Wicked Enchantment. Wanda Coleman
Award in Poetry, and 1998’s Bathwater Wine had received the Lenore Marshall Prize from the American Academy of Poets. But Wanda was still announcing her presence and suspicions.
Upon our first real conversation, on a panel at an L.A. book festival the next year, Wanda “tore me a new one,” as they say. She was a grenade of brilliance, boasts, and braggadocio. She burned and shredded all my platitudes about whatever poetry topic was at hand. She only softened when she understood/believed I was a fan. One of my mentors, a black female poet of Wanda’s generation, recently flatly said, “She was mean.” She could be mean. It was a sharpness she honed over her years outside the care of poetry collectives, coalitions, and institutions. Her poems often record the mood of one who feels exiled, discounted, neglected. Imagine how mean the famously mean Miles Davis might have been had no one taken his horn playing seriously, and you will have a sense of Wanda’s rage. I think some of it was misplaced. She had legions of fans. The actress Amber Tamblyn is a supreme Wanda disciple. Her fans include Yona Harvey, Douglas Kearney, Dorothea Lasky, Tim Seibles, Annie Finch, experimentalists, formalists, feminists, spoken-word artists. She once told me the musician Beck is a big fan. There is no poet, black or otherwise, writing with as much wicked candor and passion.
I have taught her poetry to my students for nearly all of my career. One of my oldest homemade writing exercises asks poets to devise their own American sonnet after looking at Wanda’s American sonnets. Eventually, I tried the exercise myself. I sent my first attempt, a poem entitled “American Sonnet for Wanda C” (from How to Be Drawn, 2015), to Wanda a year or so before her death in 2013. I was imitating Wanda for years before meeting her. “The Things No One Knows Blues,” in Hip Logic, my second collection, is a direct nod to her poem “Things No One Knows,” in Bathwater Wine. Yes, she let her guard down when she saw I was a fan. We became friends. She even imitated a few of my poems in her final two collections: Ostinato Vamps in 2003, and The World Falls Away in 2011, both with Pitt Press. (A shout goes out to one my first mentors, legendary Pitt Poetry series editor, Ed Ochester, who published Wanda after Black Sparrow.) I would never say Wanda and I became close friends. But we were close poets. Our letters and exchanges concerned nothing but poetry. Her passion for poetry made her sharp, warm, honest. Naturally, I loved her.
Wanda Coleman was a great poet, a real in-the-flesh, flesh-eating poet who also happened to be a real black woman. Amid a life of single motherhood, multiple marriages, and multiple jobs that included waitress, medical file clerk, and screenwriter, she made poems. She denounced boredom, cowardice, the status quo. Few poets of any stripe write with as much forthrightness about poverty, about literary ambition, about depression, about our violent, fragile passions. “American Sonnet 95,” which features this collection’s title, is one of my favorite sonnets by Wanda:
seized by wicked enchantment, I surrendered my song
as I fled for the stars, i saw an earthchild
in a distant hallway, crying out
to his mother, “please don’t go away
and leave us.” he was, i saw, my son. immediately,
i discontinued my flight
from here, i see the clocktower in a sweep of light,
framed by wild ivy. it pierces all nights to come
i haunt these chambers but they belong to cruel churchified insects.
among the books mine go unread, dust-covered.
i write about urban bleeders and breeders, but am
troubled because their tragedies echo mine.
at this moment i am sickened by the urge
to smash. my thighs present themselves
still born, misshapen wings within me
Wanda’s poems speak for themselves.
In the margin of my secondhand copy of Mad Dog Black Lady, her first full-length collection, published by Black Sparrow Press in 1979, someone wrote: “Her world is a shriek.” The poems do shriek sometimes. I open this new edition of Wanda’s selected poems with “Wanda in Worry Land,” where the refrains “I get scared sometimes” and “I have gone after people” echo the paradoxical vigor at the heart of her poems. They take the forms of aptitude tests, fairy tales, dream journals, and comic book panels. They combine manifesto and confession, inner and outer indictment, violence and tenderness, satire and sincerity. Her imitations of everyone from Lewis Carroll to Elizabeth Bishop to Sun Ra slip between homage and provocation. Themes and passions recur across the books in series like “Essay on Language,” “Notes of a Cultural Terrorist,” “Letter to My Older Sister,” and especially in the American Sonnets series, which debuted in African Sleeping Sickness in 1990. Commenting on the series in the Adrienne Rich–edited Best American Poetry 1996, Wanda wrote:
In this series of poems I assume my role as fusionist, delight in challenging myself with artful language play. I mock, meditate, imitate, and transform . . . Ever beneath the off-rhyme, the jokey alliterations, and allusions, lurks the hurt-inspired rage of a soul mining her emotional Ituri.
All of that. Every poem is an introduction to Wanda Coleman. I keep her poems close because they never cease surprising me. In “Looking for It: An Interview,” she says, “I want freedom when I write, I want the freedom to use any kind of language—whatever I feel is appropriate to get the point across.” She never ceases revealing paths to get free.
—Terrance Hayes
New York, 2019
Wanda in Her Own Words
In addition to her many volumes of poetry, Wanda Coleman wrote several incredible books of prose, fiction, and nonfiction. And while I’ll leave it to the prose writers to bring her dazzling selected prose to the world, I do want to offer you some of my favorite of her autobiographical passages from her terrific nonfiction collection, The Riot Inside Me, published by Black Sparrow in 2005.—TH
“Jabberwocky Baby,” page 6
The stultifying intellectual loneliness of my 1950’s and 60’s upbringing was dictated by my looks—dark skin and unconkable kinky hair. Boys gawked at me, and girls tittered behind my back. Black teachers shook their heads in pity, and White teachers stared in amusement or in wonder. I found this rejection unbearable and encouraged by my parents to read, sought an escape in books, which were usually hard to come by.
“My Blues Love Affair,” page 20
In the 70s divorced and on my own, I danced at the discoes, dug on Black Sabbath, David Bowie, and Alice Cooper; I interviewed Bob Marley (Catch a Fire) on three occasions and made the St. Patrick’s Day Riots at Elks Hall when New Wave stormed Los Angeles . . . yet I began wearing the grooves off my Bobby “Blue” Bland. Taj Mahal, and Otis Redding LPs . . . I was a devotee of Herbie Hancock (Hornets), thrice catching him crosstown at Dough Weston’s Troubadour . . . While listening, I am able to visualize fingering, particularly piano and guitar, instruments I’ve studied.
“Angela’s Big Night,” pages 46–47
Los Angeles Free Press, LA’s controversial 60’s underground newspaper, gave me my first official freelance reporting assignment: covering a legal defense fundraiser for the then-incarcerated Black Power Movement heroine Angela Davis . . . As a result of my report, I would be secretly boycotted from journalism for the next ten years.
“Primal Orb Density,” page 55
Here I am. I prize myself greatly I want the world to enjoy me and my art but something’s undeniably wrong, I’ve come to regard myself as a living, breathing statistic governed not by my individual will, but by forces outside myself.
“Primal Orb Density,” page 65
My delicious dilemma is language. How I structure it. How the fiction of history structures me. And as I’ve become more and more shattered, my tongue has become tangled . . . I am glassed in by language as