“[T]hese are my slave songs”: The Poetics of Transgression and Exorcising the Demon of Racism in Wanda Coleman’s Jazz Sonnets
Jerzy Kamionowski
University of Białystok, PolandJerzy Kamionowski is an Associate Professor at the University of Białystok, Poland. He is the author of New Wine in Old Bottles. The Virtuality of the Presented World in Angela Carter’s Fiction (1999), Głosy z “dzikiej strefy” (Voices from the “wild zone”) (2011) on poetry of three women writers of the Black Arts Movement: Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and Audre Lorde, and From the House of the Slave to the Home of the Brave. The Motif of Home in Poetry by Black Women since the late 1960s (2019). Presently, he takes interest in the poetry of the post-BAM generation, as well as the representations of the Middle Passage in African American literature.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3515-8751
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.
Schlagworte:
black poetry, Wanda Coleman, sonnet, plasticity, transgression, racismLiteraturhinweise
Blake, William. “The Little Black Boy.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43671/the--black-boy
---. “The Tyger.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43687/the-tyger
Browne, Mahogany L. “Introduction.” Coleman, Wanda. Heart First into This Ruin: The Complete American Sonnets. Black Sparrow Press, 2022.
Coleman, Wanda. Bathwater Wine. Black Sparrow Press, 1998.
---. Mercurochrome: New Poems. Black Sparrow Press, 2001.
---. Heart First into This Ruin: The Complete American Sonnets. Black Sparrow Press, 2022.
Crockett, Clayton. “Foreword.” Malabou, Catherine. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing. Trans. Carolyn Shread. Columbia University Press, 2010.
Dove, Rita. “An Intact World.” New Expansive Poetry: Theory, Criticism, History. Ed. R. S. Gwynn. Story Line Press, 1999, pp. 173–74.
Ellis, Trey. “The New Black Aesthetic”. Callaloo, No. 38 (Winter, 1989), pp. 233–43.
Gallagher, D. P. “César Vallejo.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/cesar-vallejo
Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech & Black Music as Poetic References. William Morrow, 1973.
Jenks, Chris. Transgression. Routledge, 2003.
Jervis, John. Transgressing the Modern: Explorations in the Western Experience of Otherness. Blackwell, 1999.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. The Crossing Press, 1984.
---. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Lowell, Robert. “History.” https://poets.org/poem/history
Malabou, Catherine. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Columbia University Press, 2010.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Plume, 1998.
Pereira, Malin. “Wanda Coleman.” Into a Light Brilliant and Unseen: Conversations with Contemporary Black Poets. Ed. Malin Pereira. University of Georgia Press, 2010, pp. 9–44.
Rich, Adrienne. “Format and Form”. After New Formalism: Poets on Form, Narrative, and Tradition. Ed. Annie Finch. Story Line Press, 1999, pp. 1–7.
Robbins, Hollis. Forms of Contention. Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition. The University of Georgia Press, 2020.
Ryan, Jennifer. “The Transformative Poetics of Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets.” African American Review 48.4 (Winter 2015), pp. 415–29.
Shakespeare, William, Macbeth. Penguin Books, 1968.
Weil, Eric A. “Review of: Wanda Coleman, Mercurochrome.” African American Review, vol. 4, 2002, pp. 695–96.
Wheatley, Phillis. “On Being Brought form Africa to America.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45465/on-being-brought-from-africa-to-america
---. “To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth.”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47706/to-the-right-honorable-william-earl--dartmouth
Wright, Richard. “The Literature of the Negro in the United States.” White Man, Listen! Anchor Books, 1964, pp. 69–105.
University of Białystok, Poland
Jerzy Kamionowski is an Associate Professor at the University of Białystok, Poland. He is the author of New Wine in Old Bottles. The Virtuality of the Presented World in Angela Carter’s Fiction (1999), Głosy z “dzikiej strefy” (Voices from the “wild zone”) (2011) on poetry of three women writers of the Black Arts Movement: Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and Audre Lorde, and From the House of the Slave to the Home of the Brave. The Motif of Home in Poetry by Black Women since the late 1960s (2019). Presently, he takes interest in the poetry of the post-BAM generation, as well as the representations of the Middle Passage in African American literature.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3515-8751
