Street Mete
Vertical Elegies 6
To the reader: Sam Truitt's Vertical Elegies 6: Street Mete needs you. It needs your company. It needs you now, right now, in order to complete the immediacy of its spontaneous images and text. Street Mete has the uncanny ability of mapping a moment more google earth than Baedeker with instructions, snapshot photos, verse, observations, and a running sidebar of commentary... Truitt, in this masterful book, improvises with the material of relationships, some visual some textual, to reconstruct a world of everyday observation--the author has moved uptown and upstate to point his work to a fleeting moment like a swallow, like rocks/trees/leg lifts. --Robert Fitterman, author of the METROPOLIS series
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Truitt has produced a site-specific poetry triangulated between the transcript of improvised language, snapshots, and the tenuous, tremulous breath of an embodied speaker. This poetry comes, that is, from the mete: "a particular point or position, esp. a turning point [verse, trope, corner] or finishing point [publication]." In doing so, Truitt twice metes urban space (travels over or traverses; paints or depicts) with a protocol that repeatedly metes (measures): "the space between your head and heart, trail of shadows among whispers," which is to say "the space between what you think and what you feel," "the oscillating intervals, felt as a throb, between wakefulness and sleep" (mete, in the obsolete intransitive impersonal, means "to dream"). Here at the boundary (mete) between speech and writing, word and image, the personal and the civic here in this 21st-Century version of Personism one can readily judge (mete) the extent (mete) to which Truitt truly meets the mark (mete: "also a mark or target. Also fig."). --Craig Dworkin, co-editor of Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing
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Shuttling back and forth in time, the words flow and circle and stop and start up again; rhythms rise and fall and fragment. A thought or scene feels intimately familiar then swerves or drifts into another; turning a corner, suddenly we are completely lost. Continuity and discontinuity interweave. Drawing on rich histories of spoken word improvisation and visual composition, Street Mete experiments in that strange space where speech meets the page, where two temporalities of recorded speech and written word meet and become something else. --Liz Kotz, author of Words to Be Looked At
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Street Mete's multimedia montage is a performative work in language/photo art. Truitt creates a poetics of transcribed voice recordings and on-the-spot photos made in the streets and subways of New York between 1996 and 2004. Infused journal entries give autobiographical edge to its sometimes harsh historical landscape that includes the fall of civilizations, yoking for example the Mayan ruins of Chichén-Itzá to our current walkways. At core is spontaneous composition on the hoof, the sudden diction arising from a language artist meeting the world with recorder in hand, speaking forward a bit of rubble wearing clothes walking past madison square garden with a pair of enormous inflated boxing gloves oldenbergian in the car line catching fire... [From http://jacket2.org/commentary/sam-truitt-two-improvisations-vertical-elegies-6-street-mete]