Wicked Enchantment Read online

  Praise for Wanda Coleman

  “Wanda Coleman’s peerless Wicked Enchantment is packed with more American Sonnets than I’ve been able to gather in one spot and a sparkling intro by her champion Terrance Hayes. Words to crack you open & heal you where it counts—hateful & hilarious, heartbroke & hellbent, psychologically & formally adroit. All honor to her name.”

  —Mary Karr, The Liars’ Club

  “A powerhouse in her time, Coleman’s work resonates in ever greater measure, in forms as diverse as blues and sonnets, making a song and sense out of suffering.”

  —Kevin Young, Brown: Poems

  “She taught me everything I know about sourcing female rage and intuition in writing.”

  —Amber Tamblyn, Era of Ignition

  “Coleman is master of telling unvarnished truths—about self, about the world, about personal past and our collective future . . . Race, disparity and the increasing complexity of race politics in this country are the knots Coleman works through on the page.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Coleman’s ability to simultaneously conjure the tactile and the abstract makes her works crackle with life and inspire multiple interpretations . . . Coleman’s aching and meditative poetry gives voice to inquiries and echoes.”

  —Booklist

  “A poet whose angry and extravagant music, so far beyond baroque, has been making itself heard across the divide between West Coast and East, establishment and margins, slams and seminars, across the too-American rift among races and genders . . .”

  —from the jury’s citation for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Bathwater Wine

  “Wanda Coleman’s poetry stings, stains, and ultimately helps heal . . . these searing, soaring poems challenge us to repair the fractures of human difference . . .”

  —from the jury’s citation for the 2001 National Book Award for Poetry for Mercurochrome (finalist)

  Also by Wanda Coleman

  Mad Dog Black Lady (1979)

  Imagoes (1983)

  Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems & Stories 1968–1986 (1987)

  A War of Eyes and Other Stories (1988)

  African Sleeping Sickness: Stories & Poems (1990)

  Hand Dance (1993)

  American Sonnets (1994)

  Native in a Strange Land: Trials & Tremors (1996)

  Bathwater Wine (1998)

  Mambo Hips and Make Believe: A Novel (1999)

  Mercurochrome (2001)

  Ostinato Vamps (2003)

  Wanda Coleman: Greatest Hits, 1966–2003 (2004)

  The Riot Inside Me: More Trials & Tremors (2005)

  Jazz and Twelve O’Clock Tales (2008)

  The World Falls Away (2011)

  The Love Project: A Marriage Made in Poetry (2014)

  Published in 2020 by

  Black Sparrow Press

  David R. Godine, Publisher

  15 Court Square, Suite 320

  Boston, Massachusetts 02108

  www.godine.com

  Copyright © 2020 by The Estate of Wanda Coleman

  Introduction Copyright © 2020 by Terrance Hayes

  Frontispiece of Wanda Coleman by Terrance Hayes

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For more information, please write to the address above.

  Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Coleman, Wanda author. | Hayes, Terrance editor, writer of introduction.

  Title: Wicked enchantment / Wanda Coleman ; edited and and introduced by Terrance Hayes.

  Description: Boston : Black Sparrow Press, 2020. | Summary: “Wanda Coleman-” the unofficial poet laureate of L.A.”-passed away in 2013, but her influence casts a long shadow across contemporary American poetry, including Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. In this first new collection of Coleman’s work since her death, Hayes has selected more than 130 poems originally written and published between the late 1970s and early 2000s”-- Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019051008 |

  ISBN 9781574232370 (hardcover) |

  ISBN 9781574232349 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

  Classification: LCC PS3553.O47447 W53 2020 | DDC 811/.54--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051008

  Contents

  Introduction

  Wanda in Her Own Words

  Mad Dog Black Lady

  Wanda in Worryland

  Doing Battle with the Wolf

  They Came Knocking on My Door at 7 a.m.

  Sessions

  The Woman and Her Thang

  Beaches. Why I Don’t Care for Them

  Imagoes

  I Live for My Car

  When My Time Comes

  Doctor’s Report

  Giving Birth

  My Love Brings Flowers

  Felon

  ’Tis Morning Makes Mother a Killer

  Imagoes

  The Saturday Afternoon Blues

  I Love the Dark

  Heavy Daughter Blues

  Male Order Catalog

  The Mountains/Entrails Curling Down and Out the Hole in the Side

  Essay on Language

  Woman on Sand

  Scratch Me

  Standoff in East Hollywood

  Wanda Why Aren’t You Dead

  Heavy Daughter Blues

  Bottom Out Blues

  African Sleeping Sickness

  Ms. Pac Man

  Bruno

  Emmett Till

  Auguries

  African Sleeping Sickness

  American Sonnet

  The First Day of Spring 1985

  How Does It Hurt

  Dream 924

  Nosomania

  Notes of a Cultural Terrorist

  Invitation to a Gunfighter

  American Sonnet 2

  Hand Dance

  Hand Dance

  Chair Affair

  We Meet the Black Rimbaud

  February 11th 1990

  Aptitude Test

  Essay on Language 2

  to the other Wanda Coleman—with apologies

  American Sonnet 3

  American Sonnet 5

  American Sonnet 6

  Notes of a Cultural Terrorist 2

  we could’ve made it if

  American Sonnet 7

  Essay on Language 3

  Dream 1218

  Want Ads

  Neruda

  Life as a Cartoon

  For Me When I Am Myself

  American Sonnet 9

  Gone But Not Forgotten

  Dream 1319

  Soul Eyes

  Nocturne

  American Sonnets

  American Sonnet 12

  American Sonnet 15

  American Sonnet 16

  American Sonnet 18

  American Sonnet 23

  American Sonnet 24

  Bathwater Wine

  November’s Song

  Letter to My Older Sister

  Things No One Knows

  Two Times Baby

  Letter to My Older Sister 2

  American Sonnet 26

  American Sonnet 34

  American Sonnet 39

  American Sonnet 43

  American Sonnet 44

  American Sonnet 49

  American Sonnet 51

  American Sonnet 54

  American Sonnet 60

  American Sonnet 61

  American Sonnet 66

  American Sonnet 70

  Americ
an Sonnet 71

  American Sonnet 75

  American Sonnet 79

  American Sonnet 82

  American Sonnet 85

  Essay on Language 5

  I Imagine the Angels of Rage

  Salvation Wax

  Late Broadcast News

  Etheridge

  Jazz Whine

  Life as a Cartoon 2

  I Ain’t Yo Earthmama

  Pseudo Dickinsonian Cento Blues

  I Ain’t Yo Earthmama 2

  Mercurochrome

  Letter to My Older Sister 4

  Zed Chronology

  Essay on Language 6

  Letter to My Older Sister 5

  Twentieth Century Nod-Out

  Twentieth Century Nod-Out 2

  Against Forgetting Cento

  American Sonnet 25

  American Sonnet 88

  American Sonnet 94

  American Sonnet 95

  American Sonnet 98

  Thiefheart

  Blind Cassandra

  Hornets

  Dream Song 811

  Consciousness Raising Exercise

  The Queen on Her Color

  Black Alice Laments

  Put Some Sex Sonnet

  I Ain’t Yo Earthmama 3

  Supermarket Surfer

  Obituary

  Her Poem

  My Bleak Visitation

  Outside In

  Having Lost My Son, I Confront the Wreckage

  Letter to My Older Sister 6

  Black-Handed Curse

  Moon Cherries

  Notes & Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Introduction

  What we have here is a sterling one-of-a-kind record of what it meant to be the late great poet Wanda Coleman. I will offer a few introductory comments, but let it be said, in life and in poetry, Wanda Coleman always preferred to speak for herself.

  In Wanda’s introduction to her chapbook Greatest Hits 1966–2003, published by Pudding House Press in 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.

  First of all: the syntax of that second sentence is breathtaking. Second of all: what could I say to follow that!? Maybe something about my own true introduction to her?

  In the summer of 2001, I shared the stage with Wanda at the Schomburg Center for Black Research’s 75th Anniversary Heritage Festival. The reading, “A Nation of Poets: Wordsmiths for a New Millennium,” included Coleman and me, along with Amiri Baraka, Staceyann Chin, Sonia Sanchez, and Patricia Smith. It’s not a very detailed memory. I was too awed to truly pay attention to anybody’s poems (my own included). I mostly only remember the “frenetic, sometimes lyrical” (neologismic? languafied?) sound of Wanda’s voice, her towering hair and bangles, her patterned fabrics and big glasses and big wicked laugh. I don’t remember what she read, though I know she was writing some of her best work at the time and finally receiving some long overdue attention. Mercurochrome, the book she published that year, would be a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in Poetry, and 1998’s Bathwater Wine had received the Lenore Marshall Prize from the American Academy of Poets. But Wanda was still announcing her presence and suspicions.

  Upon our first real conversation, on a panel at an L.A. book festival the next year, Wanda “tore me a new one,” as they say. She was a grenade of brilliance, boasts, and braggadocio. She burned and shredded all my platitudes about whatever poetry topic was at hand. She only softened when she understood/believed I was a fan. One of my mentors, a black female poet of Wanda’s generation, recently flatly said, “She was mean.” She could be mean. It was a sharpness she honed over her years outside the care of poetry collectives, coalitions, and institutions. Her poems often record the mood of one who feels exiled, discounted, neglected. Imagine how mean the famously mean Miles Davis might have been had no one taken his horn playing seriously, and you will have a sense of Wanda’s rage. I think some of it was misplaced. She had legions of fans. The actress Amber Tamblyn is a supreme Wanda disciple. Her fans include Yona Harvey, Douglas Kearney, Dorothea Lasky, Tim Seibles, Annie Finch, experimentalists, formalists, feminists, spoken-word artists. She once told me the musician Beck is a big fan. There is no poet, black or otherwise, writing with as much wicked candor and passion.

  I have taught her poetry to my students for nearly all of my career. One of my oldest homemade writing exercises asks poets to devise their own American sonnet after looking at Wanda’s American sonnets. Eventually, I tried the exercise myself. I sent my first attempt, a poem entitled “American Sonnet for Wanda C” (from How to Be Drawn, 2015), to Wanda a year or so before her death in 2013. I was imitating Wanda for years before meeting her. “The Things No One Knows Blues,” in Hip Logic, my second collection, is a direct nod to her poem “Things No One Knows,” in Bathwater Wine. Yes, she let her guard down when she saw I was a fan. We became friends. She even imitated a few of my poems in her final two collections: Ostinato Vamps in 2003, and The World Falls Away in 2011, both with Pitt Press. (A shout goes out to one my first mentors, legendary Pitt Poetry series editor, Ed Ochester, who published Wanda after Black Sparrow.) I would never say Wanda and I became close friends. But we were close poets. Our letters and exchanges concerned nothing but poetry. Her passion for poetry made her sharp, warm, honest. Naturally, I loved her.

  Wanda Coleman was a great poet, a real in-the-flesh, flesh-eating poet who also happened to be a real black woman. Amid a life of single motherhood, multiple marriages, and multiple jobs that included waitress, medical file clerk, and screenwriter, she made poems. She denounced boredom, cowardice, the status quo. Few poets of any stripe write with as much forthrightness about poverty, about literary ambition, about depression, about our violent, fragile passions. “American Sonnet 95,” which features this collection’s title, is one of my favorite sonnets by Wanda:

  seized by wicked enchantment, I surrendered my song

  as I fled for the stars, i saw an earthchild

  in a distant hallway, crying out

  to his mother, “please don’t go away

  and leave us.” he was, i saw, my son. immediately,

  i discontinued my flight

  from here, i see the clocktower in a sweep of light,

  framed by wild ivy. it pierces all nights to come

  i haunt these chambers but they belong to cruel churchified insects.

  among the books mine go unread, dust-covered.

  i write about urban bleeders and breeders, but am

  troubled because their tragedies echo mine.

  at this moment i am sickened by the urge

  to smash. my thighs present themselves

  still born, misshapen wings within me

  Wanda’s poems speak for themselves.

  In the margin of my secondhand copy of Mad Dog Black Lady, her first full-length collection, published by Black Sparrow Press in 1979, someone wrote: “Her world is a shriek.” The poems do shriek sometimes. I open this new edition of Wanda’s selected poems with “Wanda in Worry Land,” where the refrains “I get scared sometimes” and “I have gone after people” echo the paradoxical vigor at the heart of her poems. They take the forms of aptitude tests, fairy tales, dream journals, and comic book panels. They combine manifesto and confession, inner and outer indictment, violence and tenderness, satire and sincerity. Her imitations of everyone from Lewis Carroll to Elizabeth Bishop to Sun Ra slip between homage and provocation. Themes and passions recur across th
e books in series like “Essay on Language,” “Notes of a Cultural Terrorist,” “Letter to My Older Sister,” and especially in the American Sonnets series, which debuted in African Sleeping Sickness in 1990. Commenting on the series in the Adrienne Rich–edited Best American Poetry 1996, Wanda wrote:

  In this series of poems I assume my role as fusionist, delight in challenging myself with artful language play. I mock, meditate, imitate, and transform . . . Ever beneath the off-rhyme, the jokey alliterations, and allusions, lurks the hurt-inspired rage of a soul mining her emotional Ituri.

  All of that. Every poem is an introduction to Wanda Coleman. I keep her poems close because they never cease surprising me. In “Looking for It: An Interview,” she says, “I want freedom when I write, I want the freedom to use any kind of language—whatever I feel is appropriate to get the point across.” She never ceases revealing paths to get free.

  —Terrance Hayes

  New York, 2019

  Wanda in Her Own Words

  In addition to her many volumes of poetry, Wanda Coleman wrote several incredible books of prose, fiction, and nonfiction. And while I’ll leave it to the prose writers to bring her dazzling selected prose to the world, I do want to offer you some of my favorite of her autobiographical passages from her terrific nonfiction collection, The Riot Inside Me, published by Black Sparrow in 2005.—TH

  “Jabberwocky Baby,” page 6

  The stultifying intellectual loneliness of my 1950’s and 60’s upbringing was dictated by my looks—dark skin and unconkable kinky hair. Boys gawked at me, and girls tittered behind my back. Black teachers shook their heads in pity, and White teachers stared in amusement or in wonder. I found this rejection unbearable and encouraged by my parents to read, sought an escape in books, which were usually hard to come by.