A photo of late poet Wanda Coleman, with her poetry collection Wicked Enchantment laid overtop on the right.
Extracts

‘She denounced boredom, cowardice, the status quo’: the brilliance of Wanda Coleman

In this extracted introduction to Wicked Enchantment, the first-ever UK collection of Coleman's poems, award-winning poet and professor Terrance Hayes remembers the 'unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles', whose work confronted life's hardships with startling realness.

Terrance Hayes

What we have in Wicked Enchantment 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.

There is no poet, black or otherwise, who wrote with as much wicked candour and passion.

I don’t remember what she read, though I know she was writing some of her best work at the time and finally receiving some long-overdue attention. Merc­urochrome, the book she published that year, would be a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in Poetry, and 1998’s Bathwater Wine had received the Lenore Marshall Prize from the American Academy of Poets. [Poems from both collections are included in Wicked Enchantment.] 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. [Wanda was a mentee to the young Tamblyn while the former worked as a writer on American soap opera Days of Our Lives – for which Coleman won an Emmy.] Her fans also 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, who wrote with as much wicked candour and passion.

Wanda denounced boredom, cowardice, the status quo.

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

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Above photo credit: Michael J. Elderman

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