Correctional
No flag: they keep a man on the roof
with a rattle in his throat. At his feet hang
the tile men, rain catching in their knuckles,
spilling down their backs and onto the yard
where a chosen two grip circlets of old net
and another gathers into a ball.
At night, the lucky half slumber on beds
of pale, assembled limbs while a man with
crooked elbows circles the time against a wall.
Each eats from another’s clasped hands.
In the washroom, the mirror does his best.
Those here longest hook another to their heels
and gain a shadow.
Correctional is from The Rainbow Faults by Kate Wakeling, published by The Rialto, and numbered 10 in their excellent Bridge Pamphlet series. Wakeling is an ethnomusicologist by profession, and on the evidence of a number of her poems, Wakeling’s vibrant visual imagination matches her musicality.
Correctional’s impact is on various levels, but it is the eye which is first activated. Surreal, even grotesque, it presents itself initially as a series of trompes l’oeil reminiscent of Archimboldo, perhaps. Wakeling’s picture of the “correctional” institution is assembled from objects which, when you look closer, are all made up of human beings, contorted or curled or flattened: literal institutionalisation.
Once the eye is engaged, the conscience swiftly follows. The poem is not about consensual role-play. The title warns that reprimand is the goal, and what’s euphemistically called re-education may be intended – abuse of power sustains this human prison. The opening statement is casually shocking and shockingly casual: “they keep a man on the roof / with a rattle in his throat.” Who are “they” and what degree of control must they exercise so as to “keep” the man up there instead of a flag? That he has “a rattle in his throat” further dehumanises him, suggesting that his voice-box has been surgically removed and replaced. The word “rattle”, phlegmily onomatopoeic, is connected with ill-health, the rattling of a cough, the death rattle. He has been singled out for some severe misdemeanour, and his punishment is particularly solitary and degrading.
So the poem leads the eye down from the roof to the ground, briskly noting the gruesomely contorted figures on the way: “the tile men”, the men (and women?) who become the football nets and ball in the exercise yard, those inside the building whose bodies furnish tonight’s beds for “the lucky half.” Any impulse to smile at these images, with their redolence of acrobatics, circus stunts, avant garde installations and sheer impossibility, is always repelled at the last minute. It’s not spelled out, but the ball, for example, will be kicked. The tile men hanging out in all weathers may freeze or fall. It’s absurd – but we know something similar goes on when people are herded into camps or prisons, when they are treated as things.
Turning people into things is one of the devices of tyranny. So we can’t laugh – not even at the bent-elbowed clock man, or the man who tries to be a mirror. Too much cruel force lurks behind the contorted poses.
Wakeling has a brisk, almost shorthand style. Exposition and explication are minimal. Syntax as pared down as that of “In the washroom, the mirror does his best” makes space for the reader’s imagination.
The political context seems to expand as the poem goes on. The man trying to be a mirror is surely an allegorical representation of a desperate conformity. If the line “Each eats from another’s clasped hands” evokes the respite of mutual co-operation, the effect is temporary and, in the final transformation, the power-game, now played out between the prisoners, reaches its most brutal. There is a winner and a loser, and the loser is so reduced by the other that he becomes no more than this other’s shadow. I found it a disturbing reminder of descriptions of the Nazi concentration-camp inmates known as “muselmanner” – those who had lost every shred of the will to survive.
The structure at the end of the poem enacts this mortal diminution, as it curtails the expected last couplet to a single, two-beat line. It seems the ultimate exposure of the false economy of privilege.
Rhythmically, Wakeling shifts between the comfortably natural cadence and the comfort-resistant enjambment. Some end-of-line words (“hang”, “with”) seem to gasp and teeter over the stanza break. This underlines the theme of physical distortion. Normality hovers tantalisingly in the penal system, always to be insinuated, often to be parodied, never to be attained. The characters in the poem are doing the “work” (that) “sets you free.”
Correctional is an imagist poem in that it limits itself to demonstration: its only message is filtered through images. What we might detect in that message seems not only a protest against the more abusive forms of internment: it argues against the correctional pressures of society itself.
Wakeling is often a more playful writer than here, picking and mixing her various influences with a freewheeling zest. In Correctional, too, despite the terrible subtext, her pleasure in the pictorial and aural effects of language is palpable. You can read more of her work in Magma or sample an experimental trio of asemic poems in 3:am magazine. She has appeared in The Rialto magazine, and in various anthologies, including the 2014 edition of Salt’s annual compendium, The Best British Poetry. Kate Wakeling is a poet to watch, her work an April rainbow of freshness and surprise.