writing to communicate
by
Douglas Messerli
Los
Angeles poet Wanda Coleman, born in 1946, died at Cedar-Sinai Medical Center on
November 22, 2013.
The
day after my marriage to Howard, November 23, 2013, I read in the Los Angeles Times of the sad news of the
death, at age 67, of poet Wanda Coleman. Her husband, Austin Straus, vaguely
told the media that her death came after a long illness, which I presume was
cancer. Most of us, apparently, knew nothing about her sickness. Friend and
poet Rae Armantrout noted on Facebook that she had just recently had lunch with
Wanda, who appeared to be just fine. So it came something of a shock to us all,
particularly given Wanda’s young age.
Any time such a death happens, one calls
up memories of that person from the past, and my relationship with Wanda went
far back, to the first days after I’d moved to California in the 1990s, when I
served with her on a California Arts Council panel in Sacramento.
The panelists, Michael Palmer, Dennis
Phillips, Michael Davidson, Wanda, me, and, one or two other whose faces I can
no longer conjure up, shared a great rapport that year. As often happens at
such events, we joined one another at dinner, and, by meal’s end, begin sharing
stories—these coincidentally centering on our encounters with a fellow
California poet and teacher. Each of us told our tales, resulting in much
laughter, before Wanda, who had remained somewhat quiet previously, finally
spoke up: “Very early on in my writing career I decided to take a
poetry-writing course. As a young, poor Black woman, I was trying to hold down
two jobs, across town, racing down the freeways, and at night taking this
course in poetry. I had so little time that I had to stop along the highway
just to write and then race, again across town, in order to get to class. Then
this turkey, when he finally read my poems, had the nerve to say that I
wouldn’t ever be a good poet since I did not get down to the essence of life!”
This is only an approximation of her comments; in reality, her observations
were much more hilarious, and I recall we all laughed heartily in response to her
tale.
Somehow in those few days I grew somewhat
close to Wanda, and during breaks we often chatted. At the time I was a young,
brash, somewhat insensitive spokesman for innovative poetry. Evidently, I had
already read some of Wanda’s writing, because I had the nerve to ask her right
out why did she employ such normative language in her work. Wanda looked at me
for a second in what one might describe as her slightly outraged, evaluating
stare, before answering: “Listen, you fool, I already speak another language,
being a Black woman. When I write poetry, I want to communicate and not be
misunderstood.”
“Maybe,” I answered. “But there’s always
the danger in using the language of the white academy that your words will get
even more misunderstood because that language is used so manipulatively by
media, politics, sciences and even well-meaning but thoughtless writers. In my
own writing I try to express myself in a language that can’t be so easily
transformed into something else. The reader has to work through my more
privatized syntax to comprehend what I’m saying, to work just enough that he or
she might discover a deeper reality. And, of course, by writing that way, I too
uncover what I feel are deeper complexes of significance.”
Wanda eyed at me as if she were
considering whether I too might be what she would describe as a “turkey,” but
said nothing. I even think that she appreciated, just a little, the honesty,
while ignoring the audaciousness of my statements. In any event, we became friends,
later serving on other panels on both the state and local levels.
Once, based evidently on a
misunderstanding, Wanda wrote me one of her “sassy” letters, informing me that
“she came tall” and would not permit anyone like to me to say something
contrary. But since, as I explained to her in a written response, I had never
said anything to anyone against her, I simply didn’t know what she talking
about. To this day, I still have no clue what brought on her reaction. But my
letter apparently ended any hostility. The next time I saw Wanda, we greeted
one another with open arms.
I did once satirize one of her poems, a
work about “coffee,” which she read at a slightly absurd event to which poets
had been invited to read on Oscar night. For that affair I had been “hired,”
with a free ticket, to attend pseudonymously as a German poet suddenly
encountering the American poetic scene—I had originally imagined it as part of
a long book in which I might explore American poetry through the eyes of an
intelligent but unknowing foreigner. Wanda and Austin seemed pleased to see me
(as Douglas) there; and I was sorry later to have mocked her poem, through my
persona of Gottlieb Kasper, in the pages of Paul Vangelisti’s magazine Ribot (for a complete description of
this event, see My Year 2006). If
Wanda had ever seen through my persona, she never mentioned it to me. Besides,
I had made no evaluation of the poem, but simply presented it in the context of
a rather comical event.
Over the years, moreover, I had begun to
regularly read Wanda’s books, and although her volumes often contained what I
might describe as normative, narrative-based poems, I found many other poems
with which I was impressed. Indeed, Wanda, throughout her career, carefully and
sometimes colorfully hollowed out her own poetic territory, which was not an
easy fit with either the dominant Black aesthetic or the white academic ones.
Despite her stated desire to straightforwardly communicate with others, she was
creating a body of work far more dense and convoluted than perhaps even she
imagined.
One could almost perceive her various
“Essays on Language” from her remarkable book Mercurochrome of 2001, as being linguistic explorations akin to the
works of some “Language” poets:
snapping
a warped sense
of communication
impairs the
business of conventional narrative
like feeling
robbed, the rules of orgasm no mystery
given a voice,
one must struggle with one’s own
social
type-casting on the edge of ambiguity
it’s
exclusively inconclusive
…..
I am compelled
to protest
the demise of
the deliciously clandestine.
Certainly
in this work’s advocacy of inconclusiveness and the clandestine, it is a long
ways from wanting to straight-forwardly communicate.
Her rebellion against “social
type-casting” also suggests a quite radical shift from a poem such as “Coffee,”
with its litany of the delights which “make you black” and her earlier more
race-based poems in Mad Dog Black Lady and
Heavy Daughter Blues. Embracing
figures such as Robert Duncan and other experimental modernists, Coleman was
also exploring traditional forms such as the sonnet. And as her poetry expanded
so too did her sense of “outsiderness.” Like Los Angeles poet Will Alexander,
also born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, Wanda—despite her status as
Los Angeles’ unofficial poet laureate—began to feel as if she were being pulled
away from her own roots. Having grown up in Watts, she had become a kind of
poet-celebrity (having even won an Emmy for her writing on the day-time soap
opera, One Day at a Time) who now
looked outward to include influences as various as Shelley, Whitman, Dickinson,
Melville, and Poe—as well as major Beat and Black figures.
It was this remarkable embracement of the
whole of poetry and her continual search for new poetic expression that made
Wanda such an appealing figure to me. But the very fact that she dared speak
out against what she felt of an inauthentic writing, even within the Black
community, led her perhaps, in the end, to feel a kind of true isolation.
Certainly she felt some bitterness, as expressed recently in an as-yet unpublished
conversation with Paul Vangelisti.
If I live long enough,
I’ll put the gory details in a memoir.
Now that books are going
the way of dinosaurs, it appears one
will no longer be able to
publish, therefore will one perish? Will
someone create an electronic book that
one can autograph? Or
has that been done already? Will the opportunity to
be discovered
posthumously become a thing of the past, ruling out
“better late than
never?” Will the literary world become as pornographic
as the
music business? A world in which—with few exceptions—only the
beautiful and attractive mediocrities succeed while true singers are
doomed to the background?
Throughout
that interview Coleman admits to what she now perceives as a kind of outlandish
naiveté about the entire poetry world within which she began writing.
In her 2002 review in the Los Angeles Times of the beloved poet
Maya Angelou, Coleman finally lashed out at what she now saw as mere fakery in
that poets’ A Song Flung Up to Heaven:
"Song" is a sloppily written
fake, bloated to 214 pages by large type
and widely spaced chapter headings, more
than half its 33 chapters
averaging two to four pages. Powers exhibited in
"I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings" have deserted her in "Song."
Her titillating
confessions and coquettish allusions come off as redundant and
hollow old tricks. She not only engages in her usual name-dropping
but shockingly
makes that the book's content. Shamelessly, she
cannibalizes the
reputations of three major black figures: Malcolm
X (Al-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz),
James Baldwin and King Jr., using
them as linchpins on which to
promote her specious pose as an
activist.
For
Wanda, finally, Angelou had abandoned writing serious poetry in an attempt, as
she described it “to play the race card,” “like the muse Euterpe or Sister
Flue, coochie-cooing admirers out of shirts and socks, transforming bigots into
simpering ninnies and academic cowardice into five figure honorariums.”
No matter how one might admire Angelou as
a writer, one has to admit that such a brutally honest evaluation of a fellow
Black poet might, perhaps should have
resulted in cheers. How much easier for her had Wanda simply mirrored the pious
appreciations of the media who just today celebrated the empty and worn images
of Angelou’s poetic appreciation for Nelson Mandela:
No sun outlasts
its sunset, but will rise again and bring the dawn.
along
with her insipid comments: “He was the David of our society.”
Coleman was banned from the
African-American bookstore Esowan, and ostracized by many members of the Black
community throughout the country. It pained her so deeply that even four years
later, in 2005, when we celebrated my Southern California anthology of
“Innovative Poetry”—in which I included Coleman—she was still speaking of it,
lamenting her increasing sense of isolation.
A year after her “scandalous” Angelou
review, Wanda wrote “Broken Rhythms, which” represents to me a world vastly
different one from the one she was imagining in the 1990s, when I first met
her. Her life now was now filled with terrible demons, as the poet shed “all
the conceits.”:
like spellstuff all conceits I have shed
collect on sun-slashed soil where a
three-headed woman
gathers them to make
her hoodoo a powder in fire to summon a spirit
a finely ground pinch
of alcohol to cure
a cough, or in a
salve to beautify aging skin
make your wish for love
for hate
and burn the fragrant
wax with a hint of dust
chant toward the sky watch.
the children gather
watch the
children dance watching the children’s eyes
watch. the children with tongues like wolves.
If
nothing else in this bleak, magical poem, Coleman has certainly gotten down to
the essence of life, a survival that, to her way of thinking, requires a
magical potion in order to protect herself from the even the tongues of
children, ready to devour their own kind.
And already as early as her selection
from American Sonnets (1994), some
reprinted in the Sun & Moon book, Place
as Purpose: Poetry from the Western States of 2002, Coleman had expressed
an anguish that proposed death as a solution:
i am seized with
the desire to end
my breath in short
spurts, shoulder pain
the world lengthens
then contracts
(in deep water—my
sudden swimming, the surface
breaks, thoughts
leap, the Buick bends
a corner, an arc of
light briefly sweeps the dark walls)
everywhere there are
temples of stone
and strange
chantings—ashes angels and dolls
i forget my lover. i
want a stranger—
to shiver at the unfamiliar touch of the
one
who has not yet
touched me
a furred spider to
entrap my hungers
in his silk, with
virulent toxin
to numb my throat
A few years after our 2005 celebration of
my Southern California anthology, Wanda sent me, for publication, a new
manuscript, including several of her newer American
Sonnets, works of startling beauty and clarity (an earlier sonnet “after
Robert Duncan” ends with the bleak cry: “a memory. I sweat the eternal weight
of graves.”).
I suffered over my financial inability to
publish this work immediately, but felt that it would be wrong to hold onto
such a powerful manuscript until I might be able to produce it. I wrote her a
pained letter explaining that if I undertook the work, the delay would not
result in the amicable relationship we now had. Wanda answered: “Yes, I feared
that, and I am so glad that we two can remain such good friends.” I never heard
from her again. But her poetry continues to reverberate. In the end, she
communicated at a far deeper level than most of her contemporaries, and,
despite her fears of not being posthumously discovered, had been deeply admired
and loved by many of us during her life.
Los Angeles,
December 7, 2013
Copyright (c) 2013 by Douglas Messerli
