Poem of the Week: 9.29.22
"American Sonnet 66"
“American Sonnet 66” by Wanda Coleman
—after Vallejo
i am dying in lala in a blizzard of sun where my killers always profit from my death. look here at the flat little rectangle of embossed gray stone/the evidence of days. and there, the ants have taken over speeding busily to and from the oblivious hill. something tiny yet beautiful has declared root, an absurd pinkness. and over there, its white sister. and listen. the precious costly silence broken only by the distant sigh of an airship's landing and the aria of a sad bird on its sagging wire above the unkempt yard. so many's the years one must pay till paying is up. and only the lucky find their ways underground oh. thirst. oh. pride. i am dying in lala in a sunblaze in a dream dreamt then forsaken
Source: Wanda Coleman. “American Sonnet 66.” Wicked Enchantment, edited by Terrance Hayes, Black Sparrow Press, 2020, p. 136.
This is the fourth edition of the Poem of the Week. Thanks for reading.
It’s been hot in LA. Often with heat comes feelings of anger, the sensation of languishing with everything there is to do and be doing despite the weather. Wanda Coleman’s poems help keep me cool while still firing me up. Part of a masterful collection called Wicked Enchantment, the poem “American Sonnet 66” is upholding the classical sonnet form (if you’re reading on mobile, turn your phone sideways to see the poem’s form) albeit in unrhymed free verse.
Coleman is not the first poet to deconstruct and redefine the sonnet, but she is doing so to make a point: this mess continues. Death and dying are central themes here, and so are the dead poets referenced and layered. The poem is in response to one written by César Vallejo (hence the “—after Vallejo” under the title) called “Black Stone Lying On A White Stone.” But Vallejo is not the only ghost; the title and the speaker are conscious of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 66, and Gwendolyn Brooks is here, too, when the speaker hears the hauntingly sad “aria” of a dream deferred. Coleman is acknowledging these ghosts by altering the sonnet form, and the framing repetition of “i am dying in lala” suggests that many of the archaic systems we exist in are absurd and dangerous in our modern world. Yet, despite her “dying,” Coleman’s words survive refusing to become someone else’s “profit.” Writing into a mess of past traditions, writing of brutal struggle in a crazy world, and writing “something tiny yet beautiful,” Wanda Coleman is the voice of a city that is horrible and dazzling and hot and never-ending.
Have fun this weekend. Ricky