Wanda Coleman 101

Few writers are as relentless as Wanda Coleman was. A single mother who grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, Coleman often struggled to make ends meet: a reality that poems like “Things No One Knows” speak to memorably. But she also led a full, colorful life; she won an Emmy for writing for Days of Our Lives, edited a soft-core porn magazine, even performed in a punk rock band. On top of all this, she managed to produce an expansive body of work, writing fiction, essays, and journalism in addition to volumes of poetry, which could be hundreds of pages long. Energetic, irreverent, and unpretentious, her poetry is uncompromising in its vision and formal dexterity. Though she came to be regarded as the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles, her work was slow to receive critical acclaim and continues to be underread. But thanks to younger advocates, such as Terrance Hayes, her contributions to the history of the sonnet, to post–Black Arts poetics, and to American poetry generally are receiving fresh attention. Ordered chronologically, this selection of her poems serves as a brief introduction to her distinctive body of work.

“Beaches. Why I Don't Care For Them”
This poem from Coleman’s first poetry collection, Mad Dog Black Lady, embodies numerous tendencies that endured across her career. From the title onward, it’s characteristically direct, even blunt. But the “associations” it lists are nuanced, and its language is textured: it registers not only the “years of being ashamed” of her body, for example, but also the “sad aftertaste” that lingers even after that shame is overcome. Indeed, like much of her work, “Beaches” is tonally variable, quickly moving from clear-eyed observations about racism to an unabashed sexuality to a fevered fantasy of being a “feminist ahab.” The poem is formally nimble, too, employing the unpredictable periods and enjambments that proved a trusty tool in her poetic toolkit. Finally, it’s very much a poem of Los Angeles, whose highways, coastline, and sprawling neighborhoods were a consistent source of irritation, solace, and inspiration.

“About God & Things”
This aching poem from Coleman’s second book, Imagoes (1983), captures how even romance and family can be a double-edged sword for a Black woman in the United States. It spans years, but each short section is presented in present tense, lending not only urgency and intimacy but also a sense of how the “limits put on you black man / me, black woman” intrude on so many moments of their relationship. Even love itself becomes unspeakable for the speaker: “don’t say it loud,” she says, “america will never let you.” As the ending suggests, those limitations, elisions, and absences are passed on, things the child inherits. The poem’s nuanced sense of tragedy provides a powerful and necessary corrective to a Reagan-era public discourse that often demonized Black parents and social life.

“The Saturday Afternoon Blues”
A restless craftsperson, Coleman continually experimented with and invented new forms. Over the course of her career, she wrote rants, odes, confessions, “essay” poems, and poems as doctor’s reports, multiple choice exams, and math problems. This piece from Imagoes finds her working in a more traditional mode, but the result is transcendent: it’s hard to imagine a more perfect blues poem. Coleman riffs on the form’s conventional music, with her rhymes growing more insistent as the poem continues, mimicking the mounting desperation of the down-and-out speaker. Like Langston Hughes, the blues poem’s earliest practitioner, she cuts her tragedy with comedy. This doubleness might be most evident in the refrain, whose self-consciousness (“a lyric for a song”) can be read both as sly, a winking hat tip to the tradition she’s working in, and grim, a resigned acknowledgement that sadness isn’t particular to her.

“Notes of a Cultural Terrorist 2”
The central conceit of this poem—that being poor and Black is as exhausting and dangerous as fighting in a war—may seem less edgy in context: it was first published in Hand Dance in 1993, in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots that swept through Los Angeles. But if that “spontaneous torrid upsurge of rage” provided inspiration for her poem, Coleman’s real subject here is the less-visible violence of poverty, of the grind and indignities of daily life at the mercy of the broken U.S. health care and justice systems. The poem’s fury is served cold, alternating between punchier, prosier scenes of urban deprivation and shorter, more lyrical meditations. The collision of these different modes amplifies both and gives the piece the feel of a panorama, much like Montage of a Dream Deferred, the Langston Hughesepic that it references. Its final line, though—at once abject and defiant—is pure Wanda.

“American Sonnet 51”
Coleman’s magnum opus might be her 100 American sonnets, a sequence written over many years and scattered across several books. Originally intended to “earn [her] way into the canon,” her “jazzified” takes on the venerable form are high-octane, unpredictable, and utterly original. They keep the sonnet’s traditional compression, but, as she explained in an interview, “go absolutely bonkers within that constraint.” This exemplary poem from Bathwater Wine, which won the 1999 Lenore Marshall Prize, finds Coleman working in a visionary mode. She imagines a fantasy version of herself, a “last incarnation” where she “stumbled into fame / without falling” and “always wore my mink coat / to the Laundromat.” The extended riff keeps raising the stakes until the Shakespearean volta, which seems to break the spell. If she is able to “wip[e] out all purveyors of poverty,” the bathetic ending suggests, her life would need to be so different that she’d effectively be severed from her children and her community.

“Letter to My Older Sister 5”
Coleman was a serial creator of serial projects, often revisiting ideas or forms and writing sequels to her earlier poems. The “Letter to My Older Sister” series—begun in the earlier book Bathwater Wine—addresses a sibling she never knew, one who “died before christening,” an approach that provides an intimate perspective on family and loss. Published in Mercurochrome, this epistle is, in some ways, a straightforward confessional poem: focused on “the pangs-n-thangs of girlhood,” its recollections are vivid, melancholic, and even nostalgic. Clear as they can be, however, her images are anything but clear-cut. Her description of the antiseptic mercurochrome, for example, highlights love’s power as a balm and suggests its limitations, an impression further underscored by the poem’s thorny, surreal ending.

“Supermarket Surfer”
Coleman’s Mercurochrome, a National Book Award finalist in 2001, contains the celebrated “Retro Rogue Anthology” sequence, in which she imitates, speaks to, and sometimes castigates poets ranging from Elizabeth Bishop to James Wright to Lewis Carroll. “Supermarket Surfer” takes on Allen Ginsberg, whose unabashed lines and visionary diction had a clear and abiding influence on Coleman’s own. Rewriting his famous “A Supermarket in California,” Coleman casts Ginsberg in the role of Whitman and embraces his appetites, playfulness, and critical eye. But she also stands apart from him in important ways: in contrast to Ginsberg’s bohemian fantasyland, Coleman’s store is a “lonely” place, where the avocados are “more like plankton-stained golf balls / or too rotten.” Moreover, because of her race, she is closely surveilled as she wanders the aisles: “somewhere, i am detected via camera / lens picking over pepper mills.” Both paying homage and one-upping her Beat poet predecessor, the poem’s last lines are funny and sad and—like Coleman at her best—pack a real punch.