There will always be a backlash against the edgy, the extreme, the revolutionary. Right now the academic canon can't get enough of stream of consciousness, free verse, genderless, anti-political poets. If a poem like Ginsberg's Howl did anything, it gave permission for rambling, theory-based, abstract conceptionalism to become the dominate form of today's poetry.
More often than not poets that seek to find place in both race and identity go missing from many of the mainstream publications and discussions one finds in libraries and bookshops. This is both a disservice to these poets and to the continual discourse of poetry in America. To be able to talk with any authority on any issue is rare. When one finds a poet who can combine race, gender and history — and let them sing together — that poet should be championed by those of us who do not have those gifts or skills.
Wanda Coleman is such a poet. Her book, Ostinato Vamps (Univ. of Pitssburgh Press, 2003) should be on everyone's Top 10 books to read.
The first section of the book, Red Noir (which is based on a collage by Austin Strauss) has more complexities in twenty-five than most mature poets deal with in their whole careers. Wanda Coleman is a Los Angeles based poet and while the tone of the poems feels as if a Raymond Chandler novel was going off in the background their themes are anchored in our nation's links with slavery and of our refusal to acknowledge such crimes.
These are not easy poems to read. They are violent in the way a fire storm is violent. They are angry in the way a hurricane is angry. But they are a power, a truth of a world where women (and men) are commodities, their bodies used and abused and beyond their powers to control. It is interesting that even though slavery flourishes around the world today there are few poets who speak about it in present tense, only safely in past tense. Wanda Coleman brings everything into the NOW and the reader will be rewarded to be in the presence of such a force.
The section starts with the poem Revenants, where the body of a Black woman becomes the metaphoric land and both wait for "the dark gnarled word" of "deliverance" (3) that never comes to their rescue. Yellow Parchment places us squarely at "the guarded gates of slave quarters/ inscribed with delusions of freedom …" The poem addresses many of us, the living, who have the freedom to look the other way as "millions vanish/ from the text of the telling" and our histories are rewrote, reshaped, resold "to fit the narrow imprint/ of plunderers and exploiters …" (4) who now have control over our narratives.
In a poem like Relocation on the Edge a slave master " is listening" … "at our keyhole/ to our heated sex" in this " city of shames" (6) For Coleman the "plunderers and exploiters" are men, to be sure, but they are men of every different shade and race. And the exploited are not always those who go about their time innocently but many of us caught in deep cravings and addictions; a reminder that there is more than one form of slavery. In 78 rpms on a Piper's Dream she states "freedom is a blurred state of vision …" combined with "the ritual of escaping the lash/ of recognition –" (7). Who Coleman addresses over and over again in her poems are the anonymous survivors of life, the "legendary women" who are "working nightshifts and making change/ under the spell of knuckles" (13) from Thirty Seconds over America. Coleman weaves spirituality, sexuality and history in and out of her words; but a subtle determinism to her stories. Bad Luck in one sort or another shadows these poems. Even in "The Garden [of Eden]" we are told Coleman and her lover are left to "rake leaves" (17). The darkest of these poems is Red Eye & Black Beans where the narration slips into the hallucinations of nightmare. Rapists attack a woman, "the red tongues lickin' the black off her" combined with "the fresh smells of cut mango and too-ripe banana" (23). Eden is rotting.
While violence is always present in Red Noir so is hope; "there's a rainbow over Ararat/ painted in sunny yellows and aquamarines" (13). Here Mount Ararat, the biblical mountain Noah landed the Ark on a led his people to freedom, is held out as a similar promise to Coleman's readers. The key is surviving. Hope, promise, freedom, the "it" she addresses is available to all. She ends the section with Los Angeles Nocturne:
(you too can touch it. as much
as you want
you too can taste it. as much
as you want
there is everything to feel. there. throbbings
in your palms like my heart) (25)
This is just one of four sections, each worthy of our attention. Wanda Coleman is one of rare gifts: a poet who fire and power and the ability to sing that fire into song. Neruda could do that. Who else? Hardly anyone in America even tries to speak on the issues she does and with embarrassing results most of the time. The argument identity poetics, form, the subjects that the current middle-class poets frown on are that such things as identity supersede the song, in other words the poems are poor quality. That is just as true as any argument against any poem; no one wants to listen to bad poems. But there are just ass many rambling, theory-based, abstract poems being written today as poems that speak of our shared stories and histories. Perhaps if poets focused on their craft instead of just reacting against superficial complaints they would craft poems as power and beautiful as Coleman's. Possibly. But perhaps that is why there is only one Wanda Coleman.
