Wail Song: or wading in the water at the end of the world

In Chaun Webster’s Wail Song, Blackness finds its echo in the dark body of a whale. This self-described “long meditation” on the “shoreline of blackness, the nonhuman animal, the middle passage and ecological disaster” unfolds what it means for a mammal to give up living on land. Driven by greed disguised as necessity, indefatigable exploiters hunt “these evolved bodies […] as soon as they surface.” What Webster sees are

bodies that learned to hold their breath which is to say learned to circulate the oxygen, learned to make of the oxygen a body

Webster’s book is artfully scripted for the page and includes visual elements, a tripartite contrapuntal, looped canons (“black water / black whale / whale body / water body black”), and a series of paragraph-long prose poems about the Black Moby Dick character Pip, sending up the style of movie pitches (e.g. “SCENE BEGINS WITH PIP APPROACHING AHAB. a slow walk meant to dramatize the longue durée of silence”). Wail Song stands out because disparate elements are so expertly knit together, creating a rare sense of cohesion and momentum.

Like the whale, a just-born baby is a liminal creature, half-lunged, half-oxygenated through the umbilicus. The baby’s wail marks the rift from uterus to drawn breath. In the latter part of Wail Song, the ocean shades into an amniotic sac and a baby and a whale intersect. A repeated sequence is variously redacted to reveal that a woman bore a baby who struggled to breathe and died after two days. With nuanced intelligence, the poet renders the Black body’s struggle to survive when an ineluctable in-deathness exists even in the moment of coming into life.

Webster observes that “blackness as excess is as close as you can approximate to otherwise, for to be alive—through a passage the ledger cannot see—on the floating tomb, is to be outside logic.” He puts it more starkly elsewhere: “take me to the water, there is something impossible about the land.”