68 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
BOOKS
MAKING BOLD
Wanda Coleman’s fearless invention.
By Dan Chiasson
PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL J. ELDERMAN
“
I
make one chicken feed five,” Wanda
Coleman wrote in “My Love Brings
Flowers,” a poem from 1983. “Make
clothes ten years old fashionable/reju-
venate one fake sable coat.” Coleman,
who died in 2013, was one of the great
menders in American verse: she found
the extra wear in old forms like the son-
net and rummaged for new forms in
everyday material, like aptitude tests,
medical reports, and want ads. Poets
sometimes brag about their fearsome
powers of transformation; Coleman,
beset by hardship for much of her life,
kept her boasts closer to the bone. “I
scrape bottom,” she wrote, and yet her
poetry drew on deep reserves. Given
Coleman’s almost chaotic originality, it
is touching to encounter her stark ad-
missions of debt: “I borrow from friends.”
At a moment when many of us are learn-
ing—and teaching one another—how
to make a face mask out of a sock or a
bra, Coleman’s poetry might be just the
model of inspired, ecstatic thrift we need.
A new volume of her selected poems,
“Wicked Enchantment” (Black Spar-
row Press), edited by the American poet
Terrance Hayes, has brought Coleman—
who often seemed to relish the position
of outsider—into the spotlight. She was
born in Watts, in South Los Angeles,
in 1946, and lived most of her life in and
around the city. Her mother worked as
a housekeeper, sometimes for movie
stars, including Ronald Reagan. Her fa-
ther, a boxer in his youth, worked as a
sparring partner for the light-heavy-
weight champion Archie Moore. “They
beat his/head for decades,” Coleman
writes, “until/a tumor rose from the
wound and devoured his eyes.” Her par-
ents’ experiences must have shaped her
art’s insistent transparency about what
people do to make enough money. And
her choice of an art that barely paid
meant that, for much of her life, Cole-
man, who had two children and often
parented alone, had to get very good at
economic improvisation. Throughout
her career, she worked as a Peace Corps
recruiter, a waitress, a medical secretary,
a radio host, a screenwriter, and a uni-
versity lecturer—a very L.A. résumé.
Coleman won an Emmy, in 1976, for
her writing on the daytime soap opera
“Days of Our Lives,” and wrote an ep-
isode of the much rerun buddy-cop show
“Starsky & Hutch.” Soon she devoted
herself more fully to her own writing
and performing. Her first full-length
book of poetry, “Mad Dog Black Lady,”
appeared in 1979, and was followed by
a dozen or so more, as well as short sto-
ries, essays, and a novel. “Mercuro-
chrome” (2001), a volume of poetry, was
a finalist for the National Book Award.
In an interview with the Poetry So-
ciety of America, Coleman defined
herself as a “Usually Het Interracially
Married Los Angeles-based African
American Womonist Matrilinear Work-
ing Class Poor Pink/White Collar
College Drop-out Baby Boomer Earth
Mother and Closet Smoker Unmolested-
by-her-father.” That checklist is a per-
formance, building upon itself; asked a
second time, she might have produced
an entirely new inventory with its own
brilliant, funny, and tragic surprises.
In an early poem, Coleman describes a
police officer appearing at her door at
7 A.M. (“Coitus interruptus LAPD is
a drag.”) She “showed ’em alias #3”
and, returning to bed, “started fucking
again/but things had changed.”
American poets often insist on aliases
and multiple identities: Bob Dylan
plucked from Whitman’s famous line “I
am large, I contain multitudes” for the
title of his second coronavirus surprise
single. For Coleman, shape-shifting was
not an aesthetic virtue but an inevitable
means of survival, and also a lethal risk.
“I have been known to imagine a situ-
ation/and then get involved in it,” she
writes, in “Wanda in Worryland.” She
