From “where I live” to “my slave songs”: Integrity and Extension in Wanda Coleman’s Poetry

Abstract

This article discusses Wanda Coleman’s poetry in terms of two interconnected categories which launched the studies of black literature by Craig Werner: “integrity” and “extension”. These categories are assumed to correspond to the standard critical perception of Coleman’s oeuvre as content- and form-oriented, respectively, where the former pre-conditions the latter. However, the implemented concepts not only demonstrate how well-acquainted the poet was with the everyday ghetto lives of poor black women and with multiple forms of discrimination against them (“integrity”), but also reveal her experimental attitude to language and to formal dimensions of poetry (“extension”). Also, a close reading of Coleman’s protracted series of American jazz sonnets and her “Retro Rogue Anthology” poems reveals that this formal strategy extended her attention to a new subject matter (i.e., history, culture, and black identity), perceived and presented from a collective black perspective. Eventually, Coleman’s re-writing of white classic poems bears the marks of the strategy of Signifyin(g) combined with the iconoclastic tradition pioneered by Friedrich Nietzsche.