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Kurtis Matthew Russell is a young author who currently resides in Portland, Oregon and attends college while doing barely anything meaningful with his life. His writing centers around finding meaning in the face of absurdity. Currently, his only released work is a collection of poetry, which he intends to follow up with more poetry and prose-centered projects.
Reviewed by Joel R. Dennstedt for Readers' Favorite
Kurtis Matthew Russell is quick – and I might add, courageous – to tell us his goal for writing this poetry collection: 155 the Poet, Whimsy. He maintains that greatness is an accomplishment attainable by all. Shakespeare, the greatest of the great, authored 154 sonnets. Mr. Russell sets out to beat his mark by one. His courage in so confessing presets the reader toward harshly judging this audacious poet. Well, my friends, he certainly starts out with a bang. First judgement: Mr. Russell knows poetry; he knows how to write a sonnet. Second judgement: He writes them really well. Believe me, in this day and age of puerile poetics, when anyone issuing forth a rhyme may call himself a poet - or worse, anyone who writes pretty prose – this puts Mr. Russell way out front. Comparable to the Universal Master? One must read on.
In 155: the Poet, Whimsy, Kurtis Matthew Russell also states he wants his poetry to speak to the contemporary man - "Does a spork feel like it’s a bastard child?" - and thus he also begs you to critique his chosen style. For this reason alone, I refuse to compare the two. What Mr. Russell does share is an impressive understanding of the soul as poem and the other way around. He goes way beyond the mechanics of rhythm, meter, and rhyming scheme. He understands the relationship of placement, the necessity of inner resonance, and the associative principle of similes. More than this, he honors the definitive tradition of climaxing those last two lines; that is where the punch comes. And he has mastered a fine potential: marrying a traditional, classic style with a contemporary flair for modern meaning. I am not sure how anyone could call this anything but potential greatness, with quite a bit of present greatness thrown in.
