Today we share the sad news that beloved Cleveland poet, playwright, and composer Russell Atkins passed away at the age of 98 on August 15th. Kevin Prufer — editor of both the 2012 essay collection Russell Atkins: On the Life & Work of an American Master and 2019's World'd Too Much: Selected Poetry by Russell Atkins — shared the news and posted a tribute this weekend.
Prufer notes Atkins' centrality and commitment to Cleveland's poetry scene, serving as "a playful and wry presence, a figure of kindness and piercing intelligence, a questioner of the status quo and a rigorous intellectual force," before noting some of the honors that his hometown had bestowed upon him, including "an honorary doctorate from Cleveland State University as well as the Cleveland Arts Prize for Lifetime Achievement," as well as the dedication of "Russell Atkins Way" in 2017.
"He was a poet of enormous significance," he writes, "often complexly at odds with the Black Arts Movement of his time, a figure who embraced playful typography, complex musicality, and often sinister and gothic content, a writer in love with the sonic and visual complexities of language," attesting that "No history of the intersection of African American poetry and the avant garde can be written without careful attention to Russell Atkins' work." He concludes by noting:
Russell's friends, students and admirers in Cleveland will remember him as a person of boundless intelligence, playfulness, and wit, and a figure central to Cleveland's literary and African American cultural scene. Beyond his friends and admirers, Russell will be remembered as one of America's most distinctive poets, a true literary genius able to see not just the world, but language, anew.
While we do not have a PennSound author page for Atkins, there are a few related video recordings in our archives, which our own Charles Bernstein details in this Jacket2 commentary post. They include footage of the poet reading "Night and a Distant Church," "Train Yard at Night," and "It’s Here in The" for TV20 Cleveland in 2017, and Julie Patton performing Atkins' work with accompaniment by guitarist Paul Van Curen as part of a 2019 Cleveland Book Week tribute to the poet. You'll find both of those clips, along with links to numerous Atkins books at Eclipse by clicking here.
