-taking feels palpably present.  We intrude on those personal pages, even in facsimile. By contrast, the public-facing presentation of the typeset texts feels bold, exposed, declaratively blunt in its directness..”

----Joanne Drucker, author of Diagrammatic Writing