Tim Atkins, nothing

 

If you believe in gods because it proves you are dumb
    and then if you don’t
You are in trouble because you are exactly the type
    who the gods love to fuck
Being moderate in discourse and argument holding
    yourself and others to account for failures in logic
It is hard being a rational human by the side of
    something appalling (“You are doomed anyway and you are doomed if you / believe in gods”)

I’ve known of the work of British poet Tim Atkins since the early 2000s or so, even going as far to have produced a chapbook of his [see also his “12 or 20 questions” interview here], so I’m very pleased to see a new collection of poems, his nothing (The Crater Press, 2021). For more than twenty years, Atkins has been associated with a variety of threads and strains of language writing, both nationally and internationally, whether as an editor, publisher, writer or critic—and Canadian audiences might be interested to know he presented what I would easily say the most enlightening critical work on the early influences and work of Canadian poet bill bissett a few years ago at the University of Ottawa [see my notes around such here] (he also provided the introduction to bissett’s 2019 selected, published by Talonbooks).

The poems that accumulate and interrelate to achieve the collection nothing exist as combinations of sketches, thesis, train-of-thought and observational thread, allowing line upon line to aggregate and build, whether towards a particular end-point, or as ongoing rumination. “But because you are alive and awake,” he writes, as part of “At this moment in history when,” “You look out at everything growing in side the cracks / that once hosted forests / And you and these ruins / And you notice yourself inside all of those small motions / And they have names but you cannot name them / And you have a purpose but it is not to do something [.]” His poems exist to explore the minutae of big thoughts, big ideas. “If you close your eyes,” he writes, as part of “When atoms are travelling down through empty space,” “you can feel the atoms swerving / But not to avoid the colour of your skin [.]” There is a rush, an ongoingness, to Atkin’s poems, simultaneously finely-tuned and carved and set for what seem equally comfortable on the page and stage. Writing out thoughts on politics, social engagements, observational moments and pop culture connectors, there are echoes of performance across his lyrics, existing somewhere, in their exploration and execution, between stand-up and a TED Talk, pushing across a collage until there’s almost nowhere left to go. Either way, his poems are there to be heard. Listen, for example, to the ending of “In Catalunya upon the Costa Brava,” that reads:

How much you loved everything in it
And if you survive it will be because
You have learned to hate everyone and everything
Growing out of your hopes and your doubts
Your books surely prove it in all of your books
There were the thin ones in Language
And the bad unremembered ones
Prose poems and photobooks
Everything is filled with pronouncements of equanimity
Which you aimed for more often than you attained but
At least you attempted more than the average poem’s
    quota
Alongside the contradiction intertextuality disjunction
    and
Cucumber notes
In Metamorphoses you invented feeling
As an addition to the process of thought
And it will always remain inside you
In this book in this life on this bed in a boat
The black sea swallowing everything human
You finally realize
Only in writing
Everything that ever needs to be
Saved or discarded—
Including yourself