Kevin Prufer
Author of New European Poets
About the Author
Image credit: Library of Congress
Series
Works by Kevin Prufer
The Fears 2 copies
Pleiades : A Journal of New Writing (25:1) — Editor — 1 copy
Pleiades : A Journal of New Writing (25:2) — Editor — 1 copy
The Gold Watch 1 copy
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Set in the Atari and magnetic tapes retro-future of the early 1980s, Kevin Prufer's novel "Sleepaway" imagines an alt-America and the turbulence of a mysterious plague. Pollen-like mists floating around as invisible storms cause most people to fall into spells of dreamless sleeps, and cause some other people to never awaken, to live interminably alive but asleep. The mists and the story settle on a small town in Missouri, a purgatorial waypoint of the drifting protagonists: Glass, a show more fog-headed twelve-year-old boy and orphan of the sleeps, and Cora, an ex-English professor whose life has wandered into waiting tables and the cheap thrills of petty kleptomania. Cora is also terrified of becoming one of those who will fall asleep and never wake, and resorts to desperate means to procure Eight Track, an illegal palliative drug that will defend her body from the soporific symptoms of the mists. But being one of the few who can keep awake during the sleeps, Cora becomes a cognizant observer of the gradual decline of civility in her town. Children (and teachers) are skipping school. The power and the phones are out. Lawlessness increases. Lootings and shootings. People begin to behave as though they exist beyond the punishment of any earthly authority. And the government that has pledged to always care for the terminally unconscious, begins to dispose of the dormant bodies in a supposedly humane bureaucratic process. As the Greek historian Thucydides observed, "civilization is a thin veneer." This slow undertow of incivility in Cora's Missouri town looks similar to what happened in Oran, the bubonic plague hot zone of Albert Camus's novel "The Plague." In both novels, conditions of life as the surviving townspeople knew and death as they imagined are suspended.
Belief in Purgatory, a state of intermediacy between life and afterlife, was adopted by the Catholic church in about the twelfth century, to be considered a place of qualia for sinners to purge and purify their souls. While neither Camus nor Prufer completely thematize their novels in terms of Christian theology, what Purgatory might be to the townspeople of both novels is humanity in a condition of stalled hope.
In the isolated Oran of "The Plague," characters are forced to confront not just their mortality, but their morality, and undergo a process of moral transformation through suffering as they watch the civil service efficiently transport the bodies of their loved ones to mass graves. In "Sleepaway's" story, Cora begins to ask exactly what kind of America she is staying awake to live in. Her catharsis comes when she finds herself accidentally responsible for the welfare of the orphaned kid Glass, and accidentally beginning to see the cure for the slumbering world as something requiring more effort than a retreat to her selfish fears. Her transformation is a metaphor of the prognosis for humanity. show less
Belief in Purgatory, a state of intermediacy between life and afterlife, was adopted by the Catholic church in about the twelfth century, to be considered a place of qualia for sinners to purge and purify their souls. While neither Camus nor Prufer completely thematize their novels in terms of Christian theology, what Purgatory might be to the townspeople of both novels is humanity in a condition of stalled hope.
In the isolated Oran of "The Plague," characters are forced to confront not just their mortality, but their morality, and undergo a process of moral transformation through suffering as they watch the civil service efficiently transport the bodies of their loved ones to mass graves. In "Sleepaway's" story, Cora begins to ask exactly what kind of America she is staying awake to live in. Her catharsis comes when she finds herself accidentally responsible for the welfare of the orphaned kid Glass, and accidentally beginning to see the cure for the slumbering world as something requiring more effort than a retreat to her selfish fears. Her transformation is a metaphor of the prognosis for humanity. show less
Prufer lays open a death-haunted America in this dark collection, entwining political and personal story lines in sprawling verses that frequently call upon fantastical images: missiles fired from the moon, post-apocalyptic settlements, self-aware bombs. He seems focused on displaying a society that is ill, that indeed seeks out violence and cannot do without it, as in this appeal to "terrorists" in Show Us:
We are a nation of gray old men walking rain-slick streets beneath black umbrellas. /show more
Fill our tall buildings with your vines and blooms, sprinkle us with glitter and with glass, / with thrills and shards of foil and steel!In a poem called Poetry, he personifies the poem, asking if it has any relevance today as it surveys all the wreckage:
I saw the whole thing. Here I am. Up here. / ... then down I'll fall past my neighbors' windows, down I'll tumble to where that car is burning, / to where that man sleeps inside it and the column of smoke is invisible in the night / and you won't notice my descent, no, you won't cry out, you won't turn and gather around me, you won't ask me any questions at all.A recognition of the irrelevance of poets today, who are often said to only be talking to each other, in a tiny circle? If all a poet today can really do is rage while being ignored, at least he can do so with style.
while the baby boy slept in his box /show less
beneath the floorboards they walked across, /
and all night long /
his little dreams rose up on strings /
and filled the house /
that the morning light washed clean.
Russell Atkins didn't stick to the script. At a time (say, 1950-1980) when most African-American poets were somewhat understandably focused on the literary expression of socio-political themes, Atkins, born in 1926 in Cleveland and still alive there today, insisted on remaining what he had started as, a knotty formalist. This lost him some support in the black writing community, although he had his defenders too: the debate over the value of Atkins' writing may be characterized as a show more micro-controversy. With the publication of this new volume in Pleiades Press's "Unsung Masters" series, that controversy lives again.
Is Atkins, scarcely referred to in literary histories and seldom anthologized, to take his place among the recognized poets of the mid-20th Century? He has an undoubted position as an out-and-out experimentalist among African-American writers, but that in itself would not be enough to secure his status. This "Unsung Masters" volume is a bid for Atkins' canonicity, and on my view is a near-miss in that regard. But time will tell.
The volume collects 39 poems by Atkins, a manifesto, an essay, and a poetic drama, along with a critical introduction and six additional essays about his work by academics and poets. Embedded within these pages, and especially the various essays, there is plenty of evidence of a dispute over not just Atkins' output, but over what African-American literature in general is or should be. The essayists here are all champions of Atkins and by extension, of his pronouncedly aesthetic-purist stance on the question. But they quote from his detractors, including an anonymous 1969 reviewer for Negro World - "Brother Atkins [is] not a blkman dealing with his history as he should be about doing (blkartists are responsible to the blkcommunity)" - and poet Kirby Congdon - "He chooses to write in a [way that]...comes off as pretentious and unnatural...We don't think...that the sadness lies in our neglect of [Atkins]; but rather in his neglect of us."
Atkins himself has fueled the controversies. He has been explicitly audience-disdaining, and has spelled out his rejections of poetry-as-communication, linguistic clarity, "economical" and "ordinary" language (which he associated with William Carlos Williams), "sense," "meaning," and "insights," and poetry that "convinces" or "works," in favor of mannerism, self-indulgence, "conspicuous technique," and the poem-as-object (he was a pioneer in concrete poetry). Some of these manifesto positions (he was associated with two such documents, in 1964 and 1991) read defensively, as does his criticism of Henry Dumas' choices of "subject matter" rooted in feelings about "injustices."
Atkins' tone overall is irresistibly reminiscent of the infamous 1958 High Fidelity article by his near-contemporary, composer Milton Babbitt, entitled (not by its author) "Who Cares If You Listen?" It is, frankly, a little pissy. There are ample hints scattered throughout this book that Atkins was raised by his mother and older female relations with a sense of entitlement, and that he nursed this throughout his life. For example, he expressed great annoyance with the notion of earning a living, and apparently seldom came close to it, once quitting a part-time job when it threatened to become full-time. (To be fair, he was industrious with respect to his avant-garde activities, such as co-editing the little journal Free Lance.)
Atkins was a composer himself and deeply involved with music, although along different lines than Babbitt. In fact, the literal centerpiece of this "Unsung Masters" volume is his 1955 essay "A Psychovisual Perspective for 'Musical' Composition," which he set great store by and which is referred to admiringly in several of the critical essays. In my opinion, reliance upon this essay in putting forward a case for Atkins is quite problematic. It is cranky and eccentric, difficult to follow, and reads as the work of a writer who has not quite mastered the type of philosophical language he wishes to use. There is the germ of a partial insight in the essay's insistence that music is as much or more a visual as an aural art, relying on "spatial relationships" that we cannot help perceiving and describing visually (a tone is "higher" or "lower"). But the tone becomes unhinged when Atkins resorts to shouting capitals:
"THE PSYCHOVISUALIST CANNOT TAKE SERIOUSLY ANYTHING WRITTEN FOR THE EAR...Can serious composers honestly compose FOR such an organ as the ear?"
I would very much like to hear some of Atkins' largely unperformed music, but this essay cannot be said to represent him well. Several assertions are made that it was admired and championed by composer Stepan Wolpe, Music Review editor Geoffrey Sharp, and various enthusiastic Europeans - but I can't help noticing the lack of any documentation offered for these claims.
And what of Atkins' poetry, Exhibit A? He strikes me as a decent poet of the second rank. He developed a manner and tricks which he perhaps over-relied on, such as appending apostrophe-d ('d) to almost any word. Or perhaps it would be fair to say, that since such great kindred poets as Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Ivor Gurney also over-relied on their manners and tricks, that there isn't enough energy in Atkins' writing to distract the reader from that over-reliance.
Atkins also has an odd but unmistakable affinity with Louis and Celia Zukofsky's translations of Catullus, which most of his poetry predates. I don't know if the Zukofskys may have read him, but it is certainly possible.
An early Atkins poem, "Elegy to a Hurt Bird that Died," is SO Hopkins as to amount to pastiche:
I suppose you suppose that yon of little burial
Is non of? Rather it is of universal o'er
Unvast because it unvast looks?
Later his voice became more recognizably his, but he has a tendency to overdo it, as in "World'd Too Much (Irritable Song)":
Bus hollows on of back windows
awidth'd with oxygen, gust'd,
crosswise of neglect, a joyous'd
foregone of seats, the while a beer can's
joust'd about the floor's rubbish'd
and a driver's on the last run
as of fatal'd alone -
how such cheerfuls me!
then someone boards
there's always somebody
Neither of those is a specimen I would offer to put Atkins in the best light. There are some, such as "It's Here in The," which leant its title to Atkins' last major collection, Here in The (1976, Cleveland State University Press). But on the evidence of the entire portfolio included here, Atkins' poetic urgency is somewhat low. The one poetic drama included from several Atkins wrote, The Abortionist, is way off the Yeatsian standard in that genre.
I feel that Atkins merits this volume he has been granted; he is an an interesting figure to make the acquaintance of. But the American Master in the title is an over-statement. show less
Is Atkins, scarcely referred to in literary histories and seldom anthologized, to take his place among the recognized poets of the mid-20th Century? He has an undoubted position as an out-and-out experimentalist among African-American writers, but that in itself would not be enough to secure his status. This "Unsung Masters" volume is a bid for Atkins' canonicity, and on my view is a near-miss in that regard. But time will tell.
The volume collects 39 poems by Atkins, a manifesto, an essay, and a poetic drama, along with a critical introduction and six additional essays about his work by academics and poets. Embedded within these pages, and especially the various essays, there is plenty of evidence of a dispute over not just Atkins' output, but over what African-American literature in general is or should be. The essayists here are all champions of Atkins and by extension, of his pronouncedly aesthetic-purist stance on the question. But they quote from his detractors, including an anonymous 1969 reviewer for Negro World - "Brother Atkins [is] not a blkman dealing with his history as he should be about doing (blkartists are responsible to the blkcommunity)" - and poet Kirby Congdon - "He chooses to write in a [way that]...comes off as pretentious and unnatural...We don't think...that the sadness lies in our neglect of [Atkins]; but rather in his neglect of us."
Atkins himself has fueled the controversies. He has been explicitly audience-disdaining, and has spelled out his rejections of poetry-as-communication, linguistic clarity, "economical" and "ordinary" language (which he associated with William Carlos Williams), "sense," "meaning," and "insights," and poetry that "convinces" or "works," in favor of mannerism, self-indulgence, "conspicuous technique," and the poem-as-object (he was a pioneer in concrete poetry). Some of these manifesto positions (he was associated with two such documents, in 1964 and 1991) read defensively, as does his criticism of Henry Dumas' choices of "subject matter" rooted in feelings about "injustices."
Atkins' tone overall is irresistibly reminiscent of the infamous 1958 High Fidelity article by his near-contemporary, composer Milton Babbitt, entitled (not by its author) "Who Cares If You Listen?" It is, frankly, a little pissy. There are ample hints scattered throughout this book that Atkins was raised by his mother and older female relations with a sense of entitlement, and that he nursed this throughout his life. For example, he expressed great annoyance with the notion of earning a living, and apparently seldom came close to it, once quitting a part-time job when it threatened to become full-time. (To be fair, he was industrious with respect to his avant-garde activities, such as co-editing the little journal Free Lance.)
Atkins was a composer himself and deeply involved with music, although along different lines than Babbitt. In fact, the literal centerpiece of this "Unsung Masters" volume is his 1955 essay "A Psychovisual Perspective for 'Musical' Composition," which he set great store by and which is referred to admiringly in several of the critical essays. In my opinion, reliance upon this essay in putting forward a case for Atkins is quite problematic. It is cranky and eccentric, difficult to follow, and reads as the work of a writer who has not quite mastered the type of philosophical language he wishes to use. There is the germ of a partial insight in the essay's insistence that music is as much or more a visual as an aural art, relying on "spatial relationships" that we cannot help perceiving and describing visually (a tone is "higher" or "lower"). But the tone becomes unhinged when Atkins resorts to shouting capitals:
"THE PSYCHOVISUALIST CANNOT TAKE SERIOUSLY ANYTHING WRITTEN FOR THE EAR...Can serious composers honestly compose FOR such an organ as the ear?"
I would very much like to hear some of Atkins' largely unperformed music, but this essay cannot be said to represent him well. Several assertions are made that it was admired and championed by composer Stepan Wolpe, Music Review editor Geoffrey Sharp, and various enthusiastic Europeans - but I can't help noticing the lack of any documentation offered for these claims.
And what of Atkins' poetry, Exhibit A? He strikes me as a decent poet of the second rank. He developed a manner and tricks which he perhaps over-relied on, such as appending apostrophe-d ('d) to almost any word. Or perhaps it would be fair to say, that since such great kindred poets as Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Ivor Gurney also over-relied on their manners and tricks, that there isn't enough energy in Atkins' writing to distract the reader from that over-reliance.
Atkins also has an odd but unmistakable affinity with Louis and Celia Zukofsky's translations of Catullus, which most of his poetry predates. I don't know if the Zukofskys may have read him, but it is certainly possible.
An early Atkins poem, "Elegy to a Hurt Bird that Died," is SO Hopkins as to amount to pastiche:
I suppose you suppose that yon of little burial
Is non of? Rather it is of universal o'er
Unvast because it unvast looks?
Later his voice became more recognizably his, but he has a tendency to overdo it, as in "World'd Too Much (Irritable Song)":
Bus hollows on of back windows
awidth'd with oxygen, gust'd,
crosswise of neglect, a joyous'd
foregone of seats, the while a beer can's
joust'd about the floor's rubbish'd
and a driver's on the last run
as of fatal'd alone -
how such cheerfuls me!
then someone boards
there's always somebody
Neither of those is a specimen I would offer to put Atkins in the best light. There are some, such as "It's Here in The," which leant its title to Atkins' last major collection, Here in The (1976, Cleveland State University Press). But on the evidence of the entire portfolio included here, Atkins' poetic urgency is somewhat low. The one poetic drama included from several Atkins wrote, The Abortionist, is way off the Yeatsian standard in that genre.
I feel that Atkins merits this volume he has been granted; he is an an interesting figure to make the acquaintance of. But the American Master in the title is an over-statement. show less
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