January monthly blogger – Corey Wakeling!

A huge thanks to Liam Ferney for finishing 2015 with his excellent, thoughtful posts.

Our first blogger for 2016 is Corey Wakeling. His bio is below.

Corey Wakeling is the author of two books of poetry, most recently Goad Omen (Giramondo 2013), and co-editor of anthology Outcrop: radical Australian poetry of land (Black Rider Press 2013). His poetry features regularly in publications international and local, and has been described as “doomed”, “hubristic” (Peter Keneally, The Australian), “delirious” (Ali Jane Smith, Southerly) a “millennial threat” (Duncan Hose, Rochford Street Review), and as “a new music, and a new awareness” (Philip Mead, Cordite Poetry Review).

On a critical front, he is publishing articles on performance and poetics in TDR: The Drama Review, Performance Research, Westerly, Cordite Poetry Review, Plumwood Mountain, and Fusion Journal, and is a frequent commentator on contemporary poetry.

Various influences have drawn Wakeling toward language work, not least a mutual passion for performance arts, language’s peculiar qualities as hallucinogen, and the fun of visiting the sphinx of the Gesamtkunstwerk. He used to live in Melbourne, and before that Perth, and before that infant stints in the UK and US, and at present lives in Hyogo Prefecture in Japan, where he lectures in drama and literature. Corey has two middle names and lives in a country where none are formally allowed. Ventolin has become a vice and not a ventilator now that he is no longer asthmatic.

Current preoccupying intrigues include 日本語, the infant gaze, British poet David Jones’ lexicon, recurrent dreams from childhood featuring apartment buildings painted blue, Paul Klee’s Actor (1923), Gig Ryan’s “Rent Time” (in ABR December 2014), the question of justice, the speculative final days of absolute automation of human labour, and, of course, the year 2016.