Issue 22: Tim Atkins
from NOTHING CONCLUSIVE HAS YET TAKEN PLACE IN THE WORLD THE ULTIMATE WORD OF THE WORLD AND ABOUT THE WORLD HAS NOT YET BEEN SPOKEN THE WORLD IS OPEN AND FREE EVERYTHING IS STILL IN THE FUTURE AND WILL ALWAYS BE
When you have said all that there is to be said
When you have said all that there is to be said at a given time in exile in the writing space everything
Created during this half-century on this infertile soil under this unfree sky nonetheless serves to counter the dehumanizing processes of censorship and state oppression
Despite a despotic imposition in June you look up and see something you call nothing
Names being good in human terms and you open up and you open up
Because there are no such things as books you hear
Here you just go with the scraping of guns when once you were fluent and prolific and every trait of your character revealed a hidden truth
You make soup with it good bad corrupt soup critical received soup you have made all of it out of nothing
The inevitable process by which any single text comes into existence
Representing an ancient author’s original words mine
The sirens often come on when we are thinking and the firestorms in Slaughterhouse 5 you see that was me and the Vikings
The lines running out in rows where a letter erased on the farthest margins detains the eyes in ways that would be completely opaque to an auditor
When you have said all that there is to be said and you are putting on a clean shirt one day in autumn you catch yourself in the light from behind and realize there is more to be said
All of your old poems the same again different the hope and the love all stripped out as long as the causes persist
Your language fell out of you and it seemed endless now that it is gone
The loons on the moor and the fish in the flow a white pin in the arm of the sea
You are the artist formerly known as Ovid and the artist formerly known as Marina Tsvetaeva and the artist formerly known as Tim Atkins
Here I would like to be described between the immensity of our past love and the absolute nature of our present indifference
In the new world
Just to start with
If autobiographical fiction is a map of the self
And you find yourself misrepresented upon that map
Then you think I did come too quickly in a house in Osaka
The appeal located in pleasure domes
Protection from 100% humidity and protesting complete ignorance
When you love at least the idea of loving everything on a map which starts with the big bang or a cloud of unknowing
Your original face or some literary movement based upon asserting your superior knowledge and authority
Here in exile upon the topography of excluded culture and exploitation
There are wooden structures which you could live in ones of stone and others of felt
And there are gated communities located beside the Red and the Black and the White and the Yellow Seas constructed by venture capitalists
Cockroaches eating the possibilities of being human
You click to indicate your absence
In any meaningful discourse
There is a film starring Claudia Cardinale and you see her as the answer to your problems with genre fiction
You remind yourself that you need to be an I if you want to win prizes awards or attract serious funding in your latest publication
A group of musical clowns transforms your bedroom or space ship space into a circus in which the actors perform your life for five minutes
You have crossed whole seas constellations apart
And you have lost them in hospitals
You look at the map of superficial emotions without coffee you are way to the left
And the Black Sea is full of pinholes every one of which indicates an anonymous body
Just for one moment you think of Ornette Coleman meeting Don Cherry for the first time
And for the last time in your life perhaps
You need nothing else
If you are reading this letter in a letter and if
You are reading this letter in letter form perhaps you can still smell the river’s stink in the weave of the paper in summer though besides which I write this
Stinking least in August as it passes Parliament on its way to the start of the end of the water because
There is an absence in the house in this season of Johnson and in case you do not know it
From the distance at which you are reading in time or in miles this man is
Whose heart is a mansion looking over a gulag
This Johnson whose face is a cube with the surface removed and whose blocks reach pin fences
This thing to quote myself
With neither beard nor hair trimmed
Is a clock that limits time parting only to reappear in ordered cuts and this thing being deaf to the shadow the sun casts
Is this thing livid to the outskirts of a breeze art and proof in kind boiled down into a pill of college toxins
And wherever this thing lurches rock films and pennants of block
This thing filled with calcium in the voids of Eton
Gorged on excrement wads the floor of himself
A memory of waters during works in the ground dreaming ants
If you are reading this in a different century his memory tentacles
Staples through a hill shrinking ekes everything sadder as a result of this it is
Harder to be human
His cup breaking magnets the way that glue sticks to acid
I am writing this letter before the things of force
Force me out of this language in certain spots occupied by smoke
I see the light of the planet being sucked and
I see the light of the planet being sucked into the blacker dimensions of his head
I see him coming to bite my ball he is an insect the size of Middlesex
A vast beach filled with oil-covered bodies
Shitting himself upon the ceiling sheets
Only appearing to finger children with his thick blue fingers
The one in the middle splitting
Him covered with flag noise and handwriting
His posture composed of failure devoured by flattery in front of an engine before dressing
His memory average with chickens
If you are reading this letter without Johnson and
If you are on this planet without his felt over the period in shreds and bubbles
Consider yourself lucky in this lifetime his appearance contaminates
Toast hair liquid plaster old paintings dreams codfish pleading clinks blood leaps burn dressing ties hours and barbers
Is it any good to offer resistance through meditation it is
The author function reduced to a whisper in the presence of milk
Every time that I think of this
Johnson I see a hole the size of an orange
Coughing into the labyrinth
Tim Atkins has been a member of the summer faculty at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, and a member of Carla Harryman's Poets’ Theatre in San Francisco. He is the author of many books, including Atkins Collected Petrarch (a Times Literary Supplement and Salon.com book of the year), Deep Osaka (a photobook), Koto Y Yo (all from Crater Press), On Fathers < On Daughtyrs (Boiler House Press), 25 Sonnets (The Figures), Petrarch (Book Thug), and Horace (O Books). He is also the author of a play: The World’s Furious Song Flows Through My Skirt (Stoma Press), and a novel The Bath-Tub (forthcoming from Boiler House Press).
He has read and performed his work in the Houses of Parliament (for Pussy Riot), in concert at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and all over North America and Europe. His work has been translated into Spanish, Japanese, Catalan, French, and Lithuanian. Mother - a collaborative film-poem made with Graeme Maguire was a finalist at the Cyclop International Videopoetry Festival and at the Rabbit Heart Film festival in 2014. His poems have appeared in many anthologies, including The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018) The Reality Street Book of the Sonnet, and Faber’s The Thunder Mutters (edited by Alice Oswald).
The founder and editor of the long-running international online poetry journal, onedit, Tim teaches Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton. His current work is the long poem NOTHING CONCLUSIVE HAS YET TAKEN PLACE IN THE WORLD THE ULTIMATE WORD OF THE WORLD AND ABOUT THE WORLD HAS NOT YET BEEN SPOKEN THE WORLD IS OPEN AND FREE EVERYTHING IS STILL IN THE FUTURE AND WILL ALWAYS BE and sections are appearing in poetry journals in the USA, the UK, and Canada.
Copyright © 2019 by Tim Atkins, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
