WANDA COLEMAN’S POEMS radiate musical lyricism. The act is conscious, the sound and vision explicit and vibrant yet steeped in the timelessly familiar. Coleman said her landmark “American Sonnets,” which helped cement her reputation as “the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles,” were “jazz poems.” Mirroring the music’s “open form” and “rhythm structure,” they gave her an opportunity, as she put it, to “blow my soul.” In a 2005 essay, Coleman also admitted to a lifelong “Blues Love Affair”: “There was something . . . profound and magnificent . . . going on under the surface of language in its marriage to sound,” she wrote of a music introduced to her by her father, which decades later she still turned to “instead of seeking the head shrinker’s couch or pharmaceuticals.”
Spend a little time trawling the internet for videos of Coleman’s readings, and you’ll find her musicality in action, unadorned at solo recitals, but it emerges even more vividly when she’s backed by musicians, as she was at an event at California State University, Los Angeles, a few months before her 2013 passing. Coleman’s notoriously tough, no-BS demeanor—the armor she wore to navigate LA’s literary, civic, and academic establishments as a working-class Black woman poet (a frequent narrative topic)—is replaced by a radiant smile each time the call-and-response between poet and jazz trio connects in a way that fits the emotional resonance she seeks. The music helps her feel it—and she shows it!
Artist Cauleen Smith tells an anecdote of Coleman showing up at readings with a number of her own poetry collections bookmarked. “She would pick up a book, start reading, put it down mid-poem, pick up another book, and start reading mid-poem—riffing, improvising with her own poems. I was like, ‘What??? That is not done!!!’ An artist who can do that with their own work [has] trust in the form.”
Having grown up in California, Smith moved back to Los Angeles from Chicago in 2017. She surveyed friends for an LA reading list, and the poet LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs recommended Wanda. Coleman’s 2001 collection Mercurochrome clicked. “She was reminding me about the trials and challenges of living in LA,” says Smith. “Declaring her total rage and a refusal of the system that she had to deal with, but with so much humor and a wicked, wicked intellect. I felt that her amazing writing, but also her stance, her position was a really useful tactic for surviving the city.”
Coleman’s musicality, control, and expressiveness are primary elements of Smith’s new project, “The Wanda Coleman Songbook,” which pairs those verses with music by contemporary musicians. Smith invited Meshell Ndegeocello, Kelsey Lu, Jeff and Ruby Parker, Alice Smith, Jamila Woods & Standing on the Corner, and Moor Mother & Aquiles Navarro, all artists who swim with great purpose in Black American music’s rich interpretive waters, to provide Coleman’s words with original settings. You’ll find little identifiable jazz or blues faux-thenticity here, but ancestral ghosts clearly populate the studio machinery at play in the construction of these tracks, perfect foils for Coleman’s piercing insights into the different strata of people navigating LA, words poet Douglas Kearney once described as “clinics in polyvocality.”
Kearney wrote liner notes for the vinyl record The Wanda Coleman Songbook, the culmination of Smith’s project, which plays at 52 Walker in TriBeCa, New York, through mid-March. Visitors are instructed to put on and flip over the record at the turntable station; there’s no gallery attendant, so there’s no audio without audience participation; this interactivity is important to Smith, a champion of vinyl. All the while, an ambient film that Smith shot in and of Los Angeles is projected onto the walls: her own visions of driving the city, its natural wonders (sunsets, palm trees and urban wildlife) next to the street-level alienation (the homeless pushing shopping carts, the carless waiting at a bus stop) but also shots that track Coleman’s everlasting negotiation of LA’s psychosocial landscape. There are images of Coleman’s books and poems, stacks of which are strewn across 52 Walker’s couches, her original sharp words at hand. Bathed in a reddish soft-noir light, the installation reads like a love letter and a perceptive warning, an invitation across time and space, artist to artist to audience, words and images from one city to another.
In retrospect, Coleman’s tireless commitment to poetry and a critical perspective may be another reason she earned the epithet “LA blueswoman.” Between menial gigs, this work was her spiritual vocation. On The Wanda Coleman Songbook’s final secret track, a field recording of road traffic foregrounded by the sounds of a typewriter, Smith salutes Coleman’s determined labor. It’s a sonic vignette of “Wanda having to take a bus and get home in the rain and write,” Smith says. “If I were to make a film about a writer, it would be about that space between your day job and getting to your laptop. So that’s what I focused on, the dedication it takes to be this kind of poet.”
