Featured Poet Alan Britt

Featured Poet Alan Britt

forDarkling magazine

June 2011

Reading Alan Britt’s poems are an exercise in diagonal thinking. He pulls the imagination against its will that way across the grainy figures and tropes of the poetic tradition. In Britt’s poems, the wind has shoulders, questions have eyes and arms like zebras, and maple leaves unsuccessfully strive to be limes.

But these images carry a craftily subtle silent music with them. The effect of reading a Britt poem is not unlike the effect of a scene from Fantasia. Except that the music is not Tchaikovsky. It’s the special music of poetry, the music the words generate in measure and sound. On second reading, one feels quite at ease, and the poems begin to take hold of the imagination, rather like the images do in that so unusual animated feature: an old woman with planets in her eyes chips away at the ice enclosing the golden crosses in the cathedrals of Barcelona. How utterly unreal! How fascinating! One can only let the image happen and rest in the enjoyment of it.

Britt’s titles also pull one diagonally into the experience of the poem: “September is a Good Month for Shiraz.” That title immediately stimulates with its seeming ambiguity. Shiraz is a well-known wine from Australia, but it is also the name of the poetic heart and soul of Iran, the poetry capital of Persia (I don’t care if Alan Britt knows this; it’s enough that I do). And knowing this, I am looking as I read for how the poem will pull me into its world. The reader will have his or her own response to this poem, but for me, I felt the wine of poetry. I loved the image of crickets shaped like violins and the white wind wearing turquoise anklets and nickel bracelets.

Britt’s poems are not for everyone. Many readers do not like being dragged diagonally across anything, much less the imagination. They like their meanings

uncomplicated and simple. I recall one time when we were selecting poems for a

reading when a person in the group I was with screamed at me for selecting e e

cummings’ “Anyone lived in a pretty how town.” I had to abandon that lovely

poem. Instead I chose a piece by Frost, which the person in question found perfectly suitable. Alan Britt comes to us from that other side of our poetic life, the side visited and explored by poets like cummings: “All in green went my love riding / on a great horse of gold / into the silver dawn.” In his time cummings was a bright light to some readers and a great enigma to others. One has to have a certain looseness of imagination and readiness to experience the flash of incongruity to enjoy cummings’ poems, and the same is true for the poems of Alan Britt. I think readers of Darkling are prepared for them.

--by Joseph M. Ditta from Darkling Magazine (Summer 2011)

Joseph M. Ditta

English Department

Dakota Wesleyan University

Mitchell, SD 57301