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Alan Britt
Alan Britt
teaches creative writing, poetry, and composition at Towson
University. He is committed to combining creative multi-media,
student participation, along with a little fun to enhance the
learning environment in his classes. His poetry, flash fiction,
essays, and interviews have appeared worldwide in such
publications as Agni, Arson, Christian Science
Monitor, Clay Palm Review, Confrontation, English Journal,
Epoch, Fire (UK), Flint Hills Review, Fox Cry Review,
Gradiva (Italy),
Kansas Quarterly, Latino Stuff Review,
Magyar Naplo (Hungary), Midwest Quarterly, New
Letters, New Voices (Trinidad & Tobago), Pacific Review,
Pedrada Zurda (Ecuador),
Poet's Market, Puerto del Sol, Queen's Quarterly
(Canada), Revista Solar (Mexico), Sou'wester, Square
Lake, Steaua (Romania), plus the anthologies,
Fathers: Poems About Fathers (St. Martin's Press:1998),
Weavings 2000: The Maryland Millennial Anthology (Forest
Woods Media Productions, Inc.: 2001, St. Mary’s College, MD), and La Adelfa
Amarga: Seis Poetas Norteamericanos de Hoy (Ediciones El
Santa Oficio. Peru: 2003.
His recent
books are Vermilion (The Bitter Oleander Press: 2006),
Infinite Days (The Bitter Oleander Press: 2003), Amnesia
Tango (Cedar Hill Publications: 1998), and Bodies of
Lightning (Cypress Books: 1995).
Alan received
his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of
Tampa and the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He
occasionally publishes the international literary journal,
Black Moon, from Reisterstown, Maryland, where he lives with
his wife, daughter, two Bouviers des Flandres, and two formerly
feral cats.
The imagery in Britt's poems
connects itself to an idea and is, therefore, deeper and more
meaningful than embellishment or decoration. In this manner, a
linguistic experience is born, one that is palpable to the five
senses. No accent pieces needed-Britt does more than get close
to the bone-he gets to the heart of the thing itself and makes
it resonate with something deeper than exactitude. His images
are painted as if vibrating, as if his letters were tuning
forks. Britt's imagery, therefore, evokes a mood and meaning
simultaneously.
--excerpted from Dr. Maura
Gage's introduction to
Infinite Days
Here's what's being said about
VERMILION
Images are
the key to what is serious in life: lying, as such, but the
great and only occasion to understand what is truth. I enjoy
poets like Alan Britt who know where to look for truth.
--Yves Bonnefoy
Vermilion,
the new volume of poetry by Alan Britt, is a concise but very
humane piece of poetry. Two moods flood this volume-a mystic
mood, and then a contemplative mood. The first one is not
canonic, because if one can talk about a mystic feeling, this
suggests the construction of each poem as embodying a sort of
mantra. Eagles, white pelicans and above all the snow leopard
are savior-animals and symbols not only for the sacrifice, but
also for the pilgrimage that all of us, as interior monks, must
undertake in our lives.
--Ruxandra Cesereanu
(Available
books): Vermilion and Infinite Days from www.bitteroleander.com/books.html
Review
by Paul Sohar from
Off the Coast, Vol XIII, No 1, January 2007 (www.offthecoast.com/reviews.html)
Vermilion
Poems by Alan
Britt
The Bitter
Oleander Press
Finally a
volume of poetry I can really get excited about. Not only
respect and admire at a distance or learn from, but simply enjoy
without effort or reservation. And by this I don’t mean to say
these poems lack sophistication, quite the contrary, they revel
in the unexpected in lush landscapes of exotic images, but
images that require not deciphering; they force themselves on
the reader’s consciousness. It takes me more effort to wade
through the simple-minded little prosaic vignettes and so-called
slices of life that pass for poetry in many literary forums,
because halfway through I become mired in the inertia of boredom
and it takes me a great effort to overcome that paralytic state
of mind. True poetry is truly exciting to find, it’s not a
riddle to be solved, not a cutesy little story to churn the
stomach, and there’s no effort involved. The excitement
generated by a great poem electrifies the mind, alerting it to
the message the poet wants to convey in addition to the dozens
of other possible avenues the poem opens up on its own. A great
poem thus gives us a lot more than just truth; it lets us feel
we’re in possession of truth, it awakens the sensation of truth,
it lets the mind leap over the mechanics of everyday living,
above its role as the mere watchdog of survival, the servant of
so-called hard reality, and into the magic world we always
suspected existed beyond the surface we can see and touch, into
a world where poets, painters and musicians can guide us.
I don’t know
if Alan Britt thinks of himself as an imagist poet, but I am
bedazzled by the imagery that graces every stanza of his and
even vibrates in every stanza break. Yet his poems are not just
galleries of static images, but each poem is a stage for a
dramatic interplay of images, each one of which is a miniature
drama in itself and contributes to the dramatic tension that
propels each poem to completion. Never to a punch line, of
course, Britt is above that, not even to a conclusion but a
dissolution of the picture even while lyrical intensity keeps
echoing through the mind.
…when you lean forward,
you’d swear
a
new bark, yelp or howl
barely vibrates these Debussy clouds
of
twilight.
And so ends
one of the longer poems, “Listening to Dogs”. We don’t learn
much about dogs, but we do get ushered into the poet’s mind and
can’t help catching the mood that possesses it.
The above
quote illustrates two more things about Britt’s poetry; sights
and sounds are interchangeable, they smoothly flow from one into
the other, giving the metaphors an added dimension. And the
other is the broad and deep cultural background that he brings
to his poems. Although most of these poems either take their
imagery from nature or describe –no; create – a scene in nature,
mostly in the poet’s own backyard and carefully tended vegetable
garden, the larger world is never too far, and neither are the
trappings of civilization such as music, art, history and the
geography of imagination. And let me not forget the tribute he
pays to other poets who had nourished his inventiveness; the
various sections of the book are couched in quotations from
Baudelaire, Isabel Fraire (born in Mexico City, 1934) and even
John Lennon, in addition to Anne Sexton’s picture. But I find it
easiest to tune in with his allusions to music, especially
Mahler whose emotionally-laden post-Romantic symphonies and
other orchestral song cycles, such as the Song of the Earth
(there is a poem by the same title in the volume, undoubtedly a
poetic response to Mahler’s Das Lied von die Erde), all inspired
by the sounds and colors of nature, are so much in harmony with
Alan Britt’s world. They complement each other, like the various
other associations the poet makes contemplating nature. For
example, there is the owl in the poem “Myth of the Baker’s
Daughter”:
They say the owl
used to be a baker’s daughter
with wild hyacinth hair.
And then the
poem plunges into the myth, or the suggestion of a myth, slowly
warming up to its complication and expanding on its universal
implications before coming back to a real owl, a scene from
nature, that inspired the whole thing in the first place. This
poem is one of my favorites, because it demonstrates so well the
poet’s ability to put imagery to dramatic use, to keep things
moving instead of just decorating the page; the poem smoothly
slips into the myth and takes off into fantasy on a rainbow-like
arch to come back to reality, the reality of the owl in the
backyard, which has been magically opened up in the meantime to
reveal a rich world of myth lying beneath the surface. Momentum
is perhaps the most essential aspect of lyric poetry, and Alan
Britt’s poems never lack it; from the first word to the last the
lines carry the mind along as easily as a breeze carries a bird
across a valley, as easily as red wine can fill a glass.
Effort? It takes about as much effort to read and appreciate
these poems as it does to walk across a newly discovered
clearing in the woods in springtime. That is not to say the
drama and pain of life is glossed over or ignored, but by
dramatizing the meaning behind it all through vivid images the
poet is able to achieve resolution and peace of mind.
So, reveal
your desperate shoulders,
smooth shadows
of
ice melting,
as
good as any lover
devoured
by
panic existence.
The back cover
shows the poet is a relaxed pose, with a wine glass in hand but
with an alert look in the eyes. The exact image I formed of him
reading this book.
Paul Sohar
14 Sydenham
Rd.
Warren, NJ
07059
BRIEF
ENCOUNTER
When
I was 17, her eyes resembled champagne scorpions,
ones living
inside clapboard walls,
deadly stings
for such small creatures.
Her lips
resembled some sort of melon, orange or green,
I can’t
remember now, but they released elixir
similar to the
pomegranate feathers shading the agate eyes
above
Vermeer’s girl in a red hat.
Her hips had
teeth.
I’d have
shifted gears,
but I was on
automatic,
silver Chevy,
of the ’57 variety,
4-barrel,
marginal AC, the works.
Anyway, her
neck had scarlet fever,
what with all
its drops of sweat.
And since I’d
never had scarlet fever
before, I was
cooked.
Now, at 58, I
say that too much attention is paid
to the
gravitational pull of rogue suns, black holes, lavish moons,
and not nearly
enough to necks.
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