Coleman’s work is functional and communal; she wields the oral tradition in a way that reflects her poetry ancestry—the blues queen, Koko Taylor, for example, or the fringe Beat genius, Bob Kaufman—but she also shows planed, hewn lines of intellectual poem-making.
The World Falls Away, from the University of Pittsburgh Press, is a blessing for anyone interested in reading poetry. Coleman’s many books on Black Sparrow can be tough to find, and in this new book she shows herself and her full powers in tense, fraught, demanding, satisfying, funny, upsetting, or terminally top-of-head-cutting-off form.
Race shapes the writing to a certain extent, but the poems also defy the idea of “black writing.” The poems are political, in that they are concerned with social justice: they pour gasoline on conventional acceptance of poverty, racism, prison, drug addiction, etc. and bring fantastic energy to language so that the reader can become aware of their often invisible tendrils in daily American life. Even her poems about small things—her hair, for example in “My Crowning Glory”—are infused with a political tension that keeps in mind the potential for poems to “control, destroy, and create social institutions,” as Coleman put it.
Coleman’s work is functional and communal; she wields the oral tradition in a way that reflects her poetry ancestry—the blues queen, Koko Taylor, for example, or the fringe Beat genius, Bob Kaufman—but she also shows planed, hewn lines of intellectual poem-making. All of this happens on the streets of California. Shadows cast on the lines from Californian like Robert Duncan and Weldon Kees; these are never far from the human voices speaking in these poems.
To a certain extent, her poems increase the self-esteem of their reader. They have been increasing mine for nearly two decades because of their brutality and dignity. Her language is more Wanda Coleman and less like everybody else walking around the neighborhood than most writers are themselves and less like everybody else walking around the neighborhood. The poems always address the reader as a sensitive and intellectually curious person; the reader does not need her hand held around every line break.
Undeniably powerful, yet at their emotional cores, “accessible,” the poems work. By accessible, I do not mean the tyranny of the narrative poem to have a beginning, middle, and end, and to have the ability to be paraphrased; nor do I mean the tyranny of the short, personal lyric to comfort the reader with a defined voice. I mean the poems make the ironic, bored, jaded, and silly reader—he is a consumer of texts—into a fleshy, involved, concerned reader—a producer with her, moving into the depths to find meaning. Together we are challenging the critical methods always brought to bear on literature. If there is anything her poems are “about”, they must be about freedom. One thing this book shows is that finally the right wing in this country cannot have a monopoly on what that word means.
Coleman’s poems always have loci of history and power in their concerns: overgrown, foreclosed Detroit, child abuse, Coltrane’s “Naima”, interacting with a grandson, suicidal poets, Venice Beach, San Diego, doomed marriages, or cooking, for example. Almost every poem has a phrase, a line, or several, that thump the mind’s bass drums even days after the book has been put on the shelf:
“birth (an assembly line?). there are more knowzits than ever. / young, devout,
and DuSable—/ tellin’ us thangs.” (34)
“being fuckable is the best revenge” (50)
“zebra-tailed, she comes, exhausted with her doings” (80)
“the power of inkiness was at an oblique edge, / their very own Francis Bacon
worth a golden gavel” (91)
“and await the glacier you are certain is icing us over” (112)
“and work through me to the p-bone” (119)
These are uses of language never seen before or since; they are undoubtedly lines by Wanda Coleman. Even her most obvious poems, like “9/11, the Reznikoff Variation,” is one of the few poems about 9/11 that has not made me cringe or erupt in anger and frustration. She notices, for example, the failure of photography. Her poem’s second stanza uses almost no punctuation (à la Merwin); the subject and predicate seem to collapse on each other as a metonymy of the camera’s lens is conflated with a sound recording: “A frightened woman dressed in soot / elbows alongside other panicked runners / into the camera / tilted to capture the exploding skyline / its microphone / captures the curses and prayers of flight, / picture out of focus as photography fails.”
In “Detroit Left at the Moon,” she locates us with “a fullness gone flat”: geography has a social implication. She shows rusted, abandoned factories of the post-industrial city and how it affects the black middle class: “fresh in from the dream factory / blackness descending on blackness // the food has to be hardy to defend the bones / against the blight.” Invoking Malcolm X (as Detroit Red), Henry Ford, and discontents that “dwarfed a history of Septembers,” the poem invokes the worn spirit of the last decade in a fresh and terrific way.
Most of Coleman’s poems here have layers and levels; they remain satisfying and textured even after multiple readings. Her portmanteaus (“brainjello”) and nonce forms have an improvisatory edge, yet they somehow seem inevitable at the same time. Coleman is also unafraid in poems to be truthful. An elegy, for example, for Reetika Vazirani, called “The Blood This Morning,” is tender even as it blisters and shows muscularity and force as much as any of this work.
I think everyone should buy a copy of The World Falls Away. I wish Philip Levine well in his tenure as Poet Laureate, and vote for Wanda Coleman for the next one.
