| |
Contributors: Julie
Patton, Russell Atkins, Norman Fischer, Marianne Shaneen, Chad Faries,
Jean Day, Steven Farmer, Brian Kim Stefans, Loss Pequeño Glazier,
Diane Ward, Fanny Howe, Melissa Ragona, Roberto Tejada, Tim Davis, Stephanie
Barber, Rodrigo Toscano, Susan Gevirtz, Hung Q. Tu, Susan M. Schultz,
Leslie Scalapino, Steve Evans, Steve Dickinson, Liz Waldner.
From the introduction
to Crayon 2 by Julie Patton:
In Russell’s [Atkins’] work, images happen or, rather, pile up along the
way in a manner reminiscent of the way the industrial landscape gives
way to habitable space, a crop of grass, or an abandoned factory building
– they serve expressive, emotional ends, not specifics. “Juxtaposition
between connotation and denotation leads to a kind of abstract.” In the
citta invisibles of northeast Ohio, where the agrarian world meets the
urban industrial, northern meets southern culture, “underground railroad”
meets “promised land,” and lake encounters sky, I locate Russell Atkins
in another continuum – one related to my own preoccupation with the poetics
of place and curiosity about why this particular region, and the state
it dissolves itself in, generated so many ground-breaking American writers
of African descent – a sense of time, space, surface, and rupture often
articulated in the writings of Toni Morrison (Lorain), Rita Dove (Akron),
Adrienne Kennedy (Cleveland; see People Who Led To My Plays), Thyliass
Moss (Akron), and other former Clevelanders, Chester Himes, Charles Chestnut,
Norman Jordan, Barbara Smith, Bob Hamilton, and Langston Hughes, whose
blues can also be traced to Lake Erie rhythms...
|
