Corey Wakeling is a poet, translator, and scholar whose work joins experimental language, performance, modernism, ruins, cross-cultural reading, and contemporary literary practice in Australia and Japan. He has lived in Japan since 2015 and is an Associate Professor of English at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo.
His poetry collections include Goad Omen, The Alarming Conservatory, and Uncle of Cats, published by Cordite Books in 2025. A further collection, Endless Fields: Ploughing for Clothes, is forthcoming from Shearsman in late 2026. His critical monograph Beckett’s Laboratory was published by Bloomsbury in 2021.
Language and disruption
“Super Getter” moves through clipped statements, displaced idiom, broken grammar, names, commands, and rapidly changing images. Its surface keeps resisting stable paraphrase. Meaning emerges through sound, recurrence, interruption, and the friction between familiar phrases and altered syntax.
Wakeling’s language often creates a sense of cultural debris being recombined in real time. Literary quotation, speech, names, cinematic fragments, and ordinary diction occupy the same field and change one another through proximity.
Jeff Harrison’s mutable prose syntax offers a useful neighboring practice. Harrison often preserves grammatical continuity through surreal mutation, while Wakeling lets syntax itself become one of the unstable materials.
“The Docked Rottweiler”
“The Docked Rottweiler” develops a darker sequence of animal, cinematic, literary, and bodily images. Memory, violence, exile, vanity, school, Whitman, Sappho, and popular culture pass through a single unstable field.
The dog in the title carries several pressures at once: domestication, aggression, mutilation, control, and cultural stereotype. Docking makes alteration visible on the body, giving the poem a concrete image for violence carried into form.
The surrounding references widen that image into a larger field where education, literary inheritance, popular culture, and bodily memory keep colliding.
Modernism and ruins
Giramondo describes The Alarming Conservatory as a book attentive to history, ruins, architecture, modernist citation, and the pace of contemporary life. Ruins provide a powerful structure for Wakeling because they preserve form through damage.
A ruin is readable and incomplete. Walls survive while rooms disappear; fragments reveal an earlier design; the present inhabits material shaped by another historical period. This resembles Wakeling’s relation to literary inheritance.
Modernist language enters as surviving structure, quotation, rhythm, and cultural memory. Wakeling’s poems place these inherited elements inside contemporary syntax where they acquire new pressures.
Beckett’s Laboratory
Wakeling’s critical monograph on Samuel Beckett gives his poetry another context. “Laboratory” suggests controlled experiment, repeated testing, formal limitation, and the possibility that language can be subjected to procedures whose outcomes remain uncertain.
Beckett’s writing repeatedly reduces dramatic and narrative resources while intensifying attention to voice, repetition, failure, body, and time. These concerns resonate with Wakeling’s interest in disrupted language and performance.
Louis Bury’s writing on constraint offers another perspective on how formal limits can produce discovery through procedure, repetition, and the pressure of rules.
Performance and the speaking body
Wakeling’s work crosses poetry and performance, giving voice, pacing, gesture, and bodily presence an important role. A fragmented poem changes when spoken because the performer has to decide where a break becomes breath, silence, emphasis, or acceleration.
Performance can expose structures that remain ambiguous on the page. A repeated phrase gains tonal variation; a broken sentence acquires rhythm; a cultural quotation may become comic, threatening, or elegiac through delivery.
C. E. Gatchalian’s cross-genre work in poetry and theatre provides another route into the relation among text, body, role, and audience.
Translation and Japan
Wakeling’s translations of contemporary Japanese writers have appeared in journals, galleries, and theatres. Living and teaching in Japan has become an important part of his recent literary practice, placing translation and cross-cultural reading alongside poetry and scholarship.
Translation sharpens attention to syntax because every sentence has to be rebuilt under different linguistic conditions. Idiom, rhythm, grammar, tone, and cultural reference all become visible decisions.
Aaron Crippen’s translation practice offers a neighboring example of poetry transformed through sustained contact with another language and literary tradition.
Cross-cultural reading
Living across linguistic and cultural contexts changes how inherited literary categories are perceived. A familiar modernist reference can acquire another meaning when read inside Japanese academic, theatrical, or artistic settings.
Wakeling’s work benefits from this displacement. Australian literary culture, European modernism, Japanese writing, performance, and contemporary global media can enter the same field.
The result is a poetics attentive to movement among contexts and to the instability produced when language crosses institutional and national boundaries.
Uncle of Cats
Uncle of Cats extends Wakeling’s interest in unstable persona, animals, humor, cultural memory, and linguistic disruption. The title itself is relational and slightly absurd, giving kinship to a figure defined through animals rather than a conventional family role.
Animal imagery allows the poems to test projection and cultural association. Cats can carry domestic intimacy, independence, comedy, internet culture, mythology, and bodily movement. Wakeling lets these associations coexist inside a wider experimental field.
The Alarming Conservatory
The title The Alarming Conservatory joins preservation with disturbance. A conservatory can protect plants, music, education, or cultural inheritance; “alarming” changes that protected space into something unstable.
This tension captures Wakeling’s larger relation to tradition. Literary history is preserved through reading and scholarship while the poem subjects inherited material to new syntax, new contexts, and new forms of pressure.
Experimental language and poetic form
Wakeling’s work belongs within contemporary experimental poetry shaped by disrupted grammar, collage, performance, citation, and translation.
Its formal coherence comes from recurrence across these disruptions. Animal imagery, modernist reference, performance, architecture, exile, and linguistic fracture return often enough to create a recognizable field.
The page therefore becomes a site where cultural fragments are tested against one another and where reading itself becomes an active process of reconstruction.
Writer, translator, critic, teacher
Wakeling’s roles as writer, translator, critic, and teacher remain closely connected. Scholarship supplies historical depth; translation exposes the mechanics of language; teaching sustains close reading; poetry transforms all three into formal experiment.
This combination gives him a distinctive position within contemporary poetry: his work moves through literature as an interconnected field of languages, performances, ruins, texts, and living traditions.