(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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