Wanda Coleman’s work tallies and transcends the difficulties of being a black woman in a profession that hardly pays.

By Dan Chiasson
FROM: The New Yorker

Wanda Coleman wrote in “My Love Brings Flowers,” a poem from 1983. “Make clothes ten years old fashionable / rejuvenate 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 sonnet 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 admissions of debt: “I borrow from friends.” At a moment when many of us are learning—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 Sparrow 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 father, a boxer in his youth, worked as a sparring partner for the light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore. “They beat his / head for decades,” Coleman writes, “until / a tumor rose from the wound and devoured his eyes.” Her parents’ 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, Coleman, 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 university 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 episode 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 stories, essays, and a novel. “Mercurochrome” (2001), a volume of poetry, was a finalist for the National Book Award.

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.” That checklist is a performance, 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.” Read Rest of Article Here