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

In one of the last interviews with late Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman, conducted between 16 October 16 2012, and 9 May 9 2013. Coleman discusses the motivations behind and sources of her one-hundred-poem American Sonnets sequence, which was published as part of three discrete volumes of poetry (American Sonnets [1994], Bathwater Wine [1998], and Mercurochrome [2001]). She focuses in particular on the social and professional discrimination she endured as a black woman writer from southern Los Angeles, her inability to secure consistent recognition for her work, her older son's death, and her ties to Western literary traditions. The interview offers insight into the sonnets' experiments with form, as Coleman notes her investment in blues techniques, her complex relationship to the Black Arts Movement, and her many responses to other poets' characteristic styles and themes. She ties the sonnets' recurring critiques of social injustice to her unique position as a Western writer whose work is centered in urban spaces, rather than the open expanses of the desert highways, and to her experiences with the prejudice directed at US ethnic minorities. She also identifies a more general interest in formal experiment, a popularly overlooked element of modern black poetry, through discussions of the Harlem Renaissance and Beat poets, a consideration of contemporary Language-influenced work, and observations about several present-day LA writers. The interview is also distinguished by Coleman's explanations of the poetry's formal inspirations and the audience she envisions for her work.