Critical reviews of Gaytude.

GAYTUDE: Critical Analysis by Dr. Santosh Kumar, India.

A review of “GAYTUDE: a poetic journey around the world / Tour du monde poétique”, bilingual poetry by Albert Russo and Adam Donaldson Powell - Xlibris 2009, 335 pages.

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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4363-6395-2 - $22.99
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Library of Congress Number: 2008907964


Albert Russo and Adam Donaldson Powell’s Gaytude, a poetic journey around the world, makes it evident that the gay poems always have a distinctive voice, because a gay poet suffers from a sense of ostracism, of being excluded by others due to difference. The tradition of celebrating Platonic friendship with a boy has always been there in world poetry. Gay poetry from Sappho to Michelangelo has always idealized the homoerotic world. Catullus (ca. 84-54) loved sex with young men.

Shakespeare’s sonnets have been described as gay sonnets by several critics. It is well known that Derek Jarman’s film The Angelic Conversation (1985) shows gay elements in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Lord Alfred Douglas’s gay poems appeared in 1896 in English and French translations. In the twentieth century two great poets: W..H. Auden and Ginsberg wrote gay poems. The publication of The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (1983) reveals its popularity and marketing needs. It is difficult to agree with the critics who condemn Whitman’s gay poetry. The Boston Intelligencer declared that Whitman deserved no better reward than the lash for vulgarity and violation of decency. “Both Whitman’s Leaves and Emerson’s laudation had a common origin in temporary insanity” (Bucke 201). “Walt Whitman is as unacquainted with art as a hog with mathematics” (Canby 327). One should never forget that according to several biographers Whitman did not engage in sexual relations with men.

It is true that a poet’s gay identity does not quite fit into the traditional morality of the world. This is the main reason behind vituperative hostility towards homoeroticism and gay-themed poems. But one may remember Nietzsche’s assertion that sexuality extends up to the very pinnacle of the soul. The queerness of Russo and Powell both to stand at a different angle to the universe, their desire for an outsider image, and a subversive quality enticing them to overthrow conventions makes Gaytude a classic. Taboo creates its own power and energy in a creative work like Gaytude. This is also true about other gay writers such as Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill. Russo is a great poet with a passionate impulse, and he expresses it with a natural intensity devoid of any kind of laborious artistry:

I shall spoil you as no lover
Ever has or will

(SURPRISE PARTY, 35).


As we made love
Our bodies were on fire
You were insatiable
I was submissive

(ONE-NIGHT STAND, 102)


Russo does not hanker after limited joy but rather for the illimitable in the loveliness of the human body. Due to his ardor, he bursts with joy:

Our bodies commingle
In a Pacific splash of ecstasy

(UNDERCURRENTS, 42).


Russo tries to forget the stern realities of life, and his idealized love seems to be the only permanent reality for him on the altar of passion, he has chosen to “fall off the cliff” although there are several obstructions:

There’s his age, you see
And there’s my career, too
Then there’s that awesome responsibility
Towards my class
Towards society
And I am highly respected by my peers
Yet, my attraction to him is gravitational
One of these days,
I shall fall off the cliff

NO TRESPASSING, 51


The above lines are a testimony to the fact that Russo arrives at the complexity by accumulating a number of concrete images interfering with his fantasy, and this fantasy is intensified in the last line revealing the utmost limits of passion, not obliterated by the terrestrial impediments. Russo’s poems in Gaytude are marked by a tremendous burst of creativity.

Adam Donaldson Powell’s poems reveal that the poet’s mind and imagination are fused with the white heat of ardor. He is obsessed with “two moths / Playing with fire” (BLADE, 24). In his poem IDENTITY, Powell expresses his desire “to be loved, and looked up to”. He seems to be in the quest for the sumum bonum of life, that immortal instant and great moment which will unravel his identity. With quiet determination, Powell declares:

I want a real lover …
Like Arthur Rimbaud…or Jean Genet
And I want him now

PUNK, 61


Powell shows such a deep and lofty feeling as to be “in love with love” (STILL HORNY, 153). This is the state of the lover as Powell depicts it. Apart from love, nothing else in life is significant. Such is the consecrated passion of the poet that he is able to write with such ecstatic outbursts:

Creamy overcast skies,
Thick as yoghurt,
Remind me of
You…and me …

CREAMY OVERCAST SKIES 154


Setting the ‘real’ world at nought, Powell decides to thrive on the diet of surrealism by

the technique of ‘transference’:
‘Real’ briefly becomes surreal,
Through transference

INSTANT RECALL 88


In another poem, Powell expresses his inner heart in reacting against monstrous mechanization. The present climate is not in favour of rich heritage. “Individual isolation in an / Out-of-control jungle” (149) is the sordid gift of modern heritage marked by “Wars, / Lies, /Plastic reality-show idols, Virus, / Global warming, /Uncertainty, /And all too easy access to drugs” (HERITAGE? RIGHT! 149).

The poems by Russo and Powell are marked by outsiderhood, the sense of being different from a fashionable or ‘straight’ mode of writing. Walter Pater aptly comments that in the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti the dream-land with its phantoms of the body, deftly coming and going on love’s service, is to him, in no mere fancy or figure of speech, a real country, a veritable expansion or addition to our waking life (Pater 223). This comment is fully applicable to the poems in Gaytude by Russo and Powell. Gaytude, bilingual poetry at its best, written, translated and adapted by Russo and Powell, also includes wonderful photographs by Russo. Several poems of Russo included in Gaytude were first published in the poet’s own French version in the collection Tour du monde de la poesie gay (2005). The poems in English, Italian and Spanish have been translated and adapted into French by Russo. The poems in French have been translated and adapted by both Russo and Powell.


Works Cited

Russo, Albert & Adam Donaldson Powell, Gaytude. Xlibris Corporation, 2009.
Pater, Walter. Appreciations. London: Macmillan, 1931.
Bucke, R. M. Walt Whitman, Philadelphia, McRay,1883.
Canby, H. S. Walt Whitman, N. Y. Literary Classics, 1943.

GAYTUDE: Review by Rainbow Reviews, 2009.

Rainbow Reviews (USA) has reviewed "GAYTUDE" on their website. Quotes from that review and a link to the review in its entirety follow:


QUOTES:

The authors are two very accomplished writers who tackle a wide variety of subjects and themes that affect gay men with surprising depth and meaning. These topics will hit home especially for like-minded individuals but anyone with compassion will understand the beauty and heartache these issues bring to mind.

Russo’s creativity is unquestionable as he spans numerous taboo subjects and makes no apologies for his desires or sensuality.

Blending well is Powell’s poetry, which has elegance to the words and gives weight to each one, seeming as if nothing is wasted. Not a thought, an idea or a desire is anything more than necessary as he speaks of a love he yearns for.

from: Rainbow Reviews, 2009

Gaytude, a poetic journey around the world / Tour du monde poétique
a bilingual book by Albert Russo & Adam Donaldson Powell

Xlibris, 2009 - 334 pages
order website: Gaytude orders

(self-portrait, by Adam Donaldson Powell)