from Ostinato Vamps (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003)
It’s hard to have a favorite Wanda Coleman poem, mostly because she had the range, but this poem today is mine. If you leaf through any sampling of her work — particularly some of her work published by Black Sparrow Editions, which had these gorgeous, textured, almost personally-made covers (Bathwater Wine, Mercurochrome, and Hand Dance are some of my favorites) — you’ll notice the way each poem is so singularly its own, in voice, or style, or length. She also wrote big, big books — each one just filled to the brim. Her poems feel. And they see. And they play.
Last year, when Coleman’s selected poems came out, the poet and critic Dan Chiasson wrote in The New Yorker:
At a moment when many of us are learning—and teaching one another—how to make a face mask out of a sock or a bra, Coleman’s poetry might be just the model of inspired, ecstatic thrift we need.
Inspired is one word that comes to mind when I think of Coleman’s work. Universal is another. Coleman is one of the few poets I’ve read who can write in that often-dangerous, often-overly-generalized “we” without the poem reading as false, or forced. In her poem “Lorde Cento,” she writes:
we shall walk as fast as we can
moving beyond anger or failure. we are
rewarded by journeys. we are always saying
goodbye.
And it’s true, right, that we are always saying goodbye? Don’t you feel that? Don’t you feel it even more now, not just in a time of loss, but in a time of uncertainty, when you might be afraid to say I’ll see you later because you don’t know what later looks like, or what it means?
And in the same way, when I think of today’s poem, I think of that notion of universality, some common language, one buoyed by a kind of compassion that feels like the result of the work of witness. I mean, consider even the title alone of today’s poem — Exoteric — which means that the work is intended to be understood by a larger audience. I read Coleman’s title as a playful (and perhaps frustrated) slap in the face of academia — the supposed world of poets — which has, over time, cultivated an esoteric language: one intended to be understood and performed by a select few (namely white, institutionally privileged men). One could say: how inspired, how playful, how radical for Coleman to title a poem Exoteric, to approach poetry by way of communing with an audience, rather than isolating and catering to a portion of a possible audience. And that’s true, surely. But I also say: how compassionate, how generous, how warm.
One beauty of today’s poem is in its juxtaposition. Look at the italicized questions and prompts:
what is life’s purpose?
how we think of death
what we cling to in the midst of change
By posing these questions, Coleman has done a number of things, but one thing that feels special to me is the way that she has taken these questions out of the esoteric world — the oft-depicted stuffy rooms of academia with worn-wood chairs — and placed them squarely in the exoteric world, which is the world we live in, the world of ordinariness and extraordinariness, rage and love, paid bills and unpaid bills, credit card debt and dollar pizza slices. The paring of such questions with the title — Exoteric — feels like Coleman saying, almost wryly: “Did you not think everyday people ask ourselves these questions daily? We do. We do, we do, we do.”
And each answer Coleman offers in this poem also feels like it cements the universal nature of such questions in the frustrating and at times beautiful ordinariness of life. Because isn’t changing diapers when necessary just as much, if not exponentially more, a part of life’s purpose than what — finding some kind of sense of inner joy? And is the latter even possible — perhaps Coleman is potentially suggesting — in a world where those daily needs — the diapers, the bills, the medication, the you-name-it — aren’t met with enough consistent efficacy to have the time or emotional labor to begin to think of how one lives a life? And the stuffiness of an apartment in mid-summer — isn’t opening the window, hoping for a breeze, isn’t that kind of like salvation? Or hope? And isn’t another way of thinking about death the way, perhaps, you have said to yourself: there has to be a better way than this. To kill this system, to kill this institution, to erect something better in its place: aren’t those deaths like little hopes? A window open on a summer day? And how universal is that? How non-esoteric?
And finally, that last prompt. What we cling to in the midst of change. There’s that we again. And Coleman’s answer:
your cold hand. let me warm it
Which is another way of saying love, right? Which is a kind of returning, a kind of grounding, maybe, right? I think of the way she writes, in her poem “Of an Absence”:
his silence would’ve been manna. just to be together enuff. he could sit and read a book or write or correct papers or read the sports page, giving her stats on the playoffs. and now and again looking up to see if she’s holding up.
There’s a tenderness in these lines, a tenderness of silence and rustling paper, of proximity, daily intimacy. And there’s a tenderness underneath the last line of today’s poem, and at the heart of everything Coleman writes. It’s a tenderness steeped in the ordinariness of daily life, which is why the first two “answers” of today’s poem feel so apt. They invite us, the readers, in. They are exoteric at heart. They don’t pretend at anything other than reality. They are dirty diapers and stuffy rooms. And so, when that last line comes — your cold hand. let me warm it — we, the readers, see the image inside of the poem, an image of a hand that once changed a diaper, that once opened a window, a hand that did what hands do: ordinary acts, repeated over time. But we also feel the singular weight of that act, a hand warming another hand. And we feel it as love. And what is more exoteric than that?
When I consider today’s poem, I think of the way people, over time, have often assumed that it is a privilege to even ask a question, or to be asked a question, as if you won’t have a good enough question to ask, a worthy enough answer to give. I think of how frequently people have been denied the right to be offered a question because the person asking doesn’t think they are smart enough to understand it. And I think of how frequently people have been denied the right to ask a question because the person who would potentially be answering doesn’t respect the person potentially asking the question. I think of how this is repeated, time and time again, in classrooms and newsrooms and workplaces and homes. You would think the right to ask or answer a question would be a basic human right, but it is not.
And perhaps that is the most beautiful thing about Coleman’s poem today. It’s the way it extends that simple, basic act — that fundamentally human curiosity — into the everydayness of life. It rescues the questions of the esoteric world and places them where they belong, into the everyday world. At the heart of this poem, then, is a belief, a belief in the capability of each person to translate the language of the universal into the language of the ordinary, and back again. A belief, too, in the way a poem can communicate a multitude of complexities in ways that forever surprise and stun and move and settle.
In her poem “Essay on Language (4),” Coleman writes:
the meaning of love is always in the next embrace
And maybe that’s what I’m thinking of about today’s poem, too. That there’s an openness, a curiosity, a willingness to hold, again and again, life as possibility. I think we have a responsibility to be more exoteric than esoteric, to not reserve the privilege of asking and answering for a select few deemed privileged enough to engage in such acts. Because, I think, at the heart of such a responsibility is the belief that love is always in the next embrace, that what we never thought was possible is, well, possible, or at the very least could be. This is a challenge. I feel it every day. But it is a worthy challenge, I think, because it simply asks us to ask. To ask, and ask, and ask. And then, to listen, and to know a little bit, and a little bit more, and a little bit more. And from that knowledge, to ask again. And to invite others to answer. To resist the temptation to name what little knowledge we have as all the knowledge there is to have, and to resist the urge to refuse our own curiosity, or deny the curiosity of others. And then: to be present in our lives. To offer warmth when it is needed.