Edited by : Giorgia Pavlidou and Mohsen Elbelasy
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 & 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. A collaboration with his daughter, Yuki Lily Matsubayashi Atkins, A Girl Is A Machine Made Of Birds is just out from Canary Woof Press.
4 Poems 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
You write it down and there it is
When you are writing a poem
And you are thinking there is nothing
When you are writing a poem
There is not the same potential for variation
You write it down and there it is that’s the version
Or else you delete that version and replace it with another
It’s almost like erasing the knowledge that appears
Rather than representing it because the knowledge
Properly understood consists in the future potential variability
Of the detail and the whole narration
Film copy clouds the landscape
The moment thinking stops and you are left with repetition
Beginning and ending with questions concerning the whole narrative
What makes you think then that knowledge appears
As opposed to ignorance
Or perhaps error is just as much knowledge
When you are writing a poem by Ovid
Making use of the face to indicate heightened states
With electronic props to see into the future
There is not the same potential for variation
When you are writing a poem beside the black sea
On the edge of an invisible empire with goozleum glasses
Your magical power is a language-based approach to culture
Race and gender conflated or contrasting periods
With no central character combined with that of invisibility
And this is what the poem as an achieved object directly abolishes
Masters a master plan the master discourse and the master race
There is nothing more beautiful than this and
There is nothing more beautiful than there are more beautiful things than Beyonce
You write it down and there it is
It gets to the point that you read things you cannot repeat
It gets to the point that you read things
You cannot repeat about love not because
You have forgotten but because you remember
There is nothing else in your head left to think about which you don’t want
And you don’t want the point in the book where it says
You are a man because you think
You have no place in the new world
Because of all that you did in the old
And you are both angry and confused
But you have already said that
The world is filled with so much content that most of it
Spills over the sides and you go out and teach that
The world is improved when you say that
The world has form you asshole
But it does not
Think about the combative nature of all discourse
And you wonder what right you have to be a statistic
Upon social media broadcasting your minority or diminishing tastes
You prefer the word spirits when thinking of humans
When you think about the development of the seven blade razor
And the tampon tax
Patti Smith said Rimbaud said something on cassette
About the future belonging to women
Every time you look in he mirror
Doesn’t #metoo include every woman ?
And all daughters #mesoon ?
You wanted your love to approximate song
And you wanted your poetry to touch everyone
But that were wrong
All the time
You spend your days writing
Watch your daughters
Growing older
And puke in a book
For the second noble truth of the Buddha the Buddha
Shakyamuni Gotama spoke
The second noble truth
Out of four
The line runs something something
About suffering and attachment
Suffering coming due to life in its nature being
Unsatisfactory or imperfect
Like a house at an angle or cracked and when
You think about your writing
And all the places
You read it
And were happiest—
In a snowstorm with Michael Gizzi
In Gulf of Maine Books
In the disappearing light
To three humans and two dogs
Nobody with a tie gives a fuck
You have to face facts at some point in your life
In the seas of South London
You think about who you could ask for forgiveness and you make a list
And you start crossing names off
Because the hero of the problem of the content material and form
Cannot determine the difference between life and art
Your poems of crossing allowed you to leave something and become something other
In your more conceptual pieces it is helpful and more dangerous
Having had knowledge to discard it
In your moments of doubt it is impossible to make love and not produce knowledge
Oh which is a revolutionary action
Being bored or being boring before the invention of neon
You are doing something for the futures of all men and women
There is cold brew coffee to keep you awake
You loved the dictionary and making things up and
You loved coming back to the city after Christmas in the country
And an end to white faces
And you loved entering squats and housing co-ops
You loved making badges and going on protests
And you thought the world could always be good if only
You could be good and refract social progress
You thought about the benefits of psychosomatic drugs
There were things in your life which up till that point in the history of humankind
Could never exist
Giraffes and anglerfish haptic writing and cameras
The world changes when you ejaculate you once wrote
As a carrier of an ideological position and not as a mere formal resource
You go down in parks because you are supposed to
The natural world is before you and all the good people
In hospitals who used to do good dying no wonder
There are people on the streets sleeping under newspapers
We believed that it was okay to go to our beds and
That it was okay to dream of new music
But all over the world a part of it is dark growing darker
And inside it there is a secret secret service
Which never sleeps
SULFUR 