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).
A snow lark hovers over the isolated Isle of the Dead A shadow on the beach is an echo of Venus who bestows upon me some ripened red fruit In this isolated moment waves produce a dream that seduces me
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From personal ads compiled as narrative to a frame-by-frame retelling of a short film on grazing sheep, Nao’s poems and stories are acrobatic experiments in form.
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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.
Work that is just about the technical or conceptual, personal or political, is fine; it meets the world with what’s in fashion. But there’s something else bordering on magic, that brings an artwork home, makes it land and resonate. You can’t really teach that so much as conjure it.
Kara Walker
