Late morning on a sunny day last week, Turners Falls poet Patricia Pruitt sat with me in the living room of her Prospect Street home to talk about her new book, “Full Moon at Sunset: Selected Poems,” just published by Talisman House in Northfield. The book includes work from many of Pruitt’s previous publications, as well as new poems.
Pruitt will launch the book at a reading on Sunday at 3:30 p.m. at The Rendezvous, 78 Third St. in Turners Falls.
Pruitt, whose energy is diminished by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, will have the help of fellow writers Richard Anderson and Al Miller, as well as husband Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, in reading from the book. Copies will be available at the launch or can be obtained online at: bit.ly/2wAX9C8
Pruitt’s book opens with the fittingly titled “First Poem,” which reads in its entirety: Oh moon hiding behind/ dark billows/ my life/ like you/ hides and mocks me too
“I was 16 when I wrote that,” Pruitt says with a smile. “I thought it was a good expression of teenaged angst.”
Even learning how young Pruitt was when she wrote the poem doesn’t sway me from experiencing it not as an expression of teenaged angst, but instead as an evocation of a larger, more universal sense of dislocation. The spare quality of the poem’s language prompts me to ask whether Pruitt had already been reading, say, ancient Chinese poetry at 16.
Pruitt shakes her head and offers the American poet Hilda Doolittle, who published as H.D., as one of her earliest influences.
As small and self-contained as it is, “First Poem” also encapsulates many of the qualities of the poems that will follow: a sense of some things, including herself, being hidden from the poems’ narrator; a sense of discoveries being made and yet to be made; and an often haunting simplicity that manages to create a density of mood and atmosphere.
In the poem, “Suite,” the atmosphere Pruitt creates feels almost like a surrealist painting.
“Well, I’m always grateful to surrealism, because it opens up what’s possible to do with our languages,” Pruitt says. “It really opens doors for you. You can take chances on language to do something besides its strict dictionary definition.”
“Is that a different way of working, for you, when you’re approaching these surrealistic images?” I ask.
Then it occurs to me ask, “Is that even the right word to use: surrealism?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t know if a card-carrying surrealist would buy that,” Pruitt says.
She laughs. “But I like the way it’s been an influence on me.”
Other important influences for Pruitt were the poets, visual artists and filmmakers she encountered at Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, Colo., when she went to get her Master’s of Fine Arts degree in writing and poetics in 1989. Founded in 1974 by Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Naropa’s focus has always been as much on mindfulness training and spiritual practice as on academic studies.
At 44, Pruitt was older than many of her fellow classmates — the mother of two daughters, one a teenager, one in her early 20s — who stayed behind in Massachusetts. Pruitt had taken time off from teaching at Baystate Junior College, now Baystate College, in Boston to pursue her higher degree.
At Naropa, she studied with Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapino and other writers who were actively pushing the boundaries of language.
Pruitt says she chose the program over one at Boston University, “Which was all sort of about a lot of poets who were on the edge of breakdowns of one sort or another.
“It was an exciting time in the sense that language poetry was the vogue,” Pruitt says. “And the crowd at Naropa, the students as well as the faculty, were very devoted and excited to be in each other’s midst. It was a heady time, for sure.”
I ask Pruitt about her choice not to use punctuation in “Suite.” She smiles and quips, “I don’t know what governs that. Some permission I got from the grammar folks, I guess.”
For me, the lack of punctuation helps to create the sense of being suspended in another world. The lack of periods means we don’t have time to stop and be too logical. Rather than trying to parse the poem in an attempt to “understand” it, the best strategy for experiencing it seems to be to let its language sit in me. Then, I feel the poem’s dry wind move through me, bringing disturbance and, right at the end, that odd sense of being “shadowed by hope.”
Pruitt says that sometimes, when she finds she can’t write anything, she’ll choose a single word or a phrase from a list she keeps and just begin writing what it calls up in her. The word might be “chalk,” or “scythe,” or the phrase, “10-ounce wine glass.
“Obviously, there’s a lot you can say about a 10-ounce wine glass,” Pruitt says with a smile.
Working this way seems a good way of keeping yourself at your desk, I reply, even when you feel too distracted to write, or as if you have nothing to say.
“Exactly,” Pruitt says. “And that makes something happen.”
Writing that might start out as ridiculous or superficial can open into something that’s not, she adds. Which calls to mind the epigraph by Ikkyu, a 15th century Zen master that Pruitt chose to open her collection: “Poetry’s ridiculous. Write it. Feel proud.”
Trish Crapo is a writer and photographer who lives in Leyden. She is always looking for poets, writers and artists to interview for her columns. She can be reached at tcrapo@mac.com