Today’s post comments upon the newest chapbook by a local poet, Alan Catlin.
I have Alan’s consent to post this commentary.
SELF-PORTRAIT AS THE ARTIST AFRAID OF HIS SELF-PORTRAIT
(March Street Press, 2008)
Alan Catlin of Schenectady, NY, has been writing poetry for more than thirty years, steadily publishing his poetry and fiction at a local level as well as in nationally-circulating journals such as The Bitter Oleander, and earning some Pushcart Prize nominations along the way.
I think that his most recent release, the poetry chapbook SELF-PORTRAIT AS THE ARTIST AFRAID OF HIS SELF-PORTRAIT, certainly deserves some kind of prize. While reading this collection’s fifty poems, I was reminded of the book SIXTY POEMS (2007) by our current Poet Laureate, Charles Simic. The poems in Catlin’s chapbook–like some of Simic’s–are brief and surreal, reeled out from a hallucinatory mind detached from any strong emotion: cinematic rather than lyrical or narrative. And as with some of Simic’s poems–but much more frequently in Catlin’s–the prevailing mood is disquietude, a post-traumatic displacement from the shocks of war, violence, or psychic disintegration.
Almost all of the poems in Catlin’s chapbook are assigned titles that begin with “Self-Portrait,” suggesting that the poems are ekphrastic or, at the least, modeled after that mode of painting, revealing some aspect of either the outward appearance or inner state of the artist-poet. And yes, many of Catlin’s poems are direct or indirect responses to works of art by real artists (Chagall, Warhol, Joseph Cornell, Stan Rice, etc.) However, the personal pronoun “I” appears in only two poems (and therein merely within reported dialogue).
In these poems, then, an integrated, fully-developed projection of self is missing. Catlin replaces that self with thickly-textured conjurings of numerous different characters, historical episodes, and cultural icons: phantoms which might be totemic for both the poet’s personal identity as well as for his situation as a citizen of the troubled 21st century. Catlin’s subjects are strange bedfellows indeed: Francis Bacon, Hamlet, Mae West, and even some Hell’s Angels taking Christ down from the cross. These disjunctions make the collection as a whole unnerving, but also unforgettable.
I recommend reading the chapbook straight through from front to back. There’s an uncanny necessity to the sequence of these poems, as if some space-time coordinate within each poem were opening into a wormhole leading to the next poem. I read the chapbook three times non-stop while strapped to an airplane seat for eleven hours over the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by strangers from around the world speaking foreign languages. Exactly the right place to encounter the works of Alan Catlin, a dedicated, experienced, and talented poet.
(If you would like to order a copy of Alan’s chapbook, email this blogger at theresebroderick AT yahoo DOT com)
