Two Poems - Felino A. Soriano

Recollections 34

|skipping rocks|

hand as sling

motional rubberized benefit of stretch:

decline-link or

                                    plane of hope the lever functions reverse;

forrad, foray of play

filled speed of spilling vase

                                                finger-thumb union

birth of the silken gem, skin

of spatial specks                      lit by rhythm release

: skid, scope of patterned rise descend

                        rise again

decomposing existence within liquid tomb of coalesced

                                                                        mirages

Recollections 36

|Saturday, a|

Resolution of sewing shadow, patterned gaffe

fixated hem

                                    distinguishing whole from the

                                    meander of shortened prophecies

                                    stable, un

—stable paradox romanticizing self as enough beyond 24 obsessions

staving what starves among portions’ entranced focal

numerals

                                                            staged finality, end of week’s posit of

                        explicated

unravels.

--

Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974) is a case manager and advocate for adults with developmental and physical disabilities. In 2010, he was chosen for the Gertrude Stein "rose" prize for creativity in poetry from Wilderness House Literary Review.  Philosophical studies collocated with his connection to various idioms of jazz explains motivation for poetic occurrences.  For information, including his 45 print and electronic collections of poetry, over 2,800 published poems, interviews, and editorships, please visit his website: www.felinoasoriano.info.

One Poem - Connor Stratman

Facsimile I

i.

First it was history

then seismic

fingers in the ground

Now it’s electric books

and knitted clubs

How to posit a moment

and hold it still

or spit it like

our geography now determined

by spots of inky breath

Now what:

I don’t know

(nor act as knower)

The breath of godly love

            is speck of black

            stains

wrecked world of women

my other

            your disappearance

contained in cups

of cheapened water

            in the corresponding

                        holes of the sky

revise your meaning, please

ii.

film-firm surface

and insecured hands

I forget

to wonder

malicious steadiness

of

in-betweens

iii.

it’s your litany

that gets repeated

then thrown out

folded/crumpled

and wiped by the judge

The wince of begging:

acknowledged ownership

of the small scrap pile

they get something

done

like us luck struck

drawers of hall            ways

iv.

in the good minutes

after sunrise

wilted names lock

            on the walls

and call everything

something else

 --

Connor Stratman is a writer currently living in Chicago. His work has appeared in journals such as The Toronto Quarterly, The Journal of Experimental Fiction, ditch, Leaf Garden, Pinstripe Fedora, Otoliths, Counterexample Poetics, Scythe, and Little Episodes, among others. He edits the online poetry journal The Balloon. He is the author of a chapbook, invisible entrances (erbacce-press, 2010) and a full-length book of poems, An Early Scratch (erbacce, 2011).

Bobby Parker's 'Ghost Town Music' reviewed

Bobby Parker

Ghost Town Music

The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2011, £7

9781907812446

--

It is impossible not to connect Bobby Parker’s debut with the poetry of Charles Bukowski. The apprehension about doing so stems from the negative connotations inevitably brought forth by such a comparison – dreggy bedsit scribble, easy cheap indulgence, soggy English American affectation. It is both a shame and a testament to the singular Bukowski that his influence has become so ubiquitous; likewise, it is a testament to Parker that his incorporation of Bukowski poetics is for the most part transgressive and not derivative, even incidental at times. His project has the strange quality of both extreme affect and lack of artifice – a staged lack of poeticity that somehow comes across as authenticity.

Ghost Town Music is more notebook than collection, featuring a comic strip, photography, reproduced handwritten scraps and typewritten pages. Again, these come across as entirely natural, expected, a kind of vital ambience for the poems themselves. And it is the poems themselves that are most worthy of discussion. Therein, however, lies the problem. Quoting from any of the individual poems as representative exemplars of Parker’s shtick would inadvertently undermine the way GTM functions as a whole. There is an absence of metaphorical language throughout – one poem even featuring a deleted section: “(THE EDITOR THOUGHT THAT THIS LINE WAS TOO / LYRICAL TO BE INCLUDED IN THE COLLECTION)” – and a plethora of unabashedly crude rememberings of high, horny and broke adolescence. Situated together in a nonlinear progression of scrawled reminiscence, which is charmingly human and naked, the pieces blur together into a never-pitifully-melancholy shard of growing up, and while on their own there is nothing particularly exciting or interesting about the language the poems utilise, as a speedily read mass they insinuate their – how to put this? – genuineness into the reader.

For example:

In the time between

getting the sack

from one job in a factory

and walking into town

to the recruitment agency

for another job in a factory

I marvelled at

the way the sun

made people on the street

seem happy to be alive.

That is one poem (most are untitled and the book is unpaginated) in full. And in a sense, it’s not very good. If I were to read it on its own I would dismiss it as Bukowski-aping affect. It is hackneyed, and the marvelling at the people in sun is crudely functional. And yet as part of a collection read chronologically it, along with the other parts, coalesces into a believable authentic speaking self documenting an existence that is very much undocumented – as far as I can see – in the young contemporary poetry scene: a poetry about a particular kind of existence and formative surroundings free from mainstream stylisation, not locked into Movement-dogged bogstandard English plainspokenness. It is the fact that these poems read like they could not have been written any other way that gives them their aura of authenticity, of genuineness, despite the obvious affectation.

The fragments of introspection are what work best for me, when Parker is less concerned with portraying a lifestyle than expressing personal feeling. ‘Little Bean’ is, as Luke Kennard has noted, quite simply heartbreaking and I wouldn’t want to taint it by speaking of it further. But also affecting are the fragments like this one, appearing sporadically, little notes to self made public:

If I want sun

I close my eyes under a lightbulb

If I want sea

I close my eyes and listen

To the toilet flush...

Parker’s poetry in this collection, wilfully messy and semi-edited as it may or may not be, is a becoming. There is a humanity that presses against the words and helps give them their force, and as the poems ransack childhood and early adulthood for purpose, so their quality as poetry seems to be writing towards itself. It is a journey towards something enacted in the process of the poems together and the implication of what the poet is working towards as poet, and I think it will be a journey worth joining. 

 --

By Joshua Jones.

A selection of poetry by Andrew McMillan

BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play Idea #3: a glockenspiel indicates a train

A psychiatrist’s office

Patient:                problem?            I want to tell stories        but I never know

     how to round things up you know            how to give someone

                             a perfectly circular tale they can spin around their hips

                             for an afternoon              take the other day for example:

                             in a carriage between London and Manchester a man

                             got into a fight with the conductor           the conductor had a face

                             like a dilapidated barn and he was trying to make the man pay

                             full fare because he hadn’t bought his ticket on the station

                             the man said he hadn’t had chance        he’d been rushing          his wife

                             was in hospital ‘cos she’d slipped down the stairs

                             he had to get back to see her and didn’t he understand              

                             and couldn’t he let him off just once?  the conductor said he was

                             just following orders and the man replied that that’s what they’d said

                             at Nuremburg and the conductor snatched his money and stormed off

                             and the man with the wife with a sprained ankle and a broken arm

                             was left contemplating the thin orange slice of meat that was his ticket               

     And isn’t that a perfect place to end?       I suppose it would be  

     but why was there a button missing from the man’s coat? 

     and where did the exhausted metaphor of the train

                             sleep that night?  and what does the conductor smell like 

                             first thing in the morning? 

cityscape

backslash of corrugated roof      single cheek

of light across the broad chest of city

the potholed avenue the moon has been reduced to

landscape

hills        dawn crowning to the east

planes beat their wings

against the moon’s dull bulb

seascape

the bells of night’s train ring out

the sea is a half-learnt song         the sea is unsingable

the moon’s mute conduction

BBC Radio Four Afternoon Play Idea #29               rent boy in a small town dreams of the big city

truth      I want out           to fade

like an unfashionable pronunciation

it started with the recurring dream

of a car journey                                there was opera

there was a possibility of rain

and other times I was an over thumbed

button                  dropping              rolling through

this oneplatformsinglestraightline of a town

until I’d wake to find myself in someone else’s

morning                 window                city  

where the sky is scraped away to pure light

and you can't hear yourself scream for the breathing

--

Andrew McMillan was born in 1988. These poems are taken from his second pamphlet, the moon is a supporting player, due to be published by Red Squirrel Press in October 2011. A first pamphlet, every salt advance, was published in 2009 and is still available from Red Squirrel. Andrew has been Poet-in-Residence for Off the Page and the Regional Youth Theatre Festival; writer-in-residence for the Watershed Landscape Project and Apprentice Poet-in-Residence for the Ilkley Literature Festival. In 2010 he was commissioned by IMove, the cultural olympiad body for Yorkshire, to produce a new sequence of work. He is featured in the upcoming Salt Book of Younger Poets.