ABSTRACT
Russell Atkins had established himself as a prominent advocate of avant-garde poetics in America. Dudley Randall, of Broadside Press fame, journeyed from Detroit to join in that retrospective evening, presenting a reading from Atkins's correspondence. As early as 1950, Russell Atkins, who by that time had been publishing poems in magazines for six years, was already known as a significant new talent among African American poets. By the next year Marianne Moore was introducing some of his most experimental work to New York radio audiences, and Atkins's commitment to his avant-garde stance seems never to have wavered since. Eugene Redmond's assessment at the end of his summary of Atkins's career in Drum voices is both more measured and more fair than either Congdon's or that of the Johnsons, and is more temperate in its appreciations of Atkins than Simon could be about her co-editor.
