In poems that springboard from cultural and pop cultural icons like Chagall, Turner, and Andy Warhol, Catlin creates a crazy quilt of strange, terrifying, yet wonderfully surreal, and always consistent associations. These are poems like no other: like kaleidoscopic snapshots into the frenzied mind of the White Rabbit, glimpses of madness that somehow always seem brilliant and ultimately make perfect sense. Part of the fun of reading Self-Portrait of the Artist Afraid of His Self-Portrait is trying to figure out where Catlin's agile mind is going to land next and always being more than pleasantly surprised at the imaginative leap he's forced us to take. --Robert Cooperman, author of The Long Black Veil
Alan Catlin is retired from his unchosen profession as a barman. In his spare time, he has been publishing for parts of six decades in little, minuscule, not so little, literary, and university publication: from the Wormwood Review to the Wisconsin Review to Tray Full of Lab Rats, to Wordsworth's Socks, to The Literary Review and so forth. His chapbook, Blue Velvet, won the Slipstream Chapbook Contest in 2017. One of his more recent full length books is Last Man Standing, from Lummox Press, detailing his life and times walking to the bus stop, busing to work, and, at his former job, continuing an earlier, similarly arranged book, the now out of print, underground classic, The Schenectady Chainsaw Massacre. For his sins he is the poetry and review editor of misfitmagazine.net, an online poetry journal.
You've read the Southern Gothic novelists like Flannery O'Connor, right? Well Catlin is the upstate N.Y. Gothic poet. He focuses on the ne'er-do-wells, the stumblebums, the never-have- and never-will-bes with accuracy, potency, and pathos. Catlin, a retired bartender and small press legend, knows his subject well, and he ain't slumming. Bukowski would beam with pride, and might even be a bit jealous. --Doug Holder, Ibbetson Street Press Schenectady provides the charm & Alan Catlin provides the wit in these nature poems that Wendell Berry wouldn't write. It's not what the Chamber of Commerce wants you to hear, but it is the kind of gritty city poetry that's about your real neighbors. I've been hearing Alan read many of these poems at open mics & am glad to see them brought together in one place. But, I warn you that reading all the poems in one sitting will turn you into one of its characters. --Dan Wilcox, Host of the Third Thursday Reading in Albany NY, publisher, poet, and performance artist …like a long, sustained trumpet note: existential blues. i'm beat, man… --T. K. Splake, poet Backwater Graybeard Twilight
Poetry. "Alan Catlin's MEMORIES is a dream book that leaps from right now to way back. In short, bursting vignettes he lets his mind and words play across memory and all the randomness memory triggers. From an opium dream to Candace Bergen, from a side glance at racial tensions to a parting glance at Mrs. Robinson, Catlin floats his readers down a stream of memory bubbles, then reaches up and pulls them into a fractured world beneath the surface. This book exhilarates with startling images and jazzy, jagged cadences." --Mike James
Imagine a great masterpiece of film re-imagined by a different director. Or a classic piece of cheese-on-celluloid in the hands of a master. These are poems about those films.
Have you ever gone to an art exhibit and felt as if you had been transported into a museum of curiosities? Alan Catlin's WILD BEAUTY is a poetic examination of the multifarious modes of expression in various artistic media, part of an ongoing process of examining "Extreme Art": the use of unconventional, non-traditional objects to create works that fall under the general rubric of "Art." Whether considering the installations of Damien Hirst or a panel from The Garden of Earthly Delights, Catlin delves into the creative process, treating each subject as unique but also part of a larger canvas whose only boundaries are those that the artist supplies. Using this broad, nearly all-inclusive set of standards and uncommon, out-on-the-edge, lively writing, Catlin takes us to the outer edges of the artistic experience.
Volume 3 of Dog On A Chain Press's Lantern Lit series. Contemporary poetry from modern poets, poets that are poets at the very gnarl of their being. Includes the second part of Mat Gould's Vol. 1 offering, the continuation of the subtle apocalypse he is known for. Utilizing molotov and a solitary faith in the amassing duality of existence, sustaining solidarity with a brimstone awareness of the native landscapes gospel at its basis of instinct and need, albeit it is the most domestic of purpose that humanity willingly persists. Alan Catlin deliberates amongst great bards, with quick prose and tangled notes, those of whom have had flourished and shambled with a gullet full of firewater and devils hair swathed in debaucherous glory. William Graham, in his first publication, connotes personal quarrel with sensible yet unorthodox ballads of a simple life and its wanton deeds. Beasley Barrenton has once again put on the Tigers head and tamed the jackal. Keep a lantern lit.
American Odyssey is a poetic journey that began when Alan Catlin saw Mary Ellen Mark's life study of three young girls standing by a Coney Island boardwalk. He was struck by how, through this powerful photo, we immediately know where these girls have been, where they are going, and where they will end up. Marks' work focuses on the human element-the dispossessed, the children of the streets, the prostitutes here and aboard-with complete honesty and compassion. After first exploring Mark's work, Catlin then travels across a series of canvasses-satiric, imaginary, exaggerated-that all focus on humans experiencing some sort of physical or psychic pain. By the end of the book, with the REQUIEM exhibit of photographs by photographers killed in Vietnam, humans are still present but dwarfed by the war that engulfs them. These poems address silence and pain, and they offer redemption. Maybe.
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