"Come. Glory in My Wonder's Will": An Interview with Wanda Coleman

Abstract

LA poet and critic Wanda Coleman develops characters in her essays, fiction, and poetry whose lives illuminate the pervasive social inequalities of late capitalist society. Her concern with such issues stems from her experiences growing up and later working in the Watts neighborhood of southern LA. She raised her three children and held several low-paying jobs within Watts’s rapidly shifting demographic. She witnessed increasing levels of gang-related violence, culminating in the 1992 riots, and a steady influx of multicultural, working-class families who gradually displaced the once predominantly African American population. In fact, large numbers of blacks left as part of a migration to the suburbs and urban centers in the South (“Watts”), and Coleman’s poetry investigates the ways in which the city’s inhabitants register these shifts. Drawing on her triply marginalized status as a black single mother, she creates poetic situations in which speakers struggle to find babysitters for their children, work multiple jobs at once, wrestle with often neglectful partners for attention and compassion, and decry the country’s familiar inattention to basic civil rights. Coleman’s residence in Watts testifies more generally to her commitment to exploring the particular geographies and ideologies that shape its terrain. In partial response to her work and that of other LA writers, Watts has experienced an upswing in the arts in recent years. Several museums, art galleries, and theater companies provide regular programming, particularly in the area surrounding the seventeen-piece Simon Rodia sculpture known as the Watts Towers. Coleman’s work has helped to establish LA as a newly prominent locus in which writers explore both experimental poetics and American regional identities in literature. Her poetry positions LA inhabitants’ experiences against the backdrop of specific urban landscapes that challenge the more traditional representations of Western literary geographies via vast desert landscapes. As a result, the city’s streets acquire a new literary significance. Her characters regularly experience abuse and deprivation, and they bear daily witness to the effects of violent crime and poverty littering their landscapes. Although fellow LA writer Charles Bukowski represented a strong influence in her earlier work, her fascination with the ugly beauty of the inner city originates in the same sources of inspiration that