Alan Britt
TWO POETS
What happened to the two poets I call Mutt & Jeff? You call them what you like, but I call them Mutt & Jeff. Mutt grew so popular that he eventually lost a step or two. He purchased condos in
New Jersey & ate at white napkin restaurants, while Jeff was shunned for being blunt. In a culture that reveres fairy dust, one who speaks his mind, as Billy warned us generations ago, “will be avoided.” So, Jeff, isolated with obsessions that little by little burrowed into his poems the way
larvae cauterize crabapples, or the way palmetto bugs strip forest greens & banana yellows from acid free watercolors smeared & dabbed into space & time by refined horsehair—In any event, isolation infused Jeff’s poems with habanero & poison oak.
The above is a fairytale but a tale of two poets in the Great Experiment struggling to survive the trolling nets of the Empire. Two poets, living many lives before, in other cultures, other dreams,
their ochre fingers charred on El Castillo Cave walls, etching & scratching DNA into whatever allowed them to survive.
Both men remember, forget, remember to forget, then some days nothing.
First Published in Alien Buddha Press
Alan Britt has been nominated for the 2021 International Janus Pannonius Prize awarded by the Hungarian Centre of PEN International for excellence in poetry from any part of the world. Previous nominated recipients include Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles Bernstein and Yves Bonnefoy. Alan served as judge for the 2018 The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award and was interviewed at The Library of Congress for The Poet and the Poem. He has published 18 books of poetry and served as Art Agent for the late great Ultra Violet while often reading poetry at her Chelsea, New York studio. A graduate of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University he currently teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University.