C: Wanda Coleman

Consciousness Raising Exercise

I came across Wanda Coleman after seeing Terrance Hayes read at Manchester Central Library a few years ago. He’s a favourite modern poet of mine (likely my pick for H) but he talked about her as an inspiration and mentor. He provides the foreword to her recent Collected Poems: Wicked Enchantment, and it was her who first invented the concept of the American Sonnet which Hayes uses so compellingly in his work. As we’ll see with today’s choice, her work is direct and uncompromising, and you can really see her influence on Hayes with the fireworks of sound and rhythm and the often odd syntax and use of neologism. This poem is my favourite of hers – in the section of Wicked Enchantment where I found it, there’s a whole swathe of poems that are “after” some American greats – Berryman, Ginsberg, Levertov, Sexton – and I think these are interesting because she’s pastiching some recognisable qualities of these writers while also very much putting the poem through her own idiosyncratic wringer of a voice. I’ve picked the one “after” Bishop, because, well, Bishop.

Consciousness Raising Exercise

After Elizabeth Bishop

Think of the tornado roaming the nation uneasily

like tall blond boys in black coats with semi-

automatics taking names in a high-school library.

Let’s deal with the ‘after’. There’s a direct response here to a specific Bishop poem – “Little Exercise”. And that first simile is a direct retread of Bishop’s opening ‘Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily/like a dog looking for a place to sleep in.’ I’ve always thought this was a beautiful simile from Bishop, one of the three or four perfect similes in contemporary poetry that I always reach for when exemplifying how figurative language works to surprise us and expand our ways of looking.

So Coleman here is taking on a challenge: the opening to a poem that was already pretty perfect and memorable, by one of the great 20^th Century poets. Bishop’s storm=dog simile is sweet and beautiful and true-sounding – Coleman’s is jaw dropping. Think of the storm like a restless dog? No: think of the tornado like a couple of school-shooters. This poem is from 2001 so I guess the direct reference might be Columbine, especially with the black coats. But obviously that in itself is standing in for bigger evils to be fought, not least fascism – the black coats, the blond hair, the absolutely chilling framing of ‘taking names’.

That change in the title too: Consciousness Raising Exercise. This poem is a warning and it’s going to be a political statement. It has direct purpose and designs on us, which Bishop’s ambivalent, unobtrusive “Little Exercise” title almost rejects. I guess January 2025 is a good time for us to be looking for this kind of advice about consciousness and resistance.

Think how they must look now, the rotted innocents,

thinking they were safe, slain before they had the chances

most take for comfort if not for granted,

“The rotted innocents/thinking they were safe.” What do we do with an image like that? I’m really asking. This could be about any point in the world’s violent history. It could’ve been written this year about the Gaza genocide. It’s a horrible, unbearable way to describe the death of innocents. There’s no decorum in speaking about the dead this way, but there’s a deeply moral centre to the way she forces us to see the horror of death and then humanises the victims straight after and directly asks us to compare them with ourselves.

The genius of Coleman’s gambit with this ‘after’, for me, is how she takes Bishop’s fairly light, exploratory framing suggestion to “Think”, as a ‘little exercise’ and turns it into a ‘consciousness raising’, shaming directive to “think”. Coleman knows, as all those of us do who have spent the last year/decade/ lifetime horrified by the way in which official channels and ordinary people can switch off and ignore or excuse atrocity happening in front of us, that the first job of anyone of conscience is to confront and ‘think of’ what’s in front of them. Even if it’s upsetting and grotesque, even if it makes your own language and thoughts upsetting and grotesque, even if the scale of it feels unimaginable. Throughout this poem: think. Think. Think. Face it.

whose families will forever mourn by the light

of their faiths or the fires of their estrangements.

Think of the paths walked to the crossroads,

the solemn pledges, the good done, the vows, the smiles

revealed in photograph albums and mementos – small

things kept to stay the flood.

I think in some ways, Coleman needs this extended listing here because of the horrible power of her previous image of the ‘rotted innocents’. The empathy part of this exercise is more important, morally, than the creation of the shocking, confronting image in the second stanza. I absolutely love the elegance of that line about the families mourning “by the light/of their faiths or the fires of their estrangements”. There’s something old-fashioned, maybe Shakespearean about the grandness of the abstraction and the ease of handling the metaphor. Also it acknowledges that anger, as a mourning response, is as valid as faith and forgiveness. The little details of what people do to try ‘staying the flood’ of grief are really tender. Honouring “The good done” in a life cut short is simple and lovely and sad. And what a great harnessing of that previous weather metaphor of the tornado to continue it in the metaphor for grief.

It’s raining dirty water all over America. The hearths

of thousands are broken with countless fireplaces

cracked and gone to weed. The Arks are slowly filling

with unknown species and new breeds. What happened to

the brave? Have they departed with the free? Think of the

gutters crammed with souls gone needlessly to waste.

I love the way this poem escalates so dramatically. It’s apocalyptic. “It’s raining dirty water all over America.” Well, yeah.

Then more listing, but this time the dark negative of all those lovely mourning gestures from before, and there’s something haunting about the fact that those domestic places that were full of remembrance are now cracked and broken and gone to weed.

I don’t know about Coleman’s direct influences but this section reminds me of Yeats’ “The Second Coming”, a similarly tubthumping Modernist take on the biblical scale of the ills of a hellish world. Yeats says “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” Coleman upends the bold claims of her country’s anthem to update and Americanize this statement – the “free” and the “brave” have disappeared. The unknown species and new breeds are frightening and threatening, in the Ark, the place that’s supposed to be the only safe haven from that flood of grief.

Think of hundreds seeping into history’s tar

as still as redwood or mounds of shoes; think

of them, deeply injured, as disturbances unresolved.

It’s worth going back again to Bishop’s original poem for this ending – her little exercise of describing the storm ends with a man hiding in a boat, ‘uninjured, barely disturbed’. Coleman flips this again. We don’t get that peaceful ending, because this poem is a consciousness-raising exercise. Of course nobody leaves this uninjured or undisturbed. We don’t get off that easily: we must look at and think about those haunting “mounds of shoes” at Auschwitz. We must look at and think about the redwoods while they’re still there.

If there is a note of hope in this poem, it comes from the very small suggestion that this can still be turned around, not from the suggestion that nothing bad has happened. “Deeply injured” is not dead, “unresolved” may mean resolvable, still. That’s the consciousness to be raised and the work to be done.

You can get “Wicked Enchantment” here: Wicked Enchantment

In the comments:

Who and what are we resisting, and how?

What do we need to face up to?

Who is your favourite green-hatted Super Mario character?