Russell Atkins, Cleveland Poet Who Made Strides in Avant-Garde Scene, Dead at 98

Russell Atkins, the poet who reached national attention with his ear for the avant garde and who rarely left his hometown of Cleveland, died in an assisted living facility in Midtown on August 15. He was 98.

Though a close friend and confidante to mainstays—and more well-known—of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, like Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka, Atkins worked quietly over a six-decade career, producing a half dozen chapbooks of poetry and several scores of musical compositions.

His collection Here in The, published by Cleveland State University’s Poetry Center in 1976, was surprisingly Atkins’ only full-length book released in his almost 10 decades of life. It spans the poet’s stylistic range that made him a sought-after mentor in Cleveland’s poetry scene from the 1990s to the early aughts.

All of which fashioned Atkins as an anomaly just as he was a gem to those who had been lucky to discover his art.

“He was one of the real geniuses of American poetry for about three decades,” poet and native Clevelander Kevin Prufer, who knew Atkins in his later years, told Scene. “And everything sort of conspires to keep him out of public view, even though he had a huge following in Cleveland. I mean, really loyal students.”

One of the original progenitors of poetry’s Concrete movement, which argued that the visual form of a poem influences its meaning, Atkins actually spent his early years in music. In the 1940s, in his twenties, Atkins studied piano at the Cleveland School of the Arts and the Cleveland Institute of Music. He would compose boxes full of piano scores late until his eighties, yet he published or performed very little.

In 1947, Atkins published his first work, “Poem,” in View, a budding journal of poetry and prose formed with the help of friend Hughes, who had moved to New York City to develop its own movement. It wasn’t until five years later, in 1952, when Atkins formed his own iteration, Free Lance, a magazine published locally, that he would help propel the work of fellow Black experimenters in verse.

Like e.e. cummings and Audre Lorde, Atkins tinkered with the mixture of images and sounds through a non-conformist type of structure—words and phrases decorating the page with huge indents, in lowercase lettering or with a jazzy flair to their typography and musicality. Critics later gave such a name: phenomenalism.

We see it throughout Atkins’ verse: a merging of form, color and sound. In “While Waiting for a Friend to Come to Visit a Friend in a Mental Hospital,” Atkins writes:

the attendant keeps watch, watching
that abrupt wild uranium grow a bat’s ears,
sardine flowers, moons’ eggs,
      stomach guitars,
a double-bass rump –– but he’s err:
one shrewds to his inferences,
here where the world’s sharp’d
sheen’d across with antiseptic spear

Just as we see, in Atkins’ dramatic take on Lake Erie, in “Lakefront, Cleveland”:

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!

Prufer, who discovered Atkins’ work after attending a workshop at Cleveland State in the late 2000s, said he was so wowed at the poet’s sense of musicality that he included Atkins in Pleiades Press’ Unsung Masters Series, a 2010 book titled Russell Atkins: on the Life and Work of an American Master.

A year later, back in Cleveland, Prufer decided to seek out Atkins, who was living in an assisted living facility in Midtown. The two met in Atkins’ apartment, discussed poetry. Atkins showed Prufer, he said, a closet-full collection of unpublished scores and letters from Marianne Moore and Hughes. (Those, Prufer recalled, later “burned” after a bedbug infestation.)

Such discovery was a kind of metaphor for Atkins and his writings, which are hard to come by save for niche website archives and resales of early editions.

“Russell was known and admired by many,” Prufer said, “but obscure to many of the people who would have gotten a great deal of benefit from knowing his work.”

In 2017, Atkins was awarded the Cleveland Arts Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. Later that year, a portion of Grand Avenue in Midtown was renamed in his honor.