There could be no more apt place or no-place to read Corey Wakeling’s Uncle of Cats than in an hotel room in the American Midwest, rain outside, sudden sunlight, rain resumes. Here, time feels to be suspended and shuffles in cloud strata while bursts of indignation skitter from the TV. Now-time arrives as arbitrary markers slicing through no-time, making for a jump-cut prosody. Wakeling’s poems acknowledge, in passing, since all is in passing, those past and present stars that still deliver, now and then, ‘formerly inconsecutive’ lines. They shift as light girders, constructions, blinking from Ted Berrigan, Tom Raworth as well as Modernist Japanese poets.
Formally consecutive but radically paratactical, these lines are never let loose portentously to dilate. While Wakeling’s poems may aim to nullify Larkin and bog men, archaeologies of cultural inheritance, neither do the poems’ Japanese intertexts serve any smug distortion from empty mind to Western mindfulness, a ‘porcelain pseudo-history’ glazed with ego delusory in vaunted self-denial.
If ‘only a fool buys real estate’, as the epigraph to Wakeling’s formidable long poem ‘The Gavel Foundation’ has it, an epigraph embodying the contradiction of a long-lived phrase that proclaims the ephemerality of all things, descending as it does from Kamo no Chomei in about the thirteenth century to Basil Bunting to Pam Brown … to what kind of construction can the wise poet pledge? A very long exposure would score the sky, but, in ‘Lingo Surprise’, Wakeling transits attract a strobe warning, fast enough to become intransitive, the way a flash freezes.
It’s better to worry that we are stories in transit to become transit than to believe that the dairy industry has a civic terminus in a taller food circuit. Precious grin, intransitive art, transference like a conference as conference furnace farms.
So does ‘stories in transit | to become transit’ mean to say, on the way to pure abstract energy, or to consolidation in the noun? The point arrives when these extremes become identical. When do pathways of transference so multiply as to form conference? No more transit of information to its meaning terminus, no passage to its fixing; the ‘fer’ in ‘conference’ goes to ‘furnace’ while the food circuit runs through farms. The ‘precious grin’ is fleeting, no less precious for that.
The construction, then, is conference, conference opposed to ‘the simple fascism of | unity’ [‘The Gavel Foundation’]. Attempts to tamp down will fail, as the poem ‘Baal’ shows; if song, drama, dance are targeted for suppression by puritanism or by Apollonian classicism, the attuned will find ‘that dust is playing Oedipus and Medea’, and ‘just look at that dance of no light’ – I think it is the TV that blinked off after the corporate welcome to the austerity of my hotel room and starts cycling through apps, I think the jingle dissolves into ‘liquid vinyl lagoon for us all’. That’s what these poems offer – old lyric technology turning against its partiality to lull, to wrap up, the poems are fast as ice. I go outside and at the top of the street, it is bitterly cold and at the bottom sweltering, humid. Here is the street, here is the weather at every extreme. Transit becomes transit.