Wicked Enchantment. Wanda Coleman

      Introduction

      What we have here is a sterling one-of-a-kind record of what it meant to be the late great poet Wanda Coleman. I will offer a few introductory comments, but let it be said, in life and in poetry, Wanda Coleman always preferred to speak for herself.

      In Wanda’s introduction to her chapbook Greatest Hits 1966–2003, published by Pudding House Press in 2004, she wrote:

      Eager to make my mark on the literary landscape, I got busy finding the mentors who would teach me in lieu of the college education I could not afford. As a result, I have developed a style composed of styles sometimes waxing traditional, harking to the neoformalists, but most of my poems are written in a sometimes frenetic, sometimes lyrical free verse, dotted with literary, musical, and cinematic allusions, accented with smatterings of German, Latin, Spanish, and Yiddish, and neologisms, and rife with various cants and jargons, as they capture my interest, from the corporate roundtables to the streets.

      First of all: the syntax of that second sentence is breathtaking. Second of all: what could I say to follow that!? Maybe something about my own true introduction to her?

      In the summer of 2001, I shared the stage with Wanda at the Schomburg Center for Black Research’s 75th Anniversary Heritage Festival. The reading, “A Nation of Poets: Wordsmiths for a New Millennium,” included Coleman and me, along with Amiri Baraka, Staceyann Chin, Sonia Sanchez, and Patricia Smith. It’s not a very detailed memory. I was too awed to truly pay attention to anybody’s poems (my own included). I mostly only remember the “frenetic, sometimes lyrical” (neologismic? languafied?) sound of Wanda’s voice, her towering hair and bangles, her patterned fabrics and big glasses and big wicked laugh. I don’t remember what she read, though I know she was writing some of her best work at the time and finally