Russell Atkins Obituary
With sadness, we announce the passing of poet, editor, composer, music theorist, and intellectual Russell Atkins at the age of 98. Russell died peacefully in his bed at the Algart Nursing Care Center in Cleveland, Ohio on the morning of August 15.
To his friends and students, Russell Atkins was a first citizen in Cleveland’s poetry scene, a center of gravity for Cleveland’s avant garde and African American cultural communities, a teacher of workshops at Karamu House and elsewhere, and a leader, with Norman Jordan, of the Muntu Poets, a loose collective of aspiring, “movement conscious” poets of the 1960s.
To these same friends and students, Russell was a playful and wry presence, a figure of kindness and piercing intelligence, a questioner of the status quo and a rigorous intellectual force. He was deeply committed to the community of Cleveland poets from the 1950s until his passing and the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Cleveland State University as well as the Cleveland Arts Prize for Lifetime Achievement. In 2017, a stretch of Grand Avenue was given the supplementary name “Russell Atkins Way” in appreciation of his work in the community.
But Russell Atkins’ presence extended far beyond Cleveland, where he spent almost all of his life. He was a poet of enormous significance, 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. No history of the intersection of African American poetry and the avant garde can be written without careful attention to Russell Atkins’ work.
In 1950, with his longtime friend Adelaide Simon, Atkins founded Free Lance: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose, a long-lasting journal of the avant garde, described by Black World magazine as “the only Black literary magazine of national importance in existence.”
Although Russell would publish many collections of poetry, essays on poetics and music, and verse plays, his most significant work is probably Here In The, published in 1976 by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Later in his life, he would be the subject of the volume Russell Atkins: On the Life and Work of an American Master and his lifetime’s output of poetry, manifestos, and verse plays would be collected in the volume World’d Too Much: The Selected Poetry of Russell Atkins.
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.
