Wanda Coleman (1946–2013)

Wanda Coleman didn't live long enough to win Los Angeles' official poet laureate post first inaugurated by then-mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in 2012 -- she died in 2013 -- but to fans, her de facto advocates; and, I'd argue, to her haters also (how dare Wanda malign and/or mock their sacred bovines, Maya Angelou and MLK!), it was obvious she had long been Los Angeles' unofficial poet laureate, and it was obvious whether or not she was ever officially recognized (or officially snubbed) by any show more mayor or other elected dumb ass. She'll always be the reigning Poet Period ... of Watts.

Wanda Coleman's poetry was too dangerous, too daring, for a self-aggrandizing straight-laced politician to probably understand let alone endorse; too lunatic fringed for them; too edgy; too in-their-smarmy-fucking-faces; too strange; too estranged; too deranged; too ENRAGED; too I-don't-give-a-fuck-what-you-think-Assholes-how-I-relate-my-colloquial-street-slang-on-the-page-about-a-socioeconomically-squashed-place-you've-long-marginalized-ostracized-disenfranchised-with-your-MANifest-inequality-injustice-you-like-to-legislate, for any politician, no matter how well behaved, or well depraved, to publicly get behind. Politicians lack something, as well, the levity? the self awareness? the freedom? whatever it is, perhaps just the simple wherewithal to be quite so self-effacing -- or as self critical -- as a person like Wanda Coleman. Few critics were as unflinchingly honest in their critiquing or criticizing of Wanda Coleman as Wanda Coleman was of Wanda Coleman. But she also mocked the criticism. Also mocked her own rage while mocking those who criticized her for being enraged. She wrote many pieces that dealt with it head-on, like Wanda Why Aren't You Dead.

wanda when are you gonna wear your hair down
wanda. that's a whore's name
wanda why ain't you rich....
why don't you lose weight
wanda why are you so angry
how come your feet are so goddamn big
can't you afford to move out of this hell hole
if i were you were you were you
wanda what is it like being black
i hear you don't like black men
tell me you're ac/dc. tell me you're a nympho....
wanda you have no humor in you you too serious....
wanda you're ALWAYS on the attack....

Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems & Stories 1968-1986 showcases exceptionally well Wanda Coleman's development from a young, somewhat conventional poet, to the accomplished Poet she became with that instantly identifiable Voice as instantly identifiable as -- pick your favorite singer or celebrity criminal -- theirs: that black, female, persona non grata Voice of the dispossessed in the inner city, gushing out in relentless fury her characters' / her people's inarticulate and heretofore unheard individual outrage into one bitter, but beautiful, collective Voice of Outrage that could just as easily explain, poetically and powerfully, the explosions of August 11, 1965, as it could anticipate the sad helicopter closeup spectacles of April 29, 1992, at the corner of Florence and Normandie. Wanda Coleman's voice was often violent, and it was often vilified, yet few poets of her generation ever fused their Voice to the voices of the Voiceless Victimized with as savage fucking grace as she did. Read Roaches, The Arab Clerk, or April 15th 1985* sometime; they are all riveting (and sometimes revolting) examples of her intense gritty vignettes / short stories and visionary prose poems. Thank God Black Sparrow Press was there to faithfully champion her for three decades after Hollywood graced her with an Emmy and then gracelessly kicked "the loud" supposedly "self righteous bitch" out.

Wanda Coleman could just as soon mock (or let one of her many narrator's mock) the "bigoted old white bitches" in line at the San Francisco bank in April 15th 1985, as she could -- or as her possibly schizophrenic speaker could in the title prose-poem of the collection, Heavy Daughter Blues -- the political and socioeconomic insufficiency of the most celebrated Dream ever dreamed in U.S. history: "i dream i dream i dream / pass the pipe--please". I mean who but Wanda Coleman would've had the chutzpah to pass off MLKs "I Have a Dream" as a pipe dream? Or was she merely echoing aloud what a lot of people had already been thinking quietly about the man and his unrealized legacy? Or is equality among blacks and whites no longer a pipe dream in the U.S.? Maybe not if we're to believe that black, female, persona non grata Voice of Heavy Daughter Blues. Or, maybe, yes; maybe we do believe.

Difficult to decide what the Voice of Heavy Daughter Blues believes because her Voice is a multiplicity of voices, past and present. One second, a voice can "throw the symbols" and "make reverberations" and assert "the t.v. is teaching my children hibakusha**" and, the next, another voice proclaim with such absurd and delusional conviction "i am in love with a dopefiend who sleeps under freeways" and "the postman has put a hex on my P.O. box" that you almost palpably feel the atomic shockwaves of twisted logic in Coleman's nod to Langston Hughes ripple upward off the page with such relentless mushrooming force that even the bunker you may have built on the sly to hide your pettiest prejudice behind is vaporized, exposed. Heavy and nearly hopeless shit from Wanda Coleman, this late Blue Daughter of The American Pipe Dream.

Wanda Coleman was such an awesome enigma in life, such an absolute contradiction in so many interesting and appealing ways, is it really surprising then when in the short space of one of her most provocative poems, realities and fantasies and confabulations of both abruptly merge and blur line by line so that the only appropriate response to it is an equivocating "Yes" that boomerangs back at you its discombobulating "Nope"?

YesNo!NoYes! I know. I don't.

Though don't you love Wanda Coleman's response to the quandary better, when toward the end of Heavy Daughter Blues the voice of a nutty narrator "in love with a fuck freak" ruminates, turns streetwise-physicist / Ph.D. philosophy candidate, having risen from welfare to possible tenure, and, out of the palm-tree-breezy, South-Central-sleazy, tenemented-terminal-blue, ups her live-jive's ante and satirically pontificates in a deadpan delivery the dead-end lingo of her largely academic audience who regardless of Wanda's snarkyness would still no doubt most infinitely approve: "the constant preoccupation of a sphere / is in traversing the Möbius strip"? Shit. I know I do!

~~~~~

* Read the complete text of "April 15th 1985" right here.
** I recommend Googling the word show less

I picked this up just because it was on my favorite bookseller's rec shelf at Hooked. And I would like to know HOW HAD I NEVER HEARD OF WANDA COLEMAN BEFORE? Her frank writing, especially about the perpetually exploitive systems of poverty, blew me away.

I wrote down lots of favorite poems to return to and read again, but a few highlights were the anxiety/vulnerability of "Giving Birth," the heartbreak of "Emmett Till," the playfulness/wistfulness of "Thiefheart."

What people talk about when show more they call poetry powerful. show less

National Books Awards Poetry Finalist 2001

This book was published in 2001, back when I did not follow poetry awards. That was also in my Years of Little Reading due to having small kids. I heard about Coleman because my son read some of her poems in his California Literature class this year. The kids in the class had not been born when this book was published. And one of the poems (which I marked but lost because my cat pulls markers out of books) is about academics not accepting her into show more the academy as a self-taught poet without even a BA. She has made it into high scho0ol curriculum.

My favorite part of this book was Part II, Twentieth Century Nod-Out. These poems largely focus on life in LA--especially as a black woman in Los Angeles, like Coleman herself. In many ways little-to-nothing has changed.

In other ways, everything has changed since she wrote this book. Coleman had a son who died of AIDS at the age of 32, c1990 if I understood the poetry. There is a lot about grief and memory. And a fair amount about "the virus". It was strange reading this in 2021, when "the virus" means something very very different. Meanwhile, AIDS in the US is no longer the death sentence it once was.

I am not saying this book is dated. It is an amazing snapshot of a time and place, that has changed and also not changed at all. I imagine reading this back in 2001 was a very different experience--something else that is gone forever. show less

I had not heard of Wanda Coleman before picking up this new collection of her selected works but it made me an instant fan. Sadly, she passed in 2013. Most of these poems were written 30-40 years ago but are strikingly relevant to the current racial environment in America today. I hope this collection finds her a whole new audience.