“…I think you’ve hit a breakthrough of sorts and touched an artistic nerve dreaming cinema in scenic ways. The playful way you say you approached them might be a great technique to contiue working with and freeing up the unconscious wellspring…”
—Peter Magliocco (from a letter to the author)
Alan Catlin’s Playing Tennis with Antonioni validates the notion that parody is the most effective tribute to the original. Viewing in the poet’s comic lens Bergman’s “Seventh Seal” as providing tableaux for soap commercials (Catlin reminds us that Bergman once directed nine such) or Godard’s existentialism move to High Plains Drifters scratching scrotums, this seasoned chronicler of the incongruous has consummated a series of unlikely cinematic marriages. Also included, in unlikely guises, are Orson Welles’s “Wizard of Oz” putting Dorothy on trial and Eisenstein as Frankenstein. The wonder of this poetic theater of the absurd is the fresh look at film familiars Catlin provides.
—Richard Hauer Costa,
Harry Baur’s Last Perfomance (2003)
Catlin’s Playing Tennis with Antonioni makes wonderful fun of the art film, its directors, and acolytes. It’s a positive pleasure to read the articulate, witty poetry that steps way outside the self-concern that seems to limit so many writers in today’s marketplace.
—Laurel Speer,
poet, reviewer, former columnist for Small Press Review
Alan Catlin is willfully and gainfully unemployed, after leaving his unchosen profession as a barman for the uncertainties of the writing game. Recent publications include a group of short stories, Death Angels, from Four-sep Publications, and his selected poems, Drunk and Disorderly, from Pavement Saw Press.