THE NEWYORKER, MAY 18, 2020 69
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
Coleman evokes both senses of “going
after”: confronting fighters but also fol-
lowing, imitating, and learning from writ-
ers. To stand up to her predecessors was
a form of homage. Coleman often des-
ignated her poems as being “after”—not
“for”—her mentors, heroes, and friends.
There are poems “after June Jordan,”
“after Elizabeth Bishop,” “after the song
by Herbie Hancock,” and “after Sun Ra.”
The range of these dedications implies
the variety of shapes a tribute can take:
a poem “after John Berryman” is a spat;
another “after Coltrane” is a lovefest.
Coleman’s work recoups ground from
her idols and rivals, even as it acknowl-
edges their genius. A poem “after Allen
Ginsberg” modifies his famous poem “A
Supermarket in California,” which itself
is a nod to a master. “What thoughts I
have of you tonight, Walt Whitman,”
Ginsberg writes. “What bohunkian im-
ages i have of you,” Coleman writes. “I
sputter / between the confused and the
absurd as i cruise for pudding / and citrus-
free hand lotion.” Ginsberg’s surrepti-
tious queering of the American super-
market was one kind of confrontation
with history; Coleman, without the lux-
ury of being furtive, is “detected via cam-
era / lens while picking over pepper mills”
and makes her own piqued revision, re-
turning the experience of grocery shop-
ping to quotidian reality. For a black
woman, this reality includes the fear of
being accused of stealing. “The only Walt
here is Disney,” Coleman writes, trying
to find cheap, healthy food. “The pork
chops are killing me.”
C
oleman’s one hundred “American
Sonnets” are scattered throughout
five books: “African Sleeping Sickness”
(1990), “Hand Dance” (1993), “Ameri-
can Sonnets” (1994), “Bathwater Wine”
(1998), and “Mercurochrome.” Sonnets
are often at odds with their own brev-
ity, building into their short span little
interludes and pauses. Rarely does a poet
seem to want to take an already brutally
brief form and speed it up. But Cole-
man’s sonnets are sprints, which is what
makes their improvisations, modelled
on American blues and jazz, so com-
pelling. “American Sonnet 61” has short
lines, a jagged right margin, and a tricky
tone, both barbed and passionate: “reach-
ing down into my griot bag,” Coleman
finds ancestral license (a griot is a tra-
ditional West African poet) but also the
patronizing expectation that she will
pull out “womanish wisdom and wily / so-
cial commentary.” Instead, she produces
“bricks / with which to either recon-
struct / the past or deconstruct a head.”
The sonnet becomes a poem about sad-
ness and its costs. “Dolor,” she writes:
robs me of art’s coin
as i push, for peanuts, to level walls and
rebuild the ruins of my poetic promise.
That last phrase, like so many of Cole-
man’s, abounds with sarcasm. One of
the greatest poets ever to come out of
L.A., she shaped the city’s literary scene
like few before her. And yet, even after
she’d forged her own “infinite alphabet
of afroblues / intertwinings,” she still felt
that she was measured against the lit-
erary gatekeepers’ idea of her “poetic
promise,” now in “ruins.”
Coleman’s poems present, side by side,
exasperation and joy. They both tally and
transcend the difficulties of an often
broke black woman, working in perhaps
the world’s least remunerative profes-
sion. Cursing her art, she often manages
some of its most memorable language:
poetry is “rood music for the cash be-
reft / as titans clash in the space of a
Hollywood toilet.” Yet few poets write
so powerfully about the underground
freedoms possible in an economy rigged
to defeat them. In “Want Ads,” part of
a contemporary mini-genre of poems
inspired by personal ads (C. D. Wright’s
“Personals” is an influential example),
Coleman cites her daunting odds of find-
ing a partner (“a 46% remarriage rate for
black women contrasted / with 76% for
white women”) and mocks the “modest
maidenly pubis” of a white bride, her
“tresses” kept “glistening and tangle free.”
Such is the “youthful stuff sonnets / and
prayers are made of.” Instead of that prim
and coiffed material, Coleman offers the
“kinky snarls” of her own body and of
her poems. You can hear in the title,
“Want Ads,” a brilliant play on her own
first name: in Wanda Coleman’s poems,
it’s the want that adds the value.
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