Title: The “Deviating” Innovations in Poetics of Russell Atkins’s Poetry-Dramas

Abstract: Russell Atkins is an African American postmodern avant-garde poet renowned for his dedication to breaking with tradition and innovating in poetics. His poetry-dramas exemplify his “deviating” poetics. Atkins crafts his poetry-dramas in “music-form,” employs innovative gothic narration to subtly convey his rebellion against racism, and creates the interdisciplinary theory of Psychovisualism, which he applies to his poetry-dramas writing. His work represents an experiment in postmodern avant-garde poetics, an interdisciplinary aesthetic construction, and most significantly, a challenge to the hegemony of western white culture and a new attempt at formulating language rules by an African American writer.

Keywords: Russell Atkins, poetry-drama, African American poetry, avant-garde poetics

Author: Xiuxia Chen, Ph.D. Candidate, Foreign Studies College, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, Hunan, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2025.01.013