A Syntax of His Own: Remembering Russell Atkins

Essays in the “Remembrances” series pay tribute to poets who have died in the past year.

In 2012, about a year after a friend handed me a copy of Russell Atkins’s 1976 poetry collection Here In The, I found myself sitting on the floor of Atkins’s apartment, papers strewn about me. The room was stuffy, cluttered, and hot. The TV was on—a sitcom, I think—and it rattled annoyingly in the background. A ward of the state, Russell was 86 at the time and already very frail. He sat on the sofa as I snapped one photo after another of papers I’d removed from six tattered moving boxes we’d hauled from the coat closet. Here was a handwritten concerto. There, several photocopies of letters from Langston Hughes—where were the originals, I wondered?—and a rather snarky note to Russell from Marianne Moore, who declared of one of his poems, “This shows what you can do. The motion and mood are secure—eloquent. Only the words detract.” Another was more encouraging, about his poem “Trainyard at Night.” Letters from Clarence Major were especially supportive. “You are,” Major wrote, “one of the best poets I know.”

I pulled from those boxes drafts of poems, chapbooks, poetry broadsides, more letters from friends (some photocopies, some yellowing originals), correspondence with writers who, years ago, wrote for Free Lance, the avant garde literary magazine Atkins edited for more than two decades. In bound books, I found Atkins’s handwritten symphonies and verse plays and other musical compositions. “What’s this?” I asked him, holding up a cassette tape. “Oh,” Russell said from the sofa, “a recording of some of my music. It’s very old. You probably won’t enjoy it.” 

***

Last August, I learned that Russell Atkins had died. I spent much of that day thinking about him—about the early days of our relationship in his overheated apartment, his irritated voice when he said of the Black Arts Movement poets, “they disliked me and, to be honest, I didn’t always think much of them.” He had a way of speaking that was at once mischievous, conspiratorial, and wildly self-deprecating. 

“I don’t know why you’re coming here,” he said during one of my visits. 

“Because I admire your poems and I’m working on a book about you.” 

“Oh,” he said after a moment, “well, I don’t see why you would want to do anything like that.”

I remember him picking from one of his cardboard boxes a picture of a pretty young Black woman in a broken frame. “That’s my Aunt Mae,” Russell told me. His father, he’d said, was a “maniac,” and had little to do with Russell’s upbringing. Instead, three women took charge of things—Aunt Mae, his eccentric mother, and his exceedingly strange grandmother, who, as he put it, became “unhinged” and worried about ghosts (or, in her term, “hants”) passing through the house, threatening to darken his skin. She’d argue and bargain with her hants, at one point kidnapping young Russell, hiding him from the ominous ghosts until the police rescued him. “It was clear,” Atkins recalled many years later, “that the ‘little light-skinned lady’ could not be trusted to take care of me.” 

These women—especially his mother and Aunt Mae—would encourage Russell in his unusual interests, filling the home with classical music, blues, spirituals. His mother played the piano, and Russell grew fascinated by the bars and notes on her sheet music. 

His teachers would also encourage the obviously brilliant (and perhaps a little eccentric) young Atkins as he delved into the British Romantic poets, the nuances of puppetry, painting, musical composition, surrealist photography. For a time, he modeled himself on Byron, stalking the school hallways. His teachers, he told me, knew he was talented. “Whatever they meant by that,” he said.

Atkins was, to his bones, a poet of Cleveland, Ohio. One rides the city bus in his poetry, or sits in a downtown churchyard listening to the bells. In his work, the trainyards find a voice, whirling and chanting dangerously, clanging into the night. Elsewhere, his poems stroll through Cleveland’s botanical gardens or visit a diner or stand on a freezing street corner or listen in on the conversations of others by the bus stop.

Atkins’s diction and syntax are utterly his own and immediately recognizable. Nouns become verbs. Verbs become nouns. Syntax is twisted. At times, Atkins slips easily into deliberately overblown, even gothic language, only to leave all that behind in the next stanza, often with a little wink to the reader. A flinty meanness lives in his work, that sense of a hugely intelligent mind always a little at odds with its surroundings.

Of Lake Erie, Atkins wrote, in “Lakefront, Cleveland” (1976):

    it gathers strength

summoned     ascends     huged up 
               then softs! 
curls up about rocks 
upcurls about thick 
about bold     curls up 
about it

then     dangerous ’d soft!

Elsewhere, an abandoned school, “shot through the windows,” becomes a murder victim on the autopsy table of the “moon coroner”:

[…] so silently

about the rooms 
the autopsy 
     begins —

the moon coroner 
working 
       late 
    
    (“School Demolition,” 1976)

Reading Atkins’s work now, I’m brought back to the Cleveland of his mature poetry and of my youth—a Cleveland filtered through the mind of a poet able to see it utterly new, to find in it visual and musical possibilities that are exciting and complex and strange. His poems are often almost purely musical experiences. Here are the opening lines of “Night and the Distant Church” (1968):

Forward abrupt

                 up 
then mmm

                 mmm 
wind mmm m
     mmm 
               m

upon 
the mm 
            mm 
wind mmm m                 

Atkins’s verse plays are wild, violent affairs—filled with bloodlust, venom, criminals, maidens, killers, ne’er-do-wells, tombs, and, again, that strangely gothic language, part musically brilliant poetry, part 19th-century potboiler. “The Corpse” (1963) opens in candlelight, a widow “in black veil-like garments” looking up at the portrait of her dead husband. “Cold scare of the sky,” she intones:

              —the alas strewn away!
Our drear of friends funeral’d—funeral’d away.
Palling beyond hedges at the lean of trees,
We left you      Larenuf, done, dead, ceremonied.
Time cannot make less of it, only more engrieve!

End of you!  Rakes of it cruel over the heart’s field.
In one of months, a death comes to you again.
Resemblance, the presence of you, all will wane.
Out of the vaulted grey, a shadowed rain.

Producing anything like a definitive volume on Atkins is tricky, because poems and verse plays were often published several times, in one pamphlet or chapbook or mimeographed sheet after another. He would revise poems years after their original publication, then republish them. He was extremely particular about his odd use of punctuation, his transformation of adjectives into verbs, his unusual grammar—but he was also constantly shifting in these preferences.

“The practise of an art should be immersed in the bringing-into-existence-as-creative process. The result need not communicate,” he wrote in his Manifesto, first published in 1991. “Art should be conditional, i.e., conditions set by the artist. Once set, he should not risk these conditions for what is called ‘communication.’” Rather than communicate, Atkins’s poems suggest the fleeting nature of human experience. Each poem is an event, muscular and glittering with the music that lives in a fine mind as it interacts with the world, responding to external circumstances without asserting meaning or offering solutions.  

***

In 2015, someone incinerated Russell’s boxes of poems, photographs, recordings handwritten symphonies, letters from other poets, and notes. The nursing home where he was then a resident claimed they were infested by bedbugs. 

In one of his last poems, composed in 2015 and published the following year, Atkins considered the facility where he would spend many years. I recall it as a depressing place, sterile and bare. The hallway were long and white. They smelled of antiseptic. I remember the sounds of the television sets in the individual rooms as I walked past, and nurses who seemed overworked and tired in the afternoons. Here is an excerpt from Atkins’s poem about living there, like a memory from inside his room:

hag’d like of laughter . . .
laughter that hags

now and then
down the hall
more laughing hag’d

—thither of lit
is of a room thus’d to odd
with about’s of shadow’d
a door’s nearby of at
of it, or out, or of a door’s from.

    (“DAWN Rest Home,” 2016)

An important Black poet, an experimental poet, a vital American poet—Russell Atkins read from a script that was utterly, brilliantly, sometimes bafflingly his own.    

The books I’d been working on with Michael Dumanis (Russell Atkins: On the Life & Work of an American Master) and with Robert McDonough (World’d Too Much: The Selected Writings of Russell Atkins) were released in 2013 and 2019, respectively. Later, a few of us—Russell’s friends and admirers—organized celebrations of Russell’s life and work at Karamu House in Cleveland, at the East Cleveland Public Library, and elsewhere. In addition to friends, several of Russell’s former students joined in our celebrations. They were mostly elderly now, mostly members of Cleveland’s Black and avant garde poetry communities, and they came together to celebrate Russell’s work, to read his poems aloud and to play his musical compositions. They spoke of Russell’s importance to Black poets in Cleveland, about the Muntu Poets collective, about the many ways Russell’s quiet intelligence and barbed wit and, ultimately, gentle advocacy had shaped them and their conceptions of what a poem could do.

I remember glancing over at Russell—who was then in a wheelchair—during one of these celebrations, at Karamu House, Cleveland’s storied Black cultural center. He was smiling up at one of his former students, now gray haired and bearded, who was reading one of Russell’s poems to a large audience. The poem was complex and lovely. It was a sonically rich and strange poem about a “probability in the yard,” a poem in which “the rodent keeps the cat close by” and “the cat would sharp at the bird,” a poem which concludes that “the rodent becomes the death of the bird” and “dogs are random.”

Russell kept smiling. I imagine he was delighting in both the attention and the richness of his own poetry, though he never would have admitted to anything like that.

***

The last time I saw Russell, he was in a new nursing home in Cleveland. This one had white walls and wide hallways and I imagine he must often have been very bored there. Russell and I talked a bit about his training in music theory at the Cleveland Institute of Music. I’d wanted to hear more about the Muntu Poets and Free Lance and his experience of Cleveland, where I, too, grew up. But Russell had grown tired and vague and sometimes couldn’t follow the conversation very well. I’d brought him a CD player and a McDonald’s hamburger, both of which he’d requested. The hamburger was gone and I put some music on the CD player. He lay in bed. He closed his eyes. Above him, a traffic sign: Russell Atkins Way. His friends and former students had arranged to have a street named for him, and this was a duplicate of that street sign.

Russell Atkins was asleep now. A few sheets of paper—poems, I suppose—lay across his chest.