Sunday, November 24, 2013

Wanda Coleman (November 13, 1946-November 22, 2013)


Paragraph on/to Wanda Coleman

 

Dead poets and prophets are better understood than the ones who use the air.  Henceforth, your tough tenderness will sting.  Your silence will be more hauntingly powerful than your sounding out the syllables.  Your collages of feeling and shards of dreamglass will more effectively cut the flesh of death-bound-subjects, allowing the demons, dogs and bitches by them possessed to be transformed in the ecology of always changing new worlds.  The blue jazz you lived was no stereotype; it was a scalpel that exposed the bone structures of efforts to be human.  You channeled Calafia. You learned us the futility of tears.  Thus, I will not weep for you but pray a requiem for your splendid soul, your work and works. “Let the work,” you said in an interview on May 11, 2013, “be the revolution.”  So it is.  So it shall henceforth be.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.          November 24, 2013

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