After hearing me do a reading as a newly-minted "emerging writer" (whatever the hell that means), a famous poet approached me and said that I reminded them of June Jordan, Diane Seuss, and Wanda Coleman. Check! Check! Wanda, who? The tragedy of it all speaks volumes.
I should have known better. This Northern Cali Bay Area girl came too late to this Southern Cali Watts native, "L.A.'s unofficial poet laureate's" party. What did I miss? Damn near everything, according to poet Terrance Hayes, who edited Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems (Black Sparrow Press, 2020)—a collection drawing on four decades of Coleman's work, including many pieces from her "American Sonnet" series. While Wanda is living it up in the "afterdeath," I am praying at my ancestral Indigenous-Chicanx altar to aspire to someone who, in Hayes' words, is a "great poet, a real in-the-flesh, flesh-eating poet": a spiller of ink who is fierce, funny, relentless, uncompromising, unpretentious, and "I will go to blows" mean. Check!
Coleman was a code-switcher, code-ditcher, and shape-shifter who refused to conform to middle-class respectability. She was a working-class, Black single mother who struggled to make a living while writing irreverently about the daily grind of life. Take, for example, "I Live For My Car," and even though it's a "struggle buggy" and "I'm on spark plugs and lug nuts," this is a love poem about driving, surviving, and thriving in the city of cars. See her electrifying spoken word performance here: Wanda Coleman - I Live For My Car.
I call Coleman a shape-shifter because she was simultaneously blues, jazz, soul, punk rock, gangsta rap, and hip-hop. In an interview with the Poetry Society of America, Coleman defined herself as a "Usually Het Interracially Married Los Angeles-based African American Womonist Matrilinear Working Class Poor Pink/White Collar College Drop-out Baby Boomer Earth Mother and Closet Smoker Unmolested-by-her-father." Mic drop!
I also say code-switcher because, for Coleman, code-switching is not an aesthetic virtue but a well-honed survival strategy for poor and working-class people of color. Switching between different generations, races, languages, and socioeconomic classes is difficult, but Coleman changed effortlessly from one persona and voice to another. In the introduction to her chapbook Greatest Hits 1966-2003 (Pudding House Press, 2004), she wrote:
Eager to make my mark on the literary landscape, I got busy finding the mentors who would teach me in lieu of the college education I could not afford. As a result, I have developed a style composed of styles sometimes waxing traditional, harking to the neoformalists, but most of my poems are written in a sometimes frenetic, sometimes lyrical free verse, dotted with literary, musical, and cinematic allusions, accented with smatterings of German, Latin, Spanish, and Yiddish, and neologisms, and rife with various cants and jargons, as they capture my interest, from the corporate roundtables to the streets. (Coleman & Hayes, 2020, p. xi)
While deftly straddling racial and class lines, working in the interstices and between the lines, in life and in poetry, Coleman hustled to survive and keep her family afloat. She was a waitress, a medical secretary, a Peace Corps recruiter, a journalist, a radio host, a screenwriter, and a university lecturer. Also, Coleman won an Emmy for writing for Days of Our Lives, edited a soft-core porn magazine, and performed in a punk rock band. And she still managed to produce an expansive body of work, writing fiction, essays, and journalism in addition to volumes of poetry. All that and a bag of chips!
Many of Wanda's poems, like "Things No One Knows," are steeped in the reality of what it means to serve up radical Black excellence while being Black, poor, and working-class:
writing friends is a luxury, enemies a necessity. my car
was stripped and stolen months ago and i have no
money with which to repair or replace it. my mentors have
exiled me to the outskirts of nappy literacy. my wallet is
dying of militant brain cancer. my lust for my country
is frigid. the light excludes me and there is
no degree for what is learned in the dark
In another interview cited in Haye's anthology dedicated to Coleman, she wrote about her struggle to write and untie her tongue when violently entangled at the intersections of race, class, and gender oppressions: "My delicious dilemma is language. How I structure it. How the fiction of history structures me. And as I've become more and more shattered, my tongue has become tangled…I am glassed in my language as well as by the barriers of my dark skin and financial embarrassment."
Coleman lived between the 1965 Watts Riots and the 1992 Rodney King rebellion. Wanda could write about smoke, ashes, poverty, police brutality, and anti-Black racism in wickedly wise ways that defied sociological or journalistic narratives that love to pathologize working-class Black life. See her reading of: Wanda Coleman -They Came Knocking On My Door At 7 A.M. Coleman describes police officers appearing at her door at 7 A.M. with a warrant for her arrest, having interrupted her fucking her man in the other room ("Coitus interruptus LAPD is a drag.”) She "showed 'em alias #3" and, returning to bed, "started fucking again / but things had changed."
Or check out her "Notes of a Cultural Terrorist 2," written in the aftermath of the 1992 riots, in which Wanda's fury about the grind and indignities of daily life as a poor Black woman, barely surviving under racial capitalism and the carceral state, is best served cold—a mean(er) ode to Langston Hughes' Montage of a Dream Deferred. Or wade into her "Beaches. Why I Don't Care For Them," which quickly moves from recounting the "years of being ashamed" of her dark-skinned "fat, ordinary" Black body that "left a sad aftertaste" to unabashed sexuality on "the poor man's beach where bodies echo my chromatic scheme" to a fevered fantasy of being a "feminist ahab stalking the great white whale" "for my america dies with me."
Coleman was at her best when she was mean and threatened violence (always combined with vulnerability and tenderness) or when she cut her tragedy with comedy. Hayes opens his new edition of Wanda's selected poems with "Wanda in Worry Land," where the refrain "I get scared sometimes" and "I have gone after people" echo the contradictory and paradoxical vigor that drives her poetry. "I have been known to imagine a situation / and then get involved in it," she writes. She has "gone after people / with guns" and rocks and fists, but also "with poems":
i get scared sometimes
and have to go look into the mirror to see if i'm
still here
Lastly, I say code-ditcher because she embraced the sonnet form well enough to ditch it and lay it dead on the side of the US-101 freeway. 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" (Voight, 2021). My favorite of Coleman's 100 American sonnets, "American Sonnet 51," is replete with a buck-wild Shakespearan volta that speaks volumes about racial capitalism and making it in America.
Before, I did not know Wanda Coleman. Now, her relentlessness stalks my writing, even my thoughts. I consult her work as I would a deck of Oracle cards. What would Wanda say about the many "old white lady cartpushers in/supermarkets who block the aisles in slow motion" or those "Saturday Afternoon Blues" when "the air is brisk and warm," your "friends all out shopping," and the "suicide hotline is busy"? Or about when haters are going to hate on you and wish you dead?
The last question leads me to my all-time favorite Wanda poem: "Wanda, Why Aren't You Dead?" written and read by Wanda Coleman. Half "playing the dozens"/ half "rap battle" (mimicking a Kendrick Lamar/Drake Fake beef), with the poem's lashing lines, Coleman wickedly parodies her detractors' yammering, but she does so in a manner attentive to racial, class, gender, and generational differences and one that embodies intersectional Black feminist theory; this specificity is encoded in the language and decoded in the performance, both infused with Black working-class vernaculars enamored with jazz and blues rhythms.
In the poem's visual design, the dense mass of negative comments rises like a tower of haters filled with haranguing, judgmental voices; the structure looks like an impenetrable slab of subtly undermining shit talk; she's battling fiercely throughout. In the end, escaping lines float free, as if the poem were taking a deep cleansing breath. The poet has battled and now breaks free. Slowly gaining distance, the Coleman muses, "wanda wanda wanda i wonder / why ain't you dead." The wonder is that she is not only surviving but also thriving. The poem asserts the life force amid daily wear and tear, those humiliations and frustrations that burn women of color, in particular, out. Her hater's yammering stops with the door slam of the last word ("dead").
Although Wanda Coleman died in 2013, the poet is definitely not dead and speaks to us from the "afterdeath," where she commits to irreverent art-making, plays the "Dozens" with devils, and wins heaven-wide poetry slams against angels.
After Wanda Coleman, Rest In Poetry Power
— Lena Palacios is a queer, disabled Chicana with Tepehuana and settler ancestry. They play with their cats/muses when not writing on the run. She won the 2024 Quebec Writers’ Federation’s carte blanche Prize and was shortlisted for The Fiddlehead’s 2024 Creative Nonfiction Contest and The Malahat Review’s 2025 Open Season Awards (Poetry).
You can read Lena Palacio's poetry in Issue 303 (Spring 2025). Order the issue now:
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