Heart First Into This Ruin

In 2005, the poet Wanda Coleman read some of her work for documentary filmmaker Bob Bryan. In the film, she sits on an overstuffed leather couch in the bright white living room of her brother’s Los Angeles home, a laundry basket packed with books next to her. Her dreadlocks form a kind of halo, kept in place by multicolored hairpins, and when she sets a pair of orange acetate glasses on her nose, it’s surely more for effect than out of necessity. The 58-year-old poet knew her work by heart, including “Sonnet 100,” the final poem in her "American Sonnets" sequence and one of the pieces she performed for Bryan’s camera.

When the poem was first published in Mercurochrome (2001), a finalist for a National Book Award, it ended

                                           . . . sing to me
thy anthem of untasted fruit. slay in me the
wretchedness that names me brute. liberate my
    half-dead kill. come. glory in my rebirth.
    come. glory in my wonder’s will

By the time Coleman nears the poem’s volta in the film, though, she goes off-script, vamping a refrain out of the poem’s final lines: “sing to me, sing to me, sing to me, baby,” she croons before dissolving into a cackle.

This is Coleman getting the last laugh. “Come,” she bids all who doubted that she—a college dropout and a single Black mother from South Central Los Angeles—could write 100 sonnets, or win a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and that National Book Award nomination. “Glory in my wonder’s will,” she crows, laying down the gauntlet for every modern sonnet sequence to come even as she connects her sequence to that foundational sonneteer, “will”—as in William Shakespeare. With wonder sounding a slant rhyme for Wanda, this may as well read Wanda’s Will, a Black woman’s claim on a literary inheritance that’s too often the purview of white men. Finally, “Sing to me,” she demands, now that she’s at last receiving the appreciation long craved, the heretofore “untasted fruit” of attention from interviewers, scholars, and fans.

Today, Coleman’s significance is unquestioned. She’s “a central contributor to the new black poetics emerging in the post-Black Arts period,” according to scholar Jennifer Ryan-Bryant, who places Coleman alongside Eugene B. Redmond, Ishmael Reed, Nathaniel Mackey, Afaa Michael Weaver, Harryette Mullen, and Elizabeth Alexander. Poets from Terrance Hayes to Billy Collins to Gerald Stern have borrowed her signature American sonnet (Collins and Stern without giving credit). Many of the sonnets, as well as her other poems, long out of print, are newly available in Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems (Black Sparrow Press, 2020), edited by Hayes, whose volume American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018) was also a finalist for a National Book Award. Hayes’s book even opens with an epigraph from Coleman’s “Sonnet 88”: “bring me / to where / my blood runs.”

With poems drawn from eight of Coleman’s nearly two-dozen books, Wicked Enchantment is indeed “selected.” In fact, many of the collections Coleman published in her lifetime ran to more than 300 pages, the kind of bulk most poets amass only in a volume of collected poetry. All this she produced in spare minutes snatched from other full-time work, sometimes while holding down two or three jobs at a time to make ends meet, “her paycheck spread too thin across the bread of / weeks,” as she puts it in “’Tis Morning Makes Mother a Killer.”

But success came slowly for Coleman. It’s no surprise there’s a note of weariness or plain anger in that triumphal laugh from Bryan’s film. Langston Hughes might call it “laughing to keep from crying,” an impulse central to the Blues and, by extension, to Black American art. Even in her success, Coleman had plenty to cry about: a son lost to AIDS, two disappointing marriages, a boycott from the Black American literati, and the racism and sexism of her urban Los Angeles community and her country. Coleman recognized that many of the tragedies of her life were systemic, the result of persistent, deepening inequalities; “i write about urban bleeders and breeders, but am / troubled because their tragedies echo mine,” she wrote in “American Sonnet (95).”

When later asked to reflect on the persistence of such tragedies, Coleman thought back to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, guiding lights of her early activism with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the NAACP Youth Council, and the US Organization, Ron Karenga’s rival to the Black Panther Party. “What would they say,” she asked, when

most African Americans are still fighting the same battles all over again on more complex and unforgiving ground? What would they say about the long and growing list of young black males killed in “officer” involved shootings? What would they say about lawyers, judges, and other criminal justice personnel investing in the prison system as a business that criminalizes black and Latina/o youth? It’s very painful to see so much wasted human potential and the ongoing strangulation of the majority of black people, even my own diminishment. I put that view, that vision, and that pain into my poetry.

Although Coleman was celebrated as a voice of her native Los Angeles (she was known as “the L.A. Blueswoman”), her poetry does not reflect just Southern California but also Black lives across the United States. She writes about her parents’ youth in the Jim Crow South and the Great Migration that took them west, to Watts, where she was born in 1946. The African American civil rights movement, the rise of Black nationalism, and the flowering of the Black feminist movement all shape her work too. “Racism is our national horror,” she told journalist Harvey Robert Kubernik in 1990, a reality she worked to expose and redress in her poems, short stories, a novel, journalism, and literary criticism.

A poem such as “Things No One Knows” exemplifies her approach. It’s at once a portrait of a specific Los Angeles rental and an archetypal story of endemic racism familiar to many impoverished Black Americans. Here, there’s never enough money for housing, the car “was stripped and stolen months ago,” and too many friends have fallen victim to a range of institutional evils: “in Vietnam or in the liquor lockers / of America or in those classrooms long ago.” But the poem is also wickedly funny as it navigates daily heartbreak. It begins

overcome by the stink of mildewed wash, i have
been three months behind in my rent for thirty years. my
countrymen do not love me. even my lines have
lines. we are getting old in a city where the old are
invisible. i have nothing new to eat and barely five minutes
to use the jane. and less time than that to revisit my
father’s grave. i’ve worn the same underwear for fifteen
of those thirty years and some pieces longer than that

Blasting the first line with a toxic stink, Coleman colors the scene of the rental with the gritty details of poverty—mildew, old food, old clothes—never shying away from the most mundane debasements. Maybe moldy clothing isn’t ultimately the cause of the late rent payment, but in a Coleman poem, social injustices fester and infect every person, place, and thing. She musters the lexicon of sickness to diagnose such social ills in unexpected details: “My wallet is dying of militant brain cancer,” she reports later in the poem. And poverty isn’t only a cash-flow problem. Time, too, is in short supply, impoverishing everything from basic hygiene to one’s ability to mourn the dead.

But undercutting this mildewed laundry list of troubles is Coleman’s subversive and empowering wit. Playfully re-gendering a euphemism for a toilet, john to jane, is a quick kick at patriarchy. And the grumbly “even my lines have lines” is no mere diagnosis of aging skin but a telling line for a writer of lines, especially one such as Coleman who was so productive despite little support and no free time. Ultimately, a final fear, “i expect to die poemless and to be /  cremated in state ovens,” is almost ridiculous. She is not someone who will die poemless, at least.

Indeed, after publishing her first poetry chapbook, Art in the Court of the Blue Fag (1977), Coleman put out a new volume about every two years for the rest of her life. Only a few of her books, the later ones, are the kind of slim paperbacks that dominate poetry shelves today. Working for much of her career with John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, Coleman’s earlier books are the elegant hardbacks of Black Sparrow’s heyday, many adorned with cover art by Barbara Martin, John’s wife.

The Black Sparrow hardbacks were an aesthete’s response to indie presses such as City Lights, whose Pocket Poets series brought cookie-cutter simplicity to the covers of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) and Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (1964), among others. But like City Lights, Black Sparrow also published literary outlaws; Coleman described Martin as a collector “of Persian rugs, rare books, and edgy writers.” Martin founded the press as a home for Charles Bukowski, offering him a $100-per-month salary, and the publisher went on to put out books by Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, John Yau, Eileen Myles, and more.

Martin gave Coleman a reading list and pushed her to study with Black Sparrow authors Diane Wakoski and Clayton Eshelman before he would publish her. Coleman joined the workshop Eshelman conducted around his dining room table. There, she absorbed his interest in Reichian therapy, finding in it a method for channeling her rage into poetry (Wilhelm Reich, an innovator in psychoanalytic theory, explored links between mental health and bodily health, especially sexuality). Eshelman taught her to “wring the blood out of language,” she wrote in her memoir, “Dancer on a Blade.” In Wakoski’s workshops, which were also intimate home meetings, Coleman honed her voice as a critic. Reading widely with Wakoski—a syllabus that included Robert Kelly, Federico García Lorca, and Sylvia Plath—Coleman learned to challenge her teacher’s opinions of canon and craft. “I metaphorically grew up in Black Sparrow Press,” Coleman told the scholar Malin Pereira in 2010.

Coleman had few other opportunities for formal writing education, but she more than made up for it on the job. In fact, her career makes a ready example for those looking to avoid the expensive programs that train many poets now, which Coleman simply couldn’t afford. After spending her twenties raising a son and a daughter while supporting antiracist activist groups, Coleman worked as a freelance writer, eventually landing a gig editing the first African American softcore pornography magazine, Players, in 1972. There she was at the hub of Holloway House Publishing, “an unexpected center of black literary production,” according to scholar Justin Gifford, and one of the few alternatives to the strait-laced Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago, with its well-known Jet and Ebony magazines. At Holloway, Coleman worked with “street literature” writers, including Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines. When it became clear that Holloway was underpaying those writers for highly profitable writing, Coleman left her position and turned seriously to her longtime interest in television and film. She wrote for shows such as Starsky and Hutch, Sanford and Son, and Days of Our Lives, helping the latter win a daytime Emmy. After she met and married her third husband, the poet-artist Austin Straus, in 1981, she began hosting a biweekly poetry radio show with him, during which they interviewed writers from around the world. “It was tantamount to continued informal education de jure,” she explained.

Her poems are shot through with traces of her on-the-job education, and they reframe her experiences to highlight the exploitation of women and people of color. Her time at Players informs erotic poems such as “Put Some Sex Sonnet”—which centers on female sexual pleasure instead of the male focus typical of Players—or in “They Came Knocking on My Door at 7 A.M.,” in which the LAPD comes knocking “mid-fuck” and the speaker shrewdly plays up her dishabille to fend off interrogation. Her other woman-centered “street literature” includes “Felon,” in which a mother worries not only about evading the police but also about retaining her parental rights: “my heart comes thru my skin // they’ve snatched my kids,” it begins, a loss the poem’s speaker fights in court even though she’s no felon: “only crime i’m guilty of trying to / play alice straight in crookedland.”

When not battling what’s crooked in her community, the characteristically lower-case i of Coleman’s poems fights a likewise troubled interior landscape. In “Wanda in Worryland,” a catalog of anxieties—ranging from shame over a suicide attempt to “old white lady cart pushers in / supermarkets who block the aisles in slow motion”—all provoke the same retaliation: “i have gone after people,” reads the refrain, with “guns,” “rocks,” “my fists,” and, finally, “with poems.”

Coleman’s sometimes seamy résumé did not earn the admiration of the literary elite. But having little to lose left her free to appraise, especially the Black American writers of her day, whom she felt lacked the critical attention they deserved. She aimed to stir up more “discussion about degrees of excellence,” she told Pereira, explaining, “a Mari Evans or Langston Hughes was equated to a Phillis Wheatley or James Weldon Johnson without the serious critique each poet merited.”

But her critic’s pen could prove vicious, as with her takedown of Maya Angelou’s sixth autobiography, A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002). Notably, Coleman wasn’t alone in criticizing the volume; scholars John McWhorter and Hilton Als were also unenthusiastic. But Coleman held nothing back; she called Angelou’s prose “bad to God-awful,” accused her of “artfully playing the race card,” and ultimately deemed Song “a sloppily written fake.” Because of the review, which appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Coleman lost speaking engagements and was banned from the Black-owned Los Angeles bookshop Eso Won.

A 1997 review (also in the Los Angeles Times) of Audre Lorde’s collected poetry is perhaps more troubling. Although Coleman insisted that she admired Lorde’s writing, caustic phrases overpower admiration. Lorde is “tone-deaf and rhythmless,” “not a gifted poet,” and “one of the greatest literary hustlers of the 20th century,” a hack who writes white, even if she does it well. Worse, Coleman refused to back down from outright xenophobia, even after she was confronted. She classified Lorde’s point of view as that which “typifies the immigrant-of-color, an occasional enemy within the ranks, who fattens on the sufferings of African Americans yet sides with whites, believing we home-grown colored are inferior.” (Lorde was actually born in New York City, as Coleman notes, to immigrants from the Caribbean). Recalling the situation in 2002, Coleman remembered the “informal boycott” brought against her by other Black immigrant writers as a gesture that almost made her retract her statement. But Coleman chose to “stand by [her] words,” counting the blowback from her book reviews as evidence that the literary elite was determined to rebuke her.

Being ostracized fueled her independence and prompted greater experimentation in her poetry. As a young writer, she planned projects with awards in mind. She told interviewers that she originally conceived of the "American Sonnets" series because it “sounded vaguely or specifically academic,” so it was more likely to get a nod from the NEA or the Guggenheim Foundation. “I wanted to (eventually) earn my way into the canon (or priesthood),” she explained. “I had hoped it would bring me the literary success I had craved since childhood forages in the public library, swooning over Poetry magazine.” But when these projects didn’t garner the expected attention, she stopped trying to strategize her way to prominence: “it finally sank in that my presumed acceptance into anyone’s literary canon was a destructive and expensive notion. If I were to carry on, I had to let go of it. I needed to place maximum focus on craft alone.”

Her projects became increasingly surreal, fragmented, and challenging. She experimented with automatic writing—she used the term zoning—and claimed she could channel the style of any writer. She drew on other poets’ works as structures for her own poems, shaping decidedly feminist and antiracist responses. Sixty such poems—her way of literally rewriting the canon of 20th century poetry—are collected in the “Retro Rogue Anthology” section of Mercurochrome. There, Elizabeth Bishop’s “Little Exercise” becomes “Consciousness Raising Exercise,” and Frank O’Hara’s “To the Harbormaster” becomes “To the Head Nigger Wench in Charge.” The first lines of her version of Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” don’t invoke Whitman as Ginsberg did but instead offer Coleman’s take on Ginsberg himself: “what bohunkian images i have of you / crash against my niggernoggin as i shiver and stroll / long air-conditioned aisles at 2 a.m.” Her reading and writing formed a positive feedback loop: “I virtually could not read anything without a poem of one kind or another emerging even as I read, as fast as I read,” she said.

When the first American Sonnet emerged, “I recognized it immediately,” she told Pereira. “I was excited, but it took a while for me to understand where I was going creatively.” The poem invites readers to ask where they’re going in a world that unfairly privileges white people over people of color. Part surreal street scene, part math problem, the disparate stanzas loosely come together to interrogate racism and its violence:

the lurid confessions of an ex-cake junky: “i blew it
all. blimped. i was really stupid. i waited
until i was forty to get hooked on white flour
and powdered sugar”
 
            white greed                                       black anger
     _______________        X           ______________      =
     socio-eco dominance                       socio-eco disparity
 
a)         increased racial tension/polarization
b)        increased criminal activity
c)         sporadic eruptions manifest as mass killings
d)        collapses of longstanding social institutions
e)        the niggerization of the middle class
 
the blow to his head cracks his skull
he bleeds eighth notes & treble clefs
 
(sometimes i feel like i’m almost going)
 
to Chicago, baby do you want to go?

At every turn, the poem reframes readers’ expectations and prompts new questions. We’re told right away that this junky is no hardcore addict; he’s hooked on “white flour / and powdered sugar” rather than illicit drugs. But then why such suggestive imagery, with the cake ingredients evoking cocaine even as slang terms for the drug, such as blow, keep cropping up? Why does the sugar junky end up injured, seemingly just as prone to violence as the crack addict who lurks in the poem’s connotative landscape? And why does he bleed music: eighth notes and treble clefs, the tools for writing a melody?

In fact, the real “blow to his head” seems to be the unsolvable equation, a multiple-choice question wherein the problem only proliferates in the possible answers. Ultimately, the problem drug is whiteness itself, as ubiquitous as flour and sugar and evidently as addictive. The terms of the poem’s equation leave little hope for a good solution—there’s no real way to “solve” this math problem. But fighting against it brings music, like a jazz riff pressing back against the confines of a musical measure.

As the sonnets emerged, Coleman drew freely from established Shakespearean and Petrarchan precedents. But “I wanted to have my form and explode it too,” she explained. She used rhyme and iambic meters only when they suited her, and she only sometimes kept within the sonnet’s usual 14-line framework.

The new mode pushed her to experiment with syntax, punctuation, tone, and voice. The slash became a favorite device, a tighter coordinating conjunction than and or or but also more ambiguous. Coleman sometimes deploys it to compress the sonic texture of her poems, as in “American Sonnet (3),” in which “fair splay/pay” is “the stuff myths are made of” in a rigged literary marketplace—and we can’t help but hear a third rhyming phrase, “fair play,” echoing beyond the page.

The period, too, became an opportunity for innovation. For example, “American Sonnet (7)” disregards the period’s usual function as a sentence ender. Instead, its periods focus attention on the poem’s most poignant images, which illustrate what being the target of hate, especially racism, feels like. The poem reads as a set of analogies strung on a single run-on sentence, with each comparator a separate stanza linked by is:

to take the outer skin in. rehumanize it
 
is
 
swallowing whole the dourness of
an unremitting scorn and unstoppable cruelty
the exploitive ambition of pricey looks
stealing meat off the bone
 
is
 
to know grief my unnaming tongue
it reaches for its lyric the mother of
all pain to birth to know this ugly/an
abandoned stillborn blued around its eyes and
bodily bruised. found buried in a dumpster
beneath the rages of an unsung life
 
is
 
to know i must survive myself

No punctuation ends the poem—in fact, none of Coleman’s “American Sonnets” ever ends with a period; there’s only the occasional final question mark in this ever-questioning series. Without a period, the sonnet offers a corrective to the “unsung life” it mourns: this speaker’s song is unending.

Other sonnets try on new personas to render cultural critiques. “Sonnet 8” and “Sonnet 15” expose the empty rhetoric and slick marketeering of get-rich-quick schemers: “you’ll enjoy exclusive / advantages unavailable to others. because you deserve / special attention.” In a series of impossible commands, “Sonnet 71” lays bare the cruel logic of double standards:

first you must prove that you can sing while running
backwards. good. now prove that you can read under
water. excellent. not a bad ankle grabber when you
use your lower lip. okay. now, let’s see how you handle
a wallet. bank account. taxes. bankruptcy. terrific.

The breadth and complexity of Coleman’s "American Sonnets" earn them a central place in her oeuvre; they offer stunning examples of her lyricism, wisdom, and wit. Few other modern sequences deliver such a sustained or incisive critique of American culture and its pervasive injustices. These are not only “among her most important accomplishments,” Ryan-Bryant writes but also “an essential contribution to the history of American poetics.”

Before her death in 2013, Coleman planned to bring all 100 sonnets together in one volume, which she intended to call Jazz Sonnets. Wicked Enchantment includes just 35 of the sonnets, so readers seeking the complete sequence will need to track down African Sleeping Sickness (1990), Hand Dance (1993), American Sonnets (1994), Bathwater Wine (1998), and Mercurochrome. (Bathwater Wine and Mercurochrome, her most decorated volumes, are good places to begin.)

Those new to Coleman might also enjoy The Riot Inside Me (2005), a collection of literary criticism, journalism, and memoirs. There are also several LPs, cassette tapes, and CDs of Coleman reading her work, including Black/Angeles (1988), High Priestess of Word (1990), and Berserk on Hollywood Blvd. (1991), all produced by the independent label New Alliance Records.

“What she gives me, I can’t get anywhere else,” Hayes says of Coleman, pointing especially to her humor and inventive approach to language. “I’m a fan, like everybody else.” In Wicked Enchantment, Coleman’s fans, new and old, will find some of her most vital challenges to American racism and its market-driven culture, rendered in her uniquely unsettling lyric voice. Her work pushes us to confront injustice with as much candor as she did—and with as much care. “[I] see myself thrown heart first into this ruin,” she wrote in “American Sonnet 2,” “not for any crime / but being.”