Saturday, July 30, 2016

Prologue to INTENTIONS OF ALIGNED DEMARCATIONS by FELINO A. SORIANO

Duane Locke offers a Prologue to INTENTIONS OF ALIGNED DEMARCATIONS by Felino A. Soriano
(Desperanto, New York, 2011)

BOOK LINK


FELINO A. SORIANO’S POEMS:
A COPERNICAN REVOLUTION IN POETRY

It has been asserted many times by historians of philosophy, that Immanuel Kant started a Copernican revolution in philosophy.  Now it can be said that Felino Soriano has started a Copernican revolution in poetry.

Soriano‘s poetic procedure, his linguistic realties, are so new in poetic mannerisms, in ontological and metaphysical insight, in emotional and revisional profundity, that his innovative presentations make the rest of now published and distributed poetry anachronistic and obsolete.

Soriano‘s poems have the heliocentric orientation, while the rest of our circulated contemporary poetry seems Ptolemaic in its adherence to outmoded methods and outmoded perspectives on life. Soriano‘s poems have self-ownership and, thus, are authentic. His poems are engagements with living existence, occurent particularized actualities, not fabricated and manipulated to fit au courant axiologies or current and temporary editorial taste as are the majority of the poems that appear in prestigious and alternate poetic publications. These other writers of poetry might now be dismissed as ―Ptolemaic poets.

Soriano forgoes the language of everyday, the language that I call ―the language of lies that constitutes the quotidian parlance spoken daily by our slave mentalities who are our traditional-value citizens, those who sometime ago were called by Clement Greenberg, ―middlebrows. As Greenberg implied, the middlebrow poetry professor, the middlebrow editor of a poetry magazine, and the middlebrow poetry reader are greatest enemies to the art of poetry. Soriano is a highbrow poet, flourishing in a time when there is even a shortage of middlebrows, but an overpopulation of lowbrows and ―prol minds (see Paul Fussell) as power structures in the field of poetry.

Soriano‘s language is the result of an immersion in existence with intensified attention to things and life. Soriano‘s supreme language makes the language of so many celebrated current poets seem puny and a prevarication. 

Soriano‘s language has what Martin Heidegger would call ownedness. His language discovers what is true to the radical singularity of one‘s concrete particular existence, and does not cater to seek agreement with crowd and popular value which usually are false values. His language clears away the distraction to the trivial and false that dominate the average life. His language tears down the wall that ordinary language builds and separates us from what is real. 

Soriano‘s language with its apparent abstractness, which in his usage becomes an innovative way to transform abstractness into a new language of the concrete.  Soriano‘s language destroys the old false dualisms that people have lived false lives by for centuries.  Our old critical terms do not apply to Soriano. He writes an abstract-concrete language that is beyond the description of language now dominant and believed in our current vocabulary evaluations and commentaries. To appropriate Shakespeare, it can be said that our poetry is out of joint, and Soriano writes to set it right.

Since Soriano‘s poetry renders all the aesthetics and vocabulary of current poetic commentary as anachronisms and obsolete, an equipment inadequate to cope with Soriano‘s innovations which are discoveries of what has already been and what has been ignored or overlooked, a commentator on Soriano‘s poetry is bereft of the ready-made and conventional, commonplace language and preconceptions that have for a long time been applied to poetry, thus it is difficult to discuss his outstanding and authentic poetry.  The commentator has to seek and find neologisms than can suggest the realities of Soriano‘s poetry, and when using the old words from the traditional discussions of poetry, the old words must be transvalued.

Since at the present time, Soriano is the most published of our younger poets, our poets under forty, hope is that the current dull, life-absent poetry will be overwhelmed by the spread of Soriano‘s poetry and we will move out of our current age, The Age of Still Born Poetry into a renaissance of authentic poetry, a poetry of life. Before the Fifties, middlebrow poetry, Robert Frost, Richard Eberhart, Richard Wilbur, dominated, but after the counter-culture revolution of the Sixties lowbrow poetry gained domination.  During the dark ages of poetry, the Sixties, we even had a poetry lower than lowbrow poetry, a poetry that was not poetry at all, but a surrogate for poetry that was admired, loved, apotheosized by the ignorant and obtuse who really hated poetry and wanted to destroy it—one of the main assembly-line producers of this non-poetry posing as poetry was Charles Bukowski.  But now his faked poetry has vanished into oblivion, and is loved and worshipped only by the poetic insensitive and poetic illiterates. Once more now that Soriano is writing, there is hope for real poetry, authentic poetry—the only real poetry, highbrow poetry.

Phrases such as being in the ―Stein Tradition, although Soriano won the Stein Award, do not apply to Soriano, for Stein when read with careful attention is found to be still a naïve victim of the Platonic Cartesian tradition, in spite of her relationship to and study under William James, whose philosophy of pragmatism along with John Dewey and C. S. Pierce was a pioneer to clearing away the moribund Plato-Cartesian mistake.  Stein was too old-fashioned to overcome the past. Soriano‘s poetry corresponds more to the existential tradition, if this tradition is seen as focused on existence as in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Lakoff. I exclude the best known existentialist Jean Paul Sartre, for he seems still too infected with Cartesians—with the erroneous separation of subject and object.

I would exclude Soriano‘s poetry from the popular existentialism tradition and its popular nonsense and popular angst, this adolescent tradition that developed from such writers as Norman Mailer. This existentialism, American coffee house existentialism, is too doctrinaire and formulized to have any relation to Soriano‘s fluid poetry of the flow.

I would never associate Soriano‘s poetry with the symbolism that was appropriated and distorted from Mallarmé.  Soriano‘s words do not disappear into being a prop for something else, an abstract entity or a supersensible ideal or idea. His words are linguistic realities, verbal corporeals, which are verbal realities and thus beings-in-this world. Soriano, unlike Mallarmé, is not seeking the white concern of the sail, but the subtle multicolors that are usually overlooked.  Soriano seeks to find what was not seen in perceptive diagrams that constitute representations of reality.

He is not in the surrealist tradition, whose poems are reputed to be emanations from a Freudian unconscious, the surrealists’ metanarrative.  The Freudian unconscious is now obsolete, as well as the fantasies of archetypes of the Jungian unconscious.  I would say that the poems of Soriano correspond to the functioning of the cognitive unconscious and its metaphorical output as advocated by George Lakoff.

Soriano‘s poetry is not related to the Language Poetry current tradition, for Soriano is seriously concerned with language, not using it as a trapeze in a circus act to do meaningless acrobatics.  I know of no other poet as seriously concerned with language as Soriano. This serious concern with language excluded him from the current language poetry tradition, for the language poets exploit language for its use as antics and something to destroy late capitalism, although their politics have little meaning except as a publicity stunt and content for sound bites. The language poet‘s politics sounds like that of a stunted school boy, as Andre Breton sounds when he is discussing Hegel and Marx.

Soriano is seriously concerned, deeply dedicated and devoted, to creating a genuine and authentic poetry, a poetry that expresses an emotionally apprehension of reality that is always elusive, and never graspable through a clear, distinct, transparent language. He uses all of our postmodern expressive means: agrammaticalism, fragmentation, parataxis, interruption, and disjunction. He even uses Derrida‘s sous rapture. He writes a non-paraphrasable and a supremely affective poetry. He does not employ these postmodern devices as a craftsman seeking approval by being technologically postmodern without having any real postmodern feelings or a serious desire to write existence-expressive poetry. Felino writes a poetry that conveys real emotions and expresses an insight into real existence.

He does not write formulas for emotions that are used so prevalently in current poetry to fake emotion, and he writes from a feeling of real existence, not from the old false existence of the Platonic-Cartesian point of view that dominated our non-reflective and emotionally immature minds.

Also, differing from language poetry and also differing from its predecessor, the Beats, the darlings and heroes of the 60‘s counterculture that has now disappeared by being absorbed and adopted by what is called the mainstream, Soriano does not have their Madison Avenue advertising ability.  He does not employ the ad-man chicanery for self-promotion.  He is too seriously dedicated to creating a new poetry of real merit than to turn himself into a billboard.  The language poets are experts in modern advertising, mainly the TV sound bite method. A language poet always, when reading or pontificating on the nature of poetry, mentions a long list of the other language poets. These language poets names are heard so much and that soon the indiscriminate and obtuse start believing they are genuine poets. The methods of the language poets were so successful that now they appear on the pages of the rich magazine Poetry—which has become a strong enemy to authentic poetry and poetry criticism. This rich magazine published primarily the lessthan-mediocre poetry of the power structure‘s outmoded mannerism and publishes hideous attempts at criticism as such of the poseur non-criticism of the non-poet, William Logan. Allen Ginsberg was trained on Madison Avenue, became an expert in manipulating the weaklings of the poetry reading public with modernizing the old trick of épater le bourgeois, which is always a best seller among the middle class whose main admired reading is the scatological and pornographic.  Soriano is not a performance poet who uses poetry to accompany exhibitionisms, bad acting, adolescent antics, and strip teasing.

Soriano is the sincere solitary poet who is not endowed with a Madison Avenue sensibility, which is fortunate for poetry, but unfortunate for his becoming a public and popular icon. 

For a closer examination of Soriano‘s poetry in a modified and transvalued explication de texte his opening poem, ―Prologue will serve. A close reading and quasi-analysis of an actual text will suggest a basic approach to reading his wonderful poems that seem esoteric and hermetic to the poetry reader who has not assimilated the mannerisms of modern and postmodern poetry. But when read properly by a qualified reader these poems will become marvels of poetic expression and astound not only aesthetically but as giving insights in life hitherto overlooked or only partially apprehended.  Soriano goes beyond art pour l’art to create an art for the abundant life.  Art and life are fused in Soriano‘s poetry, and one cannot be separated from the other. These poems of Soriano when read in the proper manner—a manner of reading almost lost due to the misdirections and non-understanding of authentic and highbrow poetry by our Ph.D.’s in English, our poetry critics, our poetry editors and our lowbrow, prol poetasters—will expose all the so  called current transparent, clear, distinct, miscalled accessible poetry as a quackery and a fraud.  

This close reading will only be partial and will be annotated with digressions.  To write an explication of even one of his poems would require a lengthy book. His poems make the finite seem infinite.

Confronting the ―Prologue, the poem starts with a lonely and isolated ―Lost, and is followed across the page by a long white space.
Soriano is not a craftsman using handed down devices to manipulate as a puppet master manipulates his puppets and his audience, thus Soriano‘s mannerisms are far distant from the hoi polloi poetry that has identifiable subject matter and Hallmark card sentiments based on a reductive view and toxic falsifications of emotions concerning love, death, and Christmas.  Emotions are very little understood by our experts, our psychologists, and rarely understood at all by our populace and our poets.  Soriano does not try to describe or delineate emotions, or select a commonplace classified emotion for subject matter as so many naïve poets do. He presents as verbal gestures a linguistic reality that evokes emotions, and reveals the secrets of these complex and complicated human responses.  In Soriano‘s poetry we participate in the feeling of emotions and do not remain aloof and destroy the emotions emanating from his verbal constructions by relating to the quotidian and the familiar.

The presentation and spatial arrangement of his opening word, ―Lost makes the astute, language-empathetic reader repeat ―lost, lost, lost, lost in his subliminal awareness.  The next line starts with uncapitalized ―of. We want a capital, we desire a capital letter beginning, but we did not get it.  We are confronted with the lower case, and a disappointment in expectations, and thus we are feeling emotions that cannot be classified.  These emotions are continued with a hidden variation by the next word ―the. Actually, if we were viewing the poem from the vocabulary of traditional prosody and metric, this opening would be called a pyrrhic, the weakest of all units of metrical progression. This weakening of accent after the strong accent of ―Lost, a word that starts with a liquid continuant, has a long-pitched vowel, and ends with a constant cluster, a fricative continuant, and a dental terminal stop, is a word that starts an auditory background which blends and extends in the configurational beginning. Soriano has a tendency to use paragraphic configurations rather than fragment configurations.  I might add at this time, that two prior authentic poets, Spenser and Milton, also use often consonant clusters to present music as an auditory chorus.  Spenser tends toward the use of constant clusters at the beginning of the word, and Milton tends to use consonant clusters at the ending of the word, and thus their differing music and different communications. 

The next word is ―labors, and labors alliterates with lost, and thus fuses, merges, becomes close to lost, the pyrrhic in between, even accents the closeness, and then appears another long white space this white space is stressed by being continued at the beginning of the third line, and the emotive jar, not quite a shock, of action words, faith|written.  The slash in the center of the jammed together words creates and intensifies the emotion and then ordinary spacing with the action word ―vastitude. [F]aith and ―written
are cramped together, and then have a word that suggests infinite expansion, and there is a juxtaposition of the cramped and the vast, and an emotion that goes against the current and reductive classification of emotions.  Emotions are supreme and extreme complexes that cannot be fixed and stabilized in commonplace and conventional descriptions.  There is sadness, but there never are two sadnesses the same.  There is love but there never are two loves the same. Felino senses this complexity of emotions, and writes accordingly. His language engenders emotion; it does not describe or delineate emotions. His language elicits emotions and is not about emotions. Soriano is nowhere near being a hoi polloi poet with their easily identifiable subject manner.

After a very short space, the terminal word of the third line; an isolated word, ―spoken.  Soriano does not attach a speaker, or even indicate what is spoken.  It is just spoken. Here, a life-like action word, a word that exists as life exists, not a word that describes or delineates life, not a mimetic word, for Soriano has made the tradition of Aristotle from Poetics obsolete.  That is, if Aristotle is interpreted as meaning mimesis means an imitation though verbal representation of an external world of subject and object, as Aristotle is interpreted widely in our current poetic commentaries.  Of course, I think the popular interpretation of Aristotle, like most popular interpretations, is dangerously wrong.  His ―imitation of an action, his praxis means not imitation of so-called external world, but the form of matter, as in Aristotle although differencing from Plato, the matter is inseparably connected to matter, and inseparable from matter, the form is more real than matter.  I agree with thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, that Aristotle was mistaken, and his use of form and matter, only leads to false dualistic Cartesian thinking that has dominated the learned mind for centuries, but now primarily only dominates the popular mind. While the content, if a ―content, of most poets is still a victim of the Cartesian world and thus a falsifier of life, but Soriano is a poet of the new thinking and thus is a poet of reality, a presenter of life.

Also, even in this brief examination so far of Soriano‘s poem, it can be sensed in Soriano extraordinary and unparallel use of language that his words, his action words overcome the popular fallacy, the separation of subject and object.  Martin Heidegger has attacked as pernicious the language that separates subject from object, and Heidegger asserts that this separation leads to a distorted description of our experience and our lives.

Most of our current poetry today writes a language that separates object from subject, although such writers are usually self-deceived and have no awareness of their adhering to the by-passed and false dichotomy of subject-object separation.  Many aspirant poets during the Sixties and thereafter, believing themselves to be influenced by the Zen tradition, tried to appropriate Zen although their materialistic suffused and fixed minds forbids their assimilation, thus thwarting their attempts to discover a language that in Zen tradition could overcome the subject and object Cartesian separation and the attempt of the artificial and diluted Zenists became a failure and a farce.  I think of such poets as Gary Snyder and the buffoonery of Jack Kerouac, both forgotten by the true lovers of poetry, although celebrated and apotheosized by the drug addicted and spaced-out poetasters of the jejune Woodstock age and still presented as poets in our universities by obtuse and ignorant Ph. D’s.  Even, about 1930, Ludwig Wittgenstein argued against the employment of the subject and object dichotomy, finding it only to be a verbal construction without a corresponding reality, generated more problems than it solved.  In our current poetry, the separation of subject and object generates a false and faked view of life.  Soriano with his action words has overcome the subject-object model of experience.

Before returning to Soriano use of the word ―spoken, I might add that Soriano rejects in his poetic process of action words, the correspondence theory of truth and the cohesion theory of truth as Martin Heidegger does in his philosophy.

Now this terminal word of the third line, ―spoke has only a short length of white space between it and the word before.  It is followed by long space.   The words preceding are closely jammed together.  This spacing of the word ―spoken gives it special aura.  It is like a solitary shout, a shout with no one around, but a shout whose spacing suggests its loudness—a loud solitary shout followed by a void.  It occurs as if the world is suddenly perceived, not as a material substance, not as a spiritual substance, and this is definitely not a subject speaking about an object.  It is the world seen, society seen as spoken. We live as what is spoken, what has been spoken, what is being spoken, and what will be spoken.

I am often astounded by the depths that the construction and arrangement of Soriano‘s action words convey.  No other poet can write like this, and his emotional intensity that is organic and embedded in the verbal, his action words emanates emotion and not like lesser poets who try to imitate and describe emotions, usually use platitudes, old and now meaningless formulas.  Soriano‘s poetry is a poetry of real feeling, not the faked and pretended feeling of most the poetry published today.

The ease with which Soriano‘s lines come forth makes his song as natural as the song of a bird, and makes the others who attempt to sing come across as skilled laborers.

―Spoken is followed by a fast, moving rapid line but broken with parenthesis and the middle-pause caesuras of commas.  It is a line that fills the space across the page, the longest line in the poem.  But in this long line the spoken is stressed.  There are variations on this ―spoken.   The ―spoken becomes ―heard meanderings, as happens in life.  We listen. We have a lack or lacks.  Our longing to fulfill what is missing causes an event or a ―spoken to be perceived as clear and transparent coherent fulfillment of the lack. We will have heard or found a tangible palpability, but in deeper understanding, in what we do not want to know, we know we have no fulfillment, but a labyrinth, a maze, a circuitous wandering.  Soriano‘s words are words performing life, not a posited subject describing remotely what is only approximately or quasi-known, but with self-deception believes otherwise.  Soriano‘s action words are linguistic realities and are experienced as life is experienced, not as life is described, or represented according to obsolete mimesis.
 
Then comes a parenthesis to fence in a long string of words, starting with ―motional constructs describing hearsay.  Now, the spoken becomes not absolute, not even what was supposed to be spoken, but only a notion, not an utterance based on an intense life feeling, and is known first hand, not empirically witnessed, but repeated from hearsay.  As in life, most of what is spoken is not based on being a witness to what is spoken about, but copied from the authority of hearsay, not something empirically or actually known. In life, most people talk without knowing what they are talking about.

Then ―the unalterable mentioning of time, time what no one, not even Einstein knows anything about as we know from the latest finding of modern physics, is spoken ―unalterable.  The average man speaks what he has deceived himself to believe is wisdom, speaks ex cathedra, speaks as if he is the final authority, speaks unalterably.

So the spoken has many complications, many labyrinths. The spoken does not exist as a simplicity as the obtuse believe.

In the fifth line, we have language arranged so that the arrangement turns into communication; the main elements of expression are bold type, sous rature, and italics.

The bold type of ―now in the ―moment now stresses that it is believed that a moment is a fixed present and not a flow. As philosophers know, this is not true.  A moment is a flow of the past, the present, and the future, and no entity or fixity can be abstracted from his flow with a reduction or falsification of what is experienced as reality.

Then comes the Derridean writing under erasure, as the here is crossed out.  Spatial location is rendered indeterminate, so now popular notions of space and time, Kant‘s categories, are experienced as uncertainties, possible as just another human illusion, or mistake as the human being fumbles in seeking of understanding.  And then comes ―the awakened elsewhere.

This is like Rimbaud, saying ―I is another, or the surrealist talking about life as being elsewhere. It reminds of the T.S. Eliot image, ―unreal city. The awakening is an awakening to find dislocation.

Now, for a grand moment, ―virtues promised.  After this sensing of the unreal and falsity of human beliefs, after dislocation and disjunction comes the promise of virtue. The placing of ―promised after the ―virtues instead of in front renders the promise less assertive than ―promised virtues and make the promise more indefinite.  I feel that this construction followed by a long white space diminished the promise, and makes it another manipulation of a power structure to etherize the people and keep them slave mentalities that with their labor make a profit for the power structure, so the power structure can buy unused yachts and purchase voluptuous chorus girls for tennis partners.

I find Soriano‘s poetry very stimulating.  His insights rendered through poetic language create reader‘s response that goes beyond what Soriano is aware of when he is writing. Soriano‘s cognitive unconscious as evinced in his poetry is far superior to 99% percent of the poets writing today, and what comes forth in words as a surrealist might say is marvelous.  I feel what makes a poet is not skill or being a slave mentality to the fashions of his time, but the radical singularity of his concrete particular, superior cognitive unconscious that sends out words.  No two cognitive unconsciousness are the same, and very rarely is a cognitive unconscious constructed to be authentic and other than that of the commonplace slave mentality.  Most people have trained their cognitive unconscious to be preoccupied with what is inferior and trivial,  what is fashionable and false, what really does not matter. Soriano has chosen, with awareness, or by unawareness, to be true to himself.  His poetry is a witness to Soriano is being true to a worthwhile self. Most people only have a trivial self that is not worthy of being true to, And among these unfortunates are the overwhelming majority of the writers of current poetry. After the first six lines of the ―Prologue Soriano skips a line, has an extended white space, and then comes another remarkable unit that is extended with reverberations. The unit ―untangled whisper by dawn‘s earlier explanation. At beginning, this metaphoric ―dawn has explicated something that has untangled a whisper.  No surrealists or anybody else could write like this. The metaphoric ―whisper is like all our feelings that we are only dimly aware of and are tangled, not sorted out, that might be called ―subliminal, and are definitely subterrestrial. These tangled feelings are often rapturous feelings.  Untangled feelings are the dull ones.  In this case, a metaphoric ―dawn, the end of darkness and the coming of light, the coming of the Age of Enlightenment is going to untangle, straightened with 1662 Royal Society prose, the mysticism and suspicions of the Medieval ages. Just as in our time, Logical Positivism, Logical Empiricism, and Analytic Philosophy were going to untangle the obscurity, the opacity, and the intensity of Romanticism.

When arranged with Soriano‘s expressive spacing comes: You among momentaneous witnesses to the whitened marks of birthing.  More brilliance.  A mark is about to the born, white like a chalk mark.  You are not confronting this birth, but temporary witnesses are confronting this birth, and the witnesses are only experiencing the marks, the white marks, not the birth. So much like life, in life we directly and personally know very little, and our knowledge which is not real knowledge but comes from hearsay and the opinions of socalled experts. Then the result of it all is that it becomes relics.  The word ―relics reminds of all the bones I have seen in bejeweled and ornate boxes with crystal glass of saints.  These bones are all that is left of a saint‘s life.

Then comes a ―canopy motive. I think of the canopies over medieval and Renaissance beds that I have contemplated and admired throughout Europe. The canopy supports surrounding enclosures so when closed, feelings emerged that a couple cannot be shut from pollution by voyeurs.  The canopy also shuts out can the cause of a worst pollution, the above.   So here in Soriano, it suggests a motive that is hidden.  Since Freud and his ―manifest and latent content, all motives are canopy motives.  Most weaklings in this world and this world has an surplus of weaklings do not speak to mean, but speak to compensate for their lack by verbal constructions to derogate those who have achieved something that the speaker tried to achieve and failed.  His comments are meaningless, except to give an outlet for his envy by degrading others.  I am sure Soriano did not have all this in his conscious mind but from his cognitive unconscious when he wrote these brilliant action words, and this is the way his words acted on me.

But his ―canopy motive relates to having a result on rest, and Soriano states this brilliantly ―undenying rest as if rest was denied and the undenied, a complicated and complex of an emotional reaction, a tangled state that cannot be untangled.

Next, a white space and near the end of the line is one lone word, ―rescue. This placement of ―rescue after the ―canopy motive complex reverberates.  It sends shivers through the neural system of the body.  It cannot be ascertained if this is a desperate cry and/or a salvation.  

Soriano‘s verbal texture is never static, conveying the old clichés of the universal and the absolute. His movement exudes indeterminacy. Extricates from the lies and platitudes that have been spoken into us, frees from enslavement from the pollution and lies of popular discourse that is everywhere. Reading Soriano is a cleanliness, as his style washes off the filth of publicness as Mallarmé would have poets do, as T.S. Eliot has reiterated, Soriano has purified the language of the tribe.

Since the advent and apotheosis of Language Poetry, the use of language in poetry has declined in quality, but language has been restored to dignity by Soriano.

What follows are two lines that do not start with capitals, but adhere to the left margin. The first has no end-stop, no period, and the second is one word with an end-stop.  Not starting the preceding line with a capital diminished the feeling and the one word ―predication with its period completes a sentence.  This arrangement keeps the indeterminate texture vibrant. The structure of language had become a communicant.

No longer does the structure of language serve as just a container of meaning, but the way Soriano uses language, language becomes an essential part in producing the meaning. Soriano‘s language construction is, as I said before, like a Greek chorus in a Greek drama. Differing from Charles Olson, form and content are inseparable, operate as an unity, not as separates—not as Olson and Creeley: Form is an extension of content.

Now comes the first line since the beginning line that starts with capitalization: ―[Y]ou heard a name first mentioned before sacred understanding:  So after two preceding seemingly fragments, we have a unit that resembles a conventionally complete sentence, but the conventionalism is truncated by the use of this pause of intermediate length, the colon, and the language that follows.

Soriano addresses a [y]ou, and tells this ―you has heard something named, and this naming was before sacred understanding.  I think of how many times people have heard the word oak mentioned before understanding the sacredness of the oak, or never understanding the oak‘s sacredness.  I also think of the overwhelming majority of people who do not have the superior corporeal intelligence that it takes to understand the sacredness of an oak.

So, the reader is told that a body splays meaning, and the splayed meanings concludes the poem with cryptic fragments.

An interesting fragment is ―mayhem posited underbelly. This is an exciting depiction of human corporeality, how human beings have through their choices constructed their corporeally, have really misconstructed their corporeality due to a belief in a falsity, dualism.

Soriano concludes this poem with ―defined by measures of unfinished distances, ―and thus his poems ends with openness, not closure.

The above brief account of Soriano‘s poem that begins a collection of poems should prepare the unprepared for a reading of Soriano‘s innovative poems, but in reading Soriano‘s one should never seeks stabilization in reading, and should be destabilized himself before reading the next poem. At first there will be feeling of confronting the unrecognizable, but intensified attention to Soriano‘s mannerisms, the unrecognizable become recognizable, and what has been recognized before Soriano will be unrecognizable, for the falsity of what is familiar will be exposed, for our past and traditional interpretations are falsehoods about life and reality.

Soriano‘s poetry has saved us from our current Age of Stillborn poetry by his writing a meaningful, intensely emotional, authentic, realistic poetry.
 
Soriano‘s poetry, this newness in poetry required stylistic innovations to communicate a non-traditional, non-conventional metaphysical, epistemological, and ontological authentic nonuniversal, non-absolute radical singular, concrete particularized response to lived experience, thus his poems are expressions of, engenderment of, emanations of what is always elusive and ineffable, an unique and individualized fusion of inseparable inwardness and outwardness. The real as known by human beings becomes meaningful and available by no longer being perceived as being an independent reality, and the unknowable event and thing-in-itself (see Immanuel Kant) is incorporated into a living human response.

To use a Martin Heidegger term, Soriano‘s poems are disclosures. They are not the mimesis of Aristotle and the Renaissance and postmodern distortions of this mimesis. Soriano‘s poetry is a poetry of beholding, grasping, assimilating, and then appropriating what can never be fully possessed.

Soriano‘s is not trying to imitate a world of objects and concepts outside of the mind and in public domain, but is rendering through an innovative linguistic constructions a world that loses its objectivity and conceptualization when this world of supposed objects and supposed concepts is responded to with ardent feelings and intensified attention.

To read Soriano properly, one must unlearn what he has learned. He must overcome his ego and his ego imprisonments. He must even forgo what has been his greatest pleasure, the joy of self-deception, The reader must overcome his slave mentality that sustains him as a social being. After the above recommended cleanings, the cleanings of his senses as William Blake would have, he is prepared ritually to commence a reading of Soriano‘s poetry, and enter the eudemonic realm of the supremely happy few.

*****



Duane Locke, 94 years old, has a Ph. D., specialized in Metaphysical Poetry: Donne to Marvell.  During his teaching ordeal, he taught courses in Romantic poetry, and all English poetry from Old English to contemporary.  He also taught courses in Modern Spanish, French,
German and Surreal poetry.  He was Poet-in-Resident at a university for over twenty years, and
taught courses in poetry writing.

As of Feb 2016, he has published 7,058 different poems, none self-published or paid to be published. This included 33 books of poems.  His poems have been published in 36 different countries. He has been in many anthologies, including several on Southern poetry from Louisiana University Press.  He still at his advanced age writes poetry every day, and his latest book of poems, Eco Echoes, was published January 2016. He has been awarded the St. Vincent Millay Award for the best sonnet written during the year, the Charles Agnoff award for the best poem in Literary Review, the Poetry Society’s award for the best poem written on Walt Whitman and a Swiss University Prize for the best poem written on Europe.

Everyday, he studies philosophy. His favorite philosophers are Martin Heidegger, Giles Deleuze,
Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan.  He also has intense interest in philosophies of
Post-Heideggeans such as Graham Harmen, Ray Bassier, Ian Hamilton Grant, Quentin Miellassoux, Jane Bennet, Tim Morton, etc. For more information on Duane Locke go to Google search engine.  He has over a million Entries. 




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