POEM OF THE WEEK #13


Tim Atkins

Tim Atkins seems to be perfecting the poetics of the almost-not-there. The poems in his book Twenty-Five Sonnets (The Figures, 2000) may have had the requisite fourteen lines each -- but in many cases fewer words. And if you compare the "rural prose pieces" Atkins published as Folklore 1-25 (Heart Hammer Press, 1996, out of print) -- which Andrew Duncan called one of the "twelve non-trivial books of the 1990s" in contemporary British poetry -- with the stripped-down lyrics that constitute its ongoing continuation, you'll see that the echoing white space of the page has become as important as the spare language that resonates within it. Atkins grew up in Canada and has lived in the United States and Spain but has resettled in his native London, where he co-edited the one-shot online poetry journal Onedit.

 

from Folklore

  1. Thunder in the evening, perhaps.
    The sky is pouring out of night.
    No label is convincing















































     

  2. Dusk
    In church singing
    Spitting out pips
    The first day I greased her
    bitter kings















































     

  3. Martens on the paper pole, tongues, where do they go?
    A reel, A Mosquito, in my
    hand, & broke it.















































     

  4. Jumpt out for the arced branch. It all
    out & out &.
    Okay, I will tell you everything.
    Over & ever















































     

  5. Drink this cup of electricity
    Caractacus
    Sometimes crying sometimes
    A black strings
    Out of night
    The flash of gold
    Lashed to the post & carried
    To Rome in chains
    Caractacus
    Only a word of love, you understand.















































     

  6. insects
    reading the Poets of The Late T'ang
    in the stairs
    In bubbles less worldly Than the fields
    swim, swimming out beneath the hot glass.















































     

  7. Cheese of the long river, hill
    Covered with pistols.
    At this point among many. There is -- nothing random. In
    The colour of a dog.
    Black ants round the hole. Night on my windows & legs.















































     

  8. Names from the Lime Hawk Book.

    Cried often but did not listen
    With his fingers,
    The churn owl putting the needle into his

    Insects in & out of the body.
    The caterpiller's green horn.
    THIS & THIS, then this, this & this

    in &
    in















































     

  9. The counters of
    leaf catch

    From the brow to the pound.
    Stumbles in stumbles.
    Granite rushes.

    'Kissed on the teeth'

    Pith. Ask in the ditch.















































     

  10. Ice. On the road pan.
    Plutonic rock

    levels. Or is it sheet
    walking

    Pushes coins into breeding.  






    11. POEM ARCHIVE


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