INTERVIEW: AMERICA’S MOST FAMOUS UNKNOWN UNDERGROUND POET: ALAN CATLIN
Photo by Dan Wilcox
“[Poetry] feels like the creation of a small piece of the world we live in. It feels like an essential process that has to be done and no one else can do it but you.”
Alan Catlin worked as a professional barman and waiter for 34 years in the greater Albany area. His last job, for twenty-five years, was at Michael Byron's Washington tavern. He published his first poem in the mid-70s and has been publishing ever since. He has a novella in the works due out in January called A Story Told in Ten Monologues and an Epilogue (Alien Buddha available on Amazon) based on a local serial killer. Forthcoming later this year and in '26 are Landscape of the Exiled (dos madres Press), Work Anxiety Poems (Roadside Press) and Still Life with Apocalypse (Shelia na gig Press)
Alan and I go back a number of years as friends as a part of the Albany area & Capital Region poetry scene so for all those out there who have never read his work, here's an introduction to a writer and a poet who has been published in so many zines that people have lost count. I had a few questions for him I've never gotten the chance to ask.
R.M. Engelhardt: So Alan, your new book of poetry: Would you tell us a little bit more about it?
Alan Catlin: One of my latest books is Last Call for Lazarus, third in a series of what I call my “carpe diem” trilogy of bar poms. It is available on Amazon as the publisher recently passed away at home in the UK after successful heart transplant surgery. The other two in the series were published over the last year and a half also from Roadside Press (also available from Amazon but wouldn't you really like to buy the book from the small press rather than the evil empire?) The titles of those two earlier books are Bar Guide for the Seriously Deranged and Another Saturday Night in Jukebook Hell. I call them “carpe diem” books as they reflect an almost desperate ‘party 'til you drop’ attitude of reckless behavior that takes no prisoners.
For close to 20 years, I have been reflecting on "the ethics of drinking,” before deciding, basically, there are none. I decided to refine my technique from the more descriptive, oral tradition, spoken word poems, to more socially critical poems disguised as bar poems beginning with a series called Alien Nation. From those I moved on to Hollyweird, a series of eleven chapbooks of movie-based poems with a chapbook called Beautiful Mutants as a bridge collection from Alien Nation to Carpe Diem, for tomorrow we must die. It feels like this is where we are headed as a society. The last three books were all uncollected poems I found in my archives and were modified slightly to fit together as a collection. While these may not have been written in the order they were printed, the poems represent a deliberate decision to add more depth and resonance to my work.
RE: How long have you been writing poetry? And how many books have you published and where has your work been published over the years?
AC: Basically, forever. I think I wrote my first poem in grade school. A friend's mother saw it in the school newspaper and said, "Wow, you are a poet." I liked the sound of that. I wrote casually in high school. In college, I wrote more seriously and published some poems in underground mags though I had no idea what I was doing. It wasn't until I quit my nightclub bar manager's job in my early 30s that I began to find some focus, although I had published a dozen or so poems in small print/mimeo mags by the early ‘80s. I took some workshops with a local prolific poet, Lyn Lifshin, who suggested I write about my job. I was laboring under the misapprehension that I was an artist of some kind (what happens when you read too much Joyce... Beware of your literary idols.) I said no one really wants to read about bars. She asked me if I had ever read Bukowski and I said not really. So I did and I was off to the races writing, literally hundreds of poems in my out of work summer, and eventually hundreds became thousands.
The big mags, universities and college mags didn't want to read about bars, but the small press mags sure did and I soon began to publish in dozens of magazines, eventually hundreds, if not thousands. Who keeps score? Oddly, the poems looked like Lifshin poems rather than Bukowski poems though I was really aiming for something like a Creeley poem. Those would come later. In '83, I won a couple of contests that led to publication of a chapbook a month for three months into '84. One was called New Year's Eve Bash based on an actual event where a bartender was literally stomped to death on New Year's Eve after closing. I was working that night, basically by myself about a mile or so uptown in Albany so that one felt personal. The other winner was Visiting Day on the Psychiatric Ward which is an impressionistic look at what it feels like to visit your mother in an institution when you are seven and eight years old. I also developed that series in Lifshin's workshop. She loved the mother poems, (perhaps too much), and hated the bar poems. So it goes. With Visting Day, I found a direction and a second voice totally different from the bar ones. I realized voice, how you say things, the process of presenting your work, is as important, if not more so, than what you actually are trying to say (thank you Roland Barthes).
RE: What were the early days of underground poetry like?
AC: Early days of the underground scene were wild and wide open. With my International Guide to Small Presses and Magazines in hand, I tried them all. I wasn't quite as methodical as Simon Perchik who told me he did the whole book alphabetically, sending out three poems at a time and if and when they came back, he'd send to the next one on the list. I came in at the tail end of the mimeo scene just as the little, small run zines and short run print mags were flying high. Paul Weinman was still around then; along with Lifshin they were two of the top ten published small poets, and he suggested I start sending to zines. He told me about Factsheet 5 which was a local publication that gave you addresses of hundreds of zines. Most of these were one man or woman fan-like zines who also published poetry. So, I tried them too. What the hell? It was all about getting your name out there. I still tried some of the university mags, but they take forever, and I never send anything to them any longer. I'm too old to wait five months for a form rejection notice. Still, I have published in some of the big name, long running university mags like The Literary Review, Wisconsin Review, Seattle Review, Florida Review, Descant, Hiram Poetry Review, Pleiades and so on and so forth.
RE: Tell me, why do you write poetry?
AC: When I first started writing I was going to be a great novelist or, at least, a respected prose stylist. I rarely wrote poetry at all until my early 30s, so I had a lot of catching up to do which helps explain my prolific output (so much to say, so little time to do it). When I was weeding my old files, many of which were written before we had our first computer (A Kay Pro with 64k!) and are still not typed onto my hard drive. I was astonished by how much I wrote that I had basically forgotten about. One of the main reasons I quit the bar manager's job was to work on a novel project which became The American Book of the Dead, which was never published. Ever tried to publish a satirical, literary novel that isn't transparently satiric or literary except each section was written under the influence of a different author and all the characters have "literary names"? Well, you can't. Eventually, I gave up and didn't write a short story or anything resembling prose for ten years. I just couldn't do it. Some of that stuff wasn't half bad either.
I am going to salvage one piece, “An Inner Movie”, which is a novella as a movie script (or a treatment) visualizing the original prose poems that were written around the time I was doing Visiting Day. Those poems told what happened before mother went to the institution while we lived in the Virgin Islands, and she was getting her divorce. Those days, though somewhat vague, were in some ways indelible and visually imprinted in my mind as it was paradise in hell. You don't forget your mother having a nervous breakdown when you are five years old and 1,200 miles away from home. So, I turned to poetry because well, I viscerally needed to write. If you are a real, committed writer, you don't quit writing, writing quits you. You can write a poem in a few minutes (or, say if you are Lyn Lifshin you can write dozens of them in a few minutes because she did free writing that doesn't require any thought process. I know this is true because I have seen her do it.) Writing a novel is like living with a problem that can only be worked out by writing it down. No matter what you do, subconsciously at the very least, it is always with you like a living thing, and it takes months if not years to work it out. It is not a pleasurable experience until it is done. Poetry is an immediate gratification thing on one level, though on a more basic level, it feels like the creation of a small piece of the world we live in. It feels like an essential process that has to be done and no one else can do it but you.
RE: Who are the writers or poets you admire? And what or who inspired you to become a poet?
AC: There are so many writers I admire, it's almost impossible to list them all. And that list evolves and changes as you age, and your writing needs different voices to sustain the writing. I have a bad, subconscious habit of absorbing the style of a writer and it is reflected in what gets written. I once said, not entirely facetiously, you can always tell what I've been reading by what I am writing. (Even in the highly elliptical, "experimental" work I did during the pandemic which started off as being directly impacted by Bernadette Mayer and then dozens of other writers.) I will say early on, Dylan was a huge influence (both of the Dylans, that is), Ginsberg, The Wasteland, and The Romantics: Keats, Shelley and Bryon who I read extensively in grad school. Byron seems to have lasted the longest as an influence due to his effortless almost perfect voice, though I will concede Keats is probably "the better" poet. Shelley was a dick, but he could write immortal verse too. Several prose writers heavily influenced me in my late 20s and 30s like Malcolm Lowry, D.H. Lawrence and the aforementioned king of the written word – not Shakespeare – James Joyce. Diane Wakoski had a big impact and Bukowski to a certain extent. Creeley and Lifshin, though we had a falling out. I am a huge fan of zen poet Cid Corman. Galway Kinnell, whom I had the pleasure of working with, Louise Gluck and hundreds of contemporary poets too numerous to mention.
RE: Any big projects in the works?
AC: During the pandemic, I absolutely could not write personal narratives. This style was my go to for everything but like an aging pitcher reaching back for a fastball that had lost velocity, I couldn't find it. I was reading Bernadette's hybrid book Memory and taking notes. I read the notes and realized they were little prose poems that worked on the page like photos in an album. Over the next couple of years they morphed into a different kind of project entirely under the influence of Carole Masi and Dave Markson's series of This Is Not a Novel which is to novels what Magritte's This is Not a Pipe is to visual arts. I published a few hundred of those two books and stopped around 800 though I plan to go back to it and reach my stated goal of 1,000. I also wrote a collection of centos that were mostly derived from picture captions, titles and first lines of poems.
Next is my ongoing archival poem project where I am reimagining, rewriting and collecting stuff that either wasn't published before in book form or could be made into something else. I have about 1,300 of one, two and three line poems that I am reimagining with themes like Listening, Seeing, Dreams Before Waking, Insomnia. That should keep me busy for a while. I also have some "nearkus" looking for a home. A nearku is like a haiku only it doesn't fit the strict syllabic count.
RE: Do you have any readings or poetry events coming up in the future?
Nothing specific as of yet though I hope to get out more this year. Maybe this Metroland interview will make me locally famous and people will contact me for readings. I've cut way back from reading since the pandemic as I was extremely nervous about being in contact with groups given my propensity for severe respiratory illnesses.