As award — winning poet, playwright, fiction writer, journalist and Days of Our Lives scriptwriter Wanda Coleman cackled, crooned, sang and read selections from her expansive collection of writing on Wednesday night, the Oberlin audience couldn’t escape the metaphor titling her latest National Book Award nominated book of poetry, Mercurochrome.
An aptly titled book wherein sonnets are able to tell living pain, joy and the passages between, Mercurochrome is a salve made up of mercurial compounds and dabbed on open wounds as remedy.

Upon her receiving the nomination for the National Book Award Judge said, “Wanda Coleman’s poetry stings, stains and ultimately helps heal wounds like the old-fashioned mercurochrome of her brilliant title.... these searing, soaring poems help us to repair the fractures of human difference and feel what it is to be made whole again.”

Coleman opened her reading with some guidance, letting the audience know that her work addressed the “ongoing tension or dialogue between content and form,” and that she was about to “strike a writerly pose.” But even after that bit of friendly wisdom, Coleman’s several dozen listeners were stunned silent as she launched into the evening’s first poem, “Neruda,” a selection from her seventh book, Hand Dance.
Coleman’s poetry catches readers when and where they don’t expect it. “Neruda” starts soft and slow, “Few quiet hours/ I spent them soaking in my tub with my neruda.”
By the next stanza however, Coleman’s tenor had filled Wilder 101 with a beat that wavered between jazz saxophone, hip-hop lyrics and an aching Spanish love poem. In the breaks between laughter and another line of poetry her ability to fluidly move between form and content became clear. Coleman’s audience, a broad-reaching sample of the Oberlin community, was enraptured by the drama in her poetry.

“I love the complex combination of humor, passion, anger and grief that runs through so many of these poems. It just makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up,” professor of creative writing Dan Chaon said.
Coleman writes on what she calls “cultural clash.” “I look for points of disjuncture as I move through the culture. I look for these paces and they look for me,” Coleman said. “On sunset boulevard a begger accosts me/ for spare change. I hand him my collected neruda/ while my lover takes siesta I walk down to/ the neighborhood bar for a game of pool solo. I order/ dos besos. I put a quarter in the juke and notice/ all selections read neruda.”
And as the poems continued, listeners, carried by Coleman’s voice, delved further into the writer’s native Los Angeles cityscape, their own experiences and another gritty world of exacting rhyme schemes, line-breaks and lines like “cross-eyed cornflake yellow auspex of urban blather.” Coleman isn’t shy about clashing language, sticking a “mothafucka” next to a “chassi”s or a “nostrum.” She keeps a 1958 Roget’s Thesaurus next to her computer.
“I was one of those kids who liked to read the dictionary, then later I had a workshop leader who made me go back to looking up, finding all sorts of words. In the dictionary and then as a medical secretary I transcribed all these crazy words. I enjoy word-playing. I use the [sophisticated] words to enrich the language. I like to think I am using them well. I like to think myself a master of language,” Coleman said.

Born in 1946 and raised in the Los Angeles community of Watts, a black neighborhood known for its 1965 rebellion, Coleman grew up in a highly politicized, creative time. As the Black American political and social movement took off, Coleman became a player. “All these creative workshops sprang up in the post- Kennedy years, [such as] Johnson’s Great Society Program, and I was a beneficiary,” Coleman said.

Growing up reading the writers of her parents’ generation, such as Richard Wright and Baldwin as well as the white writers she learned in school and bought at the local bookstores, Coleman dreamt of becoming one of America’s greatest writers. “I wanted to be the best damn writer I could be, she said. “As a black writer it is a problem for me that I am responsible for busting the stereotypes of ‘black writers.’ I feel what is Western is mine, what is American is mine….I am black, but a writer. That’s duality,” Coleman said.
Supporting herself as she pursued this goal, Coleman worked all sides of the writing arena, going from soap writer, where she was the only black member of an ensemble writing team responsible for creating the minds and experiences of soap characters, to writing teacher, to magazine editor. Over the years, she remained in L.A., traveling and spending time in New York but always returning to Southern California. When asked by first-year Alec Scott about her experience as a writer of color in L.A., Coleman responded with the emotional frankness that colors many of her poems.

“Don’t waste the time [coming to L.A. to write]. Don’t let yourself go through the changes cause, baby, you will be plucked, gutted like a chicken,” she said.
Coleman’s epic incantation to her native city started off with “To love L.A. is to love more than a city,” and like a poetry slam gold-medalist, her words only got faster and tighter as she evoked: “holding a double thick rich malted or something better between tight thighs without hitting the accelerator,” and “…accents that change as fast as the street lights in this third world gangbang.”
The heat was blowing in Wilder 101, and by the reading’s end Coleman was toweling sweat from her brow and slowing her pace as she left us with her final cut, “Make believe is the only reality.”