“Calling Toward Clarity” by Felino Soriano, (Chippens Press)
The work of Felino Soriano is well known to readers here. A widely recognized, highly prolific, and extraordinarily gifted poet, his work is rich and complex and thus the reader may glean more from his latest publication, the e-chapbook ”Calling Toward Clarity”, by the assessment of the body of his work by another poet, the legendary Duane Locke. In an article on Soriano as a poet of distinction he notes:
Felino Soriano’s poetic style is exceptional and atypical. It is a style of self-ownership,
an independent style. Soriano's poetic affluxion, not a trickle, not a deluge, but a meandering
stream that spouts on occasion ebullient geysers of illumination, covert cognitions,
ideograms pyrotechnic in explosion and profusion… To experience the verbal-sound excitement
and the exaltation of non-dual poetry of a post-postmodern and post-language poet
read Felino Soriano's poetry where ideology is fused inside the gestures and
actions of the word configurations.*
“Calling Toward Clarity” is Soriano’s dazzling challenge to the jejune, the obvious, the imposed truth, and as a philosopher he posits alternatives and pluralities of meaning. Here is his summation of the work:
The poems in this collection, as the title states, are calling toward a thing that often
hides within the falsities proclaimed by speaking man. When someone says “it should be
clear”, they are actually asserting a capricious claim. Man often attempts, and often
succeeds with blinding the already sightless followers who are being lead to an idea or
fictionalized concept. Too, metaphysics is at the base of these writings, and therefore,
when delving into the supposed clarities of others’-given realities, the poem attempts
to counter these clarities into revealing jumbled approach to an others’-instructional guide
of existence.
When we look at a poem such as ‘Plan Change’, so much of this becomes palpable and a whirlwind of consciousness and spirit:
The portraitist, cunning, portrayed across
canvas what the mouth much more easily reveals,
language versus what the vision asks in conjured
dexterity. Within self conversation, converted moments
of silence, bathing brush alphabetic movements
transformed subject into subjected, highly
held into regarded disregard.
We are taken into the recesses of an artist at work, knowing his conceptualization and depiction holds his potency to ‘reconstruct reality’ thus ‘transforming
subject into
subjected’. The connotative subtlety is monumental, for it speaks of the constructed reality assuming an almost God-like dominance. We are taken into an amazing nether world of ‘regarded disregard’.
The terrain of the book, the imposition (in all its modalities) and consequence of a dominion of ‘anti-thinkers’ are probed thoughtfully and with eloquence in ‘Thin, yet Occurring’:
Delving silently into the basket of
language, names given by
hurried anti-thinkers, the perishable
thought growers forming volumes or
equivalence to massive interpretations,
falsified thread weavers documenting
blindfolds for across vision that misunderstand
truth’s definitional happenstance. The sadness
and shame of this occurrence, —often enough
to burgeon a black rose symbolizing death
of thinking
In his command of language in conjunction with masterful fluidity, prosody and impeccable use of imagery, the black rose becomes not a cliché, but a heart stab into what might well irrevocably be, if not confronted.
The layering of interpretation thus becomes a vehicle to posit the concept of alternative, for in embracing that we open our minds to the very subjectivity of created human existence. Thus in ‘August’ we find:
a field
of sunflowers, flame of innumerable
flowers following glorified
picking hands. Summer’s
right eye extracted, the disconnect
a lesson of dissipation toward
logical, singular saneness.
As again in ‘Ceiling’ we are where sentient, conceptual, experienced ‘possibility’ itself is pregnant:
Surface clarity upon resting silence.
Dangling construction bouncing
light shadow breezes back
into the origin of surrounding
hypothetical nuances.
Sometimes the master poet in Soriano overcomes the brilliant poet-philosopher, and we can feast on images that we know that until this moment were beyond our conception yet alone apprehension, thus in’ Movement Forgotten’ we must let ourselves be taken away:
Verbatim wind repeats its solitude
dragging alerted crawl hitherto
among the most impressive of invisible
beings, temperature cast about
net to gather flutter, conversational
data, and the leaf of a cliché.
Nuance and delicacy are trademarks of this prismatic work, just think of the intimations of the ‘prize’ within ‘the wrinkles’ of ‘Within Day’:
Day shifts unseen, child sobs, detected,
both vast in the revealed: after thought,
clarity. Prize
the unfolding of found
between wrinkled explanatory
Existences.
The title poem is less a ‘Calling Toward Clarity’ than a clarion call for the imperative of Mankind to become more fully human, by opening mind, challenging perception: “What is rain? What does rain feel?” Note the movement from dryness to fabric, then let your jaw fall as you see, you experience, the dazzling elision in the very essence and dangers posed by societal non-engagement. You join the rank and file of the living inert.
Born diversity, day, a spilling occurrence,
itself, atop a mirror cracked into that
of just enough variation. Many shapes
find their fathom in many shaped eyes. Rain
proclaims its need, its need to ascertain cultural
understanding, landing among aspectual absence,
dryness, its own ascertaining of dryness. Fabrics
mend themselves, fabrics of societal thread become
dispositional acclimation.
As Duane Locke would say, Felino Soriano is that rarest of human beings and poets ‘fully self-owned’, in this treasure of a volume, he graces us all with an infinity of insights as well as the potency to continue the process of creation. Thus, in post-modern society, he stands at the vanguard of demonstrating how much more we can be. As no other poet extant, he empowers, he honors, he defends, he shows us the glories of Man in addition to Poetry in its most distilled, most precious form.
*“THE POETRY OF FELINO SORIANO, A POETRY OF SELF-OWNERSHIP, OF OWNEDNESS”
--
Constance Stadler is the author of
Tinted Steam (Shadow Archer) and
Sublunary Curse (Erbacce) and the
Review Editor for
Calliope Nerve.
Felino Soriano (California) is a philosophy student and case manager working with developmentally and physically disabled adults. Felino is a prolific writer and edits the online experimental poetry journal
Counterexample Poetics.
Calling Toward Clarity is available from Chippens Press.
