The Poetry of Coleman by Wanda Coleman

First published:Art in the Court of the Blue Fag, 1977; Mad Dog Black Lady, 1979; Imagoes, 1983; Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems and Stories, 1968-1986, 1987; The Dicksboro Hotel and Other Travels: Poems, 1989; African Sleeping Sickness: Stories and Poems, 1990; Hand Dance, 1993; American Sonnets, 1994; Bathwater Wine, 1998; Mercurochrome: New Poems, 2001; Ostinato Vamps, 2003; Wanda Coleman: Greatest Hits, 1966-2003, 2004

Type of work: Poetry

A Mad Dog Poet

Born and reared in the slums of Los Angeles, Wanda Coleman writes passionately about her life as a member of the dispossessed and downtrodden in that city, re-creating its outrageous banalities, mundane sufferings, and quotidian tragedies not only as an eyewitness but also as a player in the drama. She is best known for the anger in her poetry, which she has sometimes read to audiences dramatically by getting on all fours and barking like a mad dog. Largely neglected by literary circles and academia beyond the Pacific coast, Coleman, who knows firsthand what it means to be a welfare mother, a typist, a waitress, an editor for a soft-core pornographic magazine, and a medical clerk, is a grassroots poet whose outcry comes straight from the hearts of a largely silent majority of marginalized “minorities.”

Coleman’s anger is inseparable from her day-to-day experience of poverty, racism, and sexism, but concomitant with the anger is her love for the community that has defined her life. As Coleman reveals in an interview, “I have one desire—to write. And, through writing, control, destroy, and create social institutions. I want to wield the power that belongs to the pen.” The racial riot in Watts in 1965 led Coleman to participate in community service for young African Americans, thus preparing her for a writing career. Fighting against tremendous odds, she ventured into experimental theater and dance and then took up scriptwriting. Although she later went on to win an Emmy Award for an episode of the soap opera Days of Our Lives in 1976, she was disillusioned by Hollywood and began to concentrate on writing poetry and short fiction.

Coleman’s poetry is informed by African American speech and the blues tradition; her background in drama and scriptwriting also has an impact on her poetry. What sets her apart, however, are her writing habits, which are closely tied to the chores and burdens of her quotidian life. Speaking to her interviewers, Coleman describes herself as a “catch-as-catch-can” writer:

I write poems while I’m standing in line at the supermarket, while the car is getting fixed. When you are poor, you spend a lot of time waiting. I never wanted to waste that time, so I always had a book or notebook handy, something I could work on.

She turns her notes into poems, and if she is not initially satisfied with the result, she will keep them for future use. Because of these habits, she has developed what may be described as an “accumulative notebook style.” A Coleman poem often comes into being when enough notes on a certain topic are gathered, and now and then a new poem will emerge under a previously used title when additional notes are collected.

Coleman’s first book, Art in the Court of the Blue Fag (1977), contains examples characteristic of her poetry. Focusing on the goings-on in a pornographic film studio and the inner thoughts of the producer, his associates, and the actors and actresses, the volume’s three title poems exemplify Coleman’s application of the scriptwriting technique to poetry, with scenes fading and zooming in and out according to the shifting of perspectives. More significant, furthermore, is her treatment of sexual exploitation as a theme, allegorized by means of the “court of the blue fag” and his associates, a murderously calculating and apathetic clique.

With regard to Mad Dog Black Lady (1979), the book by which Coleman’s reputation was established, she has explained that “being a mad dog . . . was one image I had for myself in terms of my response to racism. I had to be either cured or killed. And there is no cure for rabies. . . . ’Mad Dog’ is also slang for Mogen David 20/20, a ’rot gut’ favored by winos.” Many poems in the book contain powerful, if shocking, expressions of Coleman’s anger. For example, the persona in “Where I Live” claims that she lives “at the lip of a big black vagina/ birthing nappy headed pickaninnies every hour on the hour” and goes on to state that “the country is her pimp and she can turn a trick/ swifter than any bitch ever graced this earth/ she’s the baddest piece of ass on the west coast/ named black los angeles.” In the slumscape typified by “Somewhere” and many other poems, Coleman depicts such characters as a man dropping to his death from the top of a building to avoid his debt collector (“Untitled”), a waitress slipping out “to give/ pussy to cute yellow don” in order to get extra tips (“At the Stop”), a number of prostitutes—including a teenage male (“Dear Little Boy”), cannibals (“Woman Eater”), and so forth. The injustices of society, as epitomized by these characters, have driven the poet to compare herself in “Doing Battle with the Wolf” to an African warrior who, though dripping blood, must fight against the “white wolf” of racism that “has a fetish for black meat.”

Apart from autobiographical poems in which the poetic persona and Coleman seem identical (as in “Doctor Spider,” “Drone,” and “Accounts Payable”), one of the most important personas in Mad Dog Black Lady is the composite figure of the black woman who voices her protests against her society. In “A Black Woman’s Hole,” she complains that, after she has struggled to transform her “hole” of an apartment into a paradise, “if the world knew it would put her hole up for sale and turn her out.” Unmistakably, the black woman’s protests are often couched in terms of the economics and politics of sex. For example, in “Sweet Mama Wanda Tells Fortunes for a Price,” the persona is a prostitute who calls herself happy in strictly economic terms; in “No Woman’s Land,” the black woman condemns “love politics” as “a legislature of pricks.”

The black woman, represented as the object of many seductions (“The Deuce of Cups”), is constantly afraid of being hurt and abandoned (“Wanda in Worryland”). She curses and threatens the “bourgeois nigger bitch” who has jilted her (“The Red Queen”), muses that in order to survive “you have to sort out all the sh*t life keeps/ dishing into your bowl” (“An Overdose of Lovers”), and advises that a woman judge a man by his silences (“You Judge a Man by the Silence He Keeps”). Sexuality, then, is one of the most important figures of speech in Coleman’s imagination; it has a positive role to play in the black woman’s protests as well as in the poet’s project of self-definition in her autobiographical poems. Along with race and gender, it constitutes Coleman’s rhetoric of “doing battle with the wolf” as a “mad dog black lady.”

The Quest for Spiritual and Sexual Maturity

Imagoes (1983) continues the major tendencies of Mad Dog Black Lady, but a new trend also begins to emerge in this collection. As Coleman has explained to interviewers, the book’s title refers not only to the “sexually mature state of insect larvae” (of butterflies and moths) but also to the “idealized state of self” and “images.” “Imagoes” as a term hence signals the evolution of Coleman’s self-identity as a developing artist. In the title poem, the poet transposes her meditation on imagoes to a mediation of self (“white birds do not eat them/ they taste bitter”) and confronts her phobia of moths and butterflies until, through a semiconscious state induced by the sexual ecstasy of the present and the dreamlike memory of her ancestry, she is transformed in such a way that “in my soul winged beings flutter. ” The poem can be regarded as emblematic of Coleman’s self-fashioning maneuvers in the book, the main concern of which is her quest, through the perfection of expressive language, for a sexually and spiritually mature (or idealized) self.

Coleman’s quest is evident from the first two poems in Imagoes. “In Search of the Mythology of Do Wah Wah” rewrites Greco-Roman civilization in terms of the melodrama of racist America: “oedipus, spawned on the breeding plantations of civil war america/ slays his white father and covets his black mother.” “Daddyboy,” a sketch of her father’s life, is the poet’s poignant recognition of her own identity through her father’s; when the family’s children address their father as “daddyboy,” an affectionate nickname, he reacts angrily, and the family’s mother must explain that “your father’s black. white people/ disrespect black men by calling them boy/ call him anything but.” Having thus established the Africanness of her being, Coleman moves on to a series of three poems about a “radical revolutionary red neck” from Georgia who became a civil rights fighter and who married a black woman in Watts (the “Jerry” poems). The interracial marriage undergoes various ordeals and concludes on a tragic note: “history lay between them/ love did not survive injustice.” The failure of this interracial relationship, apparently followed by other unsuccessful relationships in “Mama’s Man” and “Men Lips,” leads the poet to reflect bitterly in “Diagnosis”: “men come and go/ i whisper to my shadow, ’there’s a qualitative/ difference between a love and a f*ck.’”

Sexuality is once again employed as a figure of speech, in this case to exemplify how the black woman’s fashioning of the self entails the maturity not only of her spiritual being but also of her sexual being. This quest for maturity is traced skillfully in part 2 of Imagoes, in which the poet explores the full range of the black woman’s experience of sexuality, including pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, family life, household chores, domestic conflicts, separation, sexual escapades, single parenting, unemployment, and welfare life. In these poems, Coleman registers the ontological difference of the black woman in the urban United States as a person marginalized not only by race but also by gender and economics. This ontological difference, which some feminist critics have come to recognize as the hallmark of black women’s writings, is best captured in “Rape,” a tour de force dramatizing how a woman raped during a burglary is subjected to multiple levels of victimization by the rapists, the police, and even her husband. Realistic vignettes such as “Rape” make clear that, in Coleman’s poetry, sexuality has come to mean sexual politics as well. Accordingly, Coleman’s quest for spiritual and sexual maturity is also an allegory for the struggle of African American women in society and in history.

In Imagoes, Coleman is in noticeably better command of her poetic idioms than in her earlier work. She has started polishing her language; it is less cryptic and disjointed, more fluent and pliant. The poet can afford the luxury of wry humor (“Dinner with a Friend”) or even an occasionally playful gesture of complacency (“Pigging Out”). Indeed, Coleman’s anger now serves as an undertone rather than as the dominant melody. This change is epitomized by a poem in which the previous book’s “mad dog” reappears under a different guise:

blue bruise my thigh i won the fight . . .blue bruise my thigh after fight[. . .]blue day he came got his clothes left the key. . .blue monday street rife with hustle muscle and winossipping blue grape mad dog 20/20.

The mad dog, no longer a dog but the slang term for a kind of liquor, is not so much a metaphor for anger as an agent of the blues, a form that Coleman begins to favor from this volume on.

Blues Poetry

Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems and Stories, 1968-1986 (1987) is a showcase of Coleman’s literary art in the lyric, dramatic, and narrative modes. Here, although the poet is covering familiar ground, the storytelling impulse is stronger, and third-person perspectives begin to dominate. Frequently, the poetic self seems to disappear from the text, particularly in character studies (“Mother Taylor” and “Mister Clark”) and blues poems (“Trouble on My Doorsteps Blues” and “Bottom Out Blues”). An important hint about the character of this volume can be found in “Walking Paper Blues,” in which the figure of the “mad dog” for which Coleman is known is used in the context of the blues:

if’n yo don’t fire me sooni’m leavin’ he-ah today[. . .]mah soul nevah been he-ahmah heart been gone fo daysgot me a fifth o mad dogto celebrate this day.

Here, the emphasis has shifted from anger and helplessness to celebratory defiance, thus signaling the self-sufficiency characteristic of the mature self. Because the poetic self is quietly in control rather than submerged, the volume demonstrates Coleman’s success in achieving the maturity that she sought earlier in Imagoes.

In African Sleeping Sickness: Stories and Poems (1990), Coleman continues to excel in her regular repertoire (“Notes of a Cultural Terrorist,” “Starved for Affection Blues,” “In the Kitchen My Potatoes Are Polemical,” “Self-Immolation,” and others), but has expanded it to include a discourse on acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), in “Current Events,” “The Educational Lab Counselor,” “A Late 80’s Party,” “Obituaries,” “A Civilized Plague,” “The Article in the Newspaper,” and “Nesomania (2).” Also apparent are Coleman’s attempts to enhance her expressiveness by experimenting with form (“American Sonnet” and “Koan”) and with language in order to address the issues of the American Dream more effectively. The two title poems, which are rather obscure, employ medical metaphors to illustrate a black woman’s experience of feelings of inauthenticity, disintegration, and loss of self—a complex syndrome that, in turn, signifies the dysfunctionality of African American communities as a consequence of slavery, racism, oppression, and mistreatment. In the first “African Sleeping Sickness” poem, the disease is associated with the persona’s insistence on memory, language, dreaming, and becoming; in the second, the disease is related to the persona’s sexuality. In both poems, the persona implores the implied listener to sing to her of rivers, an allusion to Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Significantly, Coleman does not stop at hinting that the American Dream is the general issue; at the end of the second poem, by announcing that “between my thighs runs the river whiskey and he—he is a divin’ duck,” the persona also reiterates Coleman’s rhetoric of sexuality, linking the American Dream to gender issues.

A closer examination of some other poems in African Sleeping Sickness reveals that Coleman’s rhetoric of sexuality also begins to focus on the reproductive aspect of the central motif. An important example is the first poem of the book, “Black Madonna,” in which the poet characterizes the archetypal black woman as the “night of nights” and “victim of victims,” with legions of children tearing at her breasts and partaking of her flesh, thus calling into question the relevance of the crucifixion. Rejecting Christianity as a religion oppressive to black people, the poet turns to the Egyptian goddess Isis to celebrate her procreative fertility in “Black Isis.” Another telling example is “Baby I’ve Got the Reds,” in which the poet transforms the language of the blues into a discourse about the inherent relationship between abortion and poverty. As a counterpoint, in “Art in the Court of the Blue Fag (9),” the persona’s surrealistic, abortionlike childbirth is associated with wealth-generating exploitation.

The language of reproduction begins to permeate Coleman’s poetry to the extent that even menstruation begins to play the role of poetics: When a male poet asks his wife whether she likes his poems, “she took off the sanitary napkin she was wearing/ and plopped it on the page/ ’needs more blood in it’/ and went back to the kitchen” (“Ars Poetica”). This reproductive rhetoric boldly reiterates Coleman’s persistent concern with the ways in which the social role of the black woman is governed by sexual politics. By reinstating reproduction as an integral part of the black woman’s sexuality, Coleman in effect challenges the politics that has sought, through distorted and reified notions of sexuality, to reduce black women to “the victim of victims.”

If Wanda Coleman’s poetry strikes readers as polemical and quarrelsome in intention and graphic and grotesque in expression, it is because she has succeeded in a clinically candid and aesthetically unique representation of the United States as a pathological society. As she has said to interviewers, “The body politic of America is gangrenous”; what she tries to do, she says, is to get diagnostic studies under way, to “cut open the flesh and see that sepsis”—which is, of course, not pretty, but which is nevertheless real. Because the issues that she addresses are relevant to so many, her poetic voice demands urgent attention.

Since the 1990’s, Coleman has become an irrepressible voice bearing witness to the kind of social trauma exemplified by the Los Angeles riots, with her testimony captured in many of the prose entries in the nonfiction collection Native in a Strange Land: Trials and Tremors (1996)—for example, in “City in Denial: L.A. Diary, 1993.” As her writing career has expanded and her reputation has grown, she has also recorded performances of her poems as “spoken-word poetry,” thus gaining recognition by Rolling Stone magazine in 1993 as a poet “with a rock-and-roll attitude.” In 1998, Coleman was featured in the groundbreaking anthology A Revolution of Black Poets: 360 Degrees as one of forty contemporary black poets whose work represented “thirty years of ’black fire.’” Her work has been included in many other anthologies focusing on social issues, women’s lives, workers’ conditions, and human rights, suggesting that she has attracted an audience that finds her work engaging. Coleman has also managed to meet with an increasing level of acceptance from mainstream arbiters of taste.

Hand Dance as an Aesthetic Manifesto

When Hand Dance was published in 1993, Coleman received little if any notice from reviewers, but this volume deserves attention for its range and depth. At first glance, Hand Dance covers familiar ground in terms of subject matter and poetic style; there are poems inspired by the blues (“Lovin’ Breakfast Blues” and “Moanin’ Groanin’ Blues”) and by the urban landscape of Southern California (“UCLA Graffiti Bio Med Library”), as well as poems addressing issues of work (“Sh*t Worker in General” and “The Tao of Unemployment”), race (“Aptitude Test” and “All Maps Tell Lies”), gender (“His Comments After Her Hanging” and “Want Ads”), health and sexuality (“Mastectomy”), and crime (“David Polion” and “Current Events”). Coleman’s “American Sonnets” also begin to make a more prominent appearance in Hand Dance, in which sonnets 3 to 11 appear. In 1994, a limited edition collection titled American Sonnets was published. The titular sequence continued to grow after its publication in include more than one hundred poems.

On closer examination, it can be observed that Coleman is attempting to organize her entire poetic output in terms of the hand dance. While paying tribute, symbolically, to this African American art form that can be traced back to the Harlem Renaissance, Coleman appears to be developing a particular aesthetic that embodies, specifically, the kind of poetry she has been producing. In the eponymic poem dating to 1983 and serving as the epigraph that opens the book, the poet’s career is characterized as a hand dance:

this is the ritual of the whole becomingthe hand shaping a certaintyto complete the cycle. to share my lifewith my man. to feed my children. my hands(they dance this anger. They sing it, paint itmake it pay. it is bigger than mere hands can hold)born in slavery died enslavedyet not a slaveborn in misery died miserablyyet not miserable.

As stated in the biographical note that also serves as the epilogue to the book,

Every time her hands take flight her heart rides with them. It takes maximum effort to unshroud her mind’s eye from the raucous inner theatre of her feelings and set her hands in motiondo that poetic waltz, heady-handed, floating above the world as she creates and recreates ither universe imagined and revealeddepths hidden—a reality once loved once lived. The doing is manifest as her poems, short stories and essays continue to appear.

In between these two bookends, Coleman groups the poems into four sections: “The Dexter,” “The Sinister,” “But Ambidexterously,” and “The Laying on of. . . .” These terms all have something to do with the hand: “Dexter” means the right hand; “sinister,” the left hand; “ambidexterous,” skillful in the use of both hands; and “the laying on of hands,” while part of the dance, is also often used in religious or healing rituals involving the power of the Holy Spirit or God. Coleman may therefore be alluding to the extent to which her life as a black woman and writer involves personal and political engagements with both the poetic (associated with the dexter) and journalistic (associated with the sinister) impulses. This dynamically and socially engaged writing is the artistic means by which her personal life finds expression and fulfillment.

In Hand Dance, Coleman thus appears to be projecting a unified aesthetic vision that could pave the way to her proper and well-deserved recognition. For Bathwater Wine (1998), which contains poems of the “Dangerous Subjects” series, as well as a collection of autobiographical poems and another of “American Sonnets,” Coleman received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, which was established by the New Hope Foundation and administered by the Academy of American Poets. Her next volume of poetry, Mercurochrome: New Poems (2001), includes more “American Sonnets” and a playfully innovative section of poems, “Retro Rogue Anthology,” written in imitation of (and in dialogue with) various contemporary American poets. The book became a finalist for the National Book Award. Coleman’s Ostinato Vamps (2003) saw publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press as part of the distinguished Pitt Poetry Series, establishing irrefutably that the voice of Coleman, long-time blueswoman and unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles, now belongs to the nation as well.

Bibliography

Coleman, Wanda. “Clocking Dollars.” In African Sleeping Sickness: Stories and Poems. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1990. An important position statement by the poet about the impact of poverty on her writing; also shows how Coleman, as a marginalized author, differs from other black writers sanctioned by the establishment.

Coleman, Wanda. “Sweet Mama Wanda Tells Fortunes: An Interview with Wanda Coleman.” Interview by Tony Magistrale and Patricia Ferreira. Black American Literature Forum 24, no. 3 (Fall, 1990): 491-507. A lengthy, comprehensive interview. Essential reading for Coleman scholars.

Goldstein, Laurence. “Looking for Authenticity in Los Angeles.” Michigan Quarterly Review 30, no. 4 (Fall, 1991): 717-731. Contains a review of African Sleeping Sickness and discusses Coleman’s work in the ethnic and cultural context of Los Angeles.

Magistrale, Tony. “Doing Battle with the Wolf: A Critical Introduction to Wanda Coleman’s Poetry.” Black American Literature Forum 23, no. 3 (Fall, 1989): 539-554. An indispensable in-depth study of Coleman’s poetry.

Williams, Sherley Anne. “The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry.” In Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction, edited by Dexter Fisher and Robert B. Stepto. New York: Modern Language Association, 1979. Shows how African American women poets are inspired by the blues tradition.