Russell Atkins is a poet, playwright, composer, and editor from Cleveland. In 1950 he cofounded Free Lance, a black avant-garde publishing house and literary journal. Atkins’s only full-length collection of poetry, Here In The, was published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1975 and his chapbooks include A Podium Presentation (1960), Phenomena (1961), Objects (1963), Objects 2 (1964), Heretofore (1968), The Nail, to Be Set to Music (1970), Maleficium (1971), and Whichever (1978). He also wrote verse-plays including The Abortionist and The Corpse.
Atkins’s manifesto appears along with more than 100 poems, two plays, and a forward by Janice A. Lowe in the new comprehensive collection World’d Too Much: The Selected Poetry of Russell Atkins (CSU Poetry Center, 2019).
As an Indigenous poet, Belcourt is creating space for himself and his community in “a world we did not want, a world that we did not build for ourselves.”
All the experts say I’m sane.
Some even say I might acquire insight someday.
Increasingly, poems reach me physically, testing my physical and emotional boundaries—looking for places they might get inside, frequencies at which I might hear, poking at sensuous dead zones.
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with Korakrit Arunanondchai, Antoine Catala and Dan Graham, Atelier Bow-Wow, American Artist, Jeff Bliumis, James N. Kienitz Wilkins, Rion Amilcar Scott, and Carmen Giménez Smith.
We need our own space to think and digest what we see. And we also have to trust the viewer and trust the power of the object. And the power is in simple things. I like the kind of clarity that that brings to thought. It keeps thought from being opaque.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
