“[T]hese are my slave songs”: The Poetics of Transgression and Exorcising the Demon of Racism in Wanda Coleman’s Jazz Sonnets

Abstract

The article focuses on Wanda Coleman’s protracted series of American Sonnets as a prime example of what I call the poetics of transgression, which the poet worked out and implemented in her “jazz sonnets.” The article discusses the reasons behind Coleman’s decision to turn towards formal poetry, and argues that her choice of the sonnet form is a transgressive gesture, which means a challenge to the white tradition whose limits are infringed by violating the convention, as Coleman approaches the sonnet as the entirely plastic form in the meaning that Catherine Malabou gives to the term. Through the formal transgression – i.e., breaking the rules and destruction of all the recognizable features of the sonnet, the poet demonstrates her refusal to be its slave, as she actively challenges and reshapes the old form by “jazzing it up.” Simultaneously, the formal choice of the sonnet allows her to extend her earlier subject matter concerning black women’s experience in the Los Angeles ghetto. Merging “integrity” with “extension” (the features of black writing identified by Craig Werner) provides Coleman with a foundation to discuss larger topics from a black perspective, such as history, identity, culture, and poetry itself. As a result, her American Sonnets series remains the poet’s most consistent and subtle strategy of tracing down and exorcising the demon of racism wherever it hides – i.e. in its manifestations in the acts of violence as well as its stubborn presence in American (sub)consciousness.