Myth of Arrival

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.

"This land of jungles and paddy fields
is where Heaven meets Earth."
— Larry Mitchell, "The Ballad of Vietnam"

I have just finished reading a book about war and survival. Very few poets have written about war first hand. That is not to say there are not a lot of war-themed poems in the world. When George Gordon Noel, known to the world as Lord Byron, went on his first European tour he kept a poetic diary of everything he came upon as he went along. He saw first hand the Peninsular War (1808 — 1814) as Napoleon Bonaparte attempted to invade Spain and Byron wrote about it at a time when no one else was doing such things. When he returned home he translated his diaries into poetry and published them as the first of four cantos called Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The poems immediately became a huge success which lead Byron to note, "I woke one day to find myself famous."

The bulk of poetry that deals with war tends to be anti-war poetry, usually written by those who have never experienced it, living on the other side of the planet from where it is happening. Much of the poetry written by members of groups like Poets Against War and Poetry Without Borders: poets of witness falls into this category. There is nothing good or bad about that; it just is. Poets like Brian Turner in Here, Bullet (2005) and Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau (1988) are the notable exceptions, recording their first hand war experiences. Now we should add Larry Mitchell to that select list.

I have just finished reading Mitchell's Potawatomi Tracks (The Ballad of Vietnam and Other Stories) from heliographica press (2004). Larry Mitchell is a Potawatomi from the Prairie Band reservation in Kansas and lived through the fire fight that lasted for days on the notorious Hill 805 before it was overrun by the enemy. His "The Ballad of Vietnam," a free verse poem, starts this way:

Firebase Ripcord sits on the ridge of a nearby mountain.
A desolate firebase;
one that looks like the brown hump of a buffalo … (1)

Larry Mitchell is an excellent story teller. The poem takes us from that hill back into time to record Mitchell's experiences that lead him up to find himself "an infantryman that served in this rifle company/ on Hill 805./ Under a livid grey sky,/ it took me half a July morning to dig a fox-hole" (3). The sign of a good poet is writing a poem that makes you want to re-read it again and again, that makes you want to go up to strangers and say, "you need to read this!" "The Ballad of Vietnam" is such a poem and Larry Mitchell is such a poet.

Perhaps one of the hardest parts of telling a story is the ending, especially when there is no clear stopping point. Survivor's guilt, substance abuse, fear all blur the lines between "the end" and the life the writer is living now. So it is to Mitchell's credit that he ends his poem the way he does, setting us up for the other themes of his book — Mitchell's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, his hellish decent into drugs and alcohol, the endless racism and abuse he suffered as being both a Vietnam Veteran and a Native American. But Potawatomi Tracks is a collection of poems about survival most of all. In the Introduction the author Joni Bour writes, "This isn't an easy book to read. It is painfully easy to follow, but it isn't easy to look at" (i). And yet looking hard and long at our collective actions is exactly what we need to do. Potawatomi Tracks is a book that needs to be read by everyone who has been affected by war, regardless of their political presumptions.

As long as we keep sending soldiers out into the world to fight and die and suffer on our behalf we need poets and story tellers like Larry Mitchell to tell us the hard stories about what our actions are doing in the world. That is the other job of a good poet. "The Ballad of Vietnam" is such a poem and Larry Mitchell is such a poet.