Wandering and getting lost before I’m able to get lost in The Wanda Coleman Songbook
We get The New York Times on Sundays. Yes. Really! For about a year now and it comes with all the digital bells and whistles like Cooking and Wirecutter and sharing of up to 10 free articles a month which is how I get to share this with you!
The reasons we get the paper physically are twofold in manifolds many folds like cranes flying in formation or rising like icons of construction is cities like Austin that I contribute occasionally to keeping weird at ACL fest in past years and mostly daily by listening to KUTX especially Laurie Gallardo.
Back to the Sunday paper trail. We get it because:
1. The variety puzzles from which The Daily Spelling Bee was birthed + assorted acrostics and puns and anagrams are no longer available online. We used to print them out every week and do them with coffee and scones (also only available only on Sundays) from our local Forestville Bakery, Nightingale. And now, we take a picture and Tom does them in the magazine and I do them on the other side of re-used paper covered with architectural drawings (we call that Lisa paper).
2. The other reason is that once a year, in mid-December, there’s a super mega puzzle section with enough puzzles to get you through atmospheric rivers or boxing day flus that put a literal damper on your outdoor, musical, hiking, social meanders that you may have been thinking of planning.
At the end of 2022 our search for the physical paper in Sonoma County was an odyssey with several strands. We even answered the riddle of “where is the last bastion of NY Times papers in Sonoma County?” correctly after meeting a potter at DRNK at their holiday market who had a copy of the paper in her car and offered it to us on the spot. There was also a foray to the Santa Rosa Barnes & Noble. Which held the possibilities of two papers! One for each of us! Yay! Not so fast, no magazine, no Super Mega puzzle section. You see, the east coast, midwest, rest of the country weather had made the inclusion of those sections impossible. Boo! And they would be in the very next Sunday’s paper. Yay! But the next Sunday is Christmas - yay and boo and neutral too depending on what, how, and who you observe.
But it meant stores would be closed and no news fit to print would be procurable in print if you didn’t get it dropped in your drive/stoop. That is the scoop. We were able to subscriber just in time for the NY Times to arrive on 12/25/22. And take photos of the puzzles we both liked and do the massive super mega crossword together on our massive super mega island (well, big enough for this pursuit).
So that’s how we come to be subscribing to the physical Sunday New York Times over a year (and two joy-filled super mega puzzle sections semi-complete) later.
Many times, I let the papers pile up week to week, saving the book reviews, arts and leisure, even business, for a later ingestion date (or sometimes never). While Tom does the 30 times daily read on app or computer news refresh, I approach my Sunday times reading like an unscheduled untimed, OMG, blow my mind scavenger hunt. I even grab a notebook and write down quotes and delights and insights if I’m really into an ocean diving expedition.
But this piece is not exactly about that, yes and it does benefit from my ability to share with you the whole article about Wanda Coleman, “verbal virtuoso,” who I confess to have had little to no exposure to. No excuses, as a relatively newly practicing spoken word poet who hasn’t read, seen, or experienced many poets, and gotten much of her influence from music, songwriters, reading, conversation, writing groups, nature, circles, and the whole gamut of my lived experience, I am finding my eyes and ears opening up to “new to me” discoveries. And Wanda is an invitation to an LA Highway of a rabbit hole. I won’t attempt to describe her here and let you take your own journey via the article and more links below.
From the article on The Wanda Coleman Songbook:
Her poetry, published since the late 1970s by Black Sparrow Press, was raw, often rude, sexually explicit, bitingly funny, full of cleareyed fury at the systems and biases she faced as a working-class Black woman — and acerbically insightful on intimacy across class and race. It was also virtuosic, playing with forms from sonnets to the blues and a plethora of literary references.
I looked everywhere (streaming platforms, googling the googling) for the album and video Cauleen Smith made. This again from the NY Times piece:
“to share poems with musicians she admired, “to know if they connect with Wanda, how they connect, what it sounds like. The seven tracks were made separately, with different artists, yet the result — somewhere in the realm of jazz and avant-garde soul — is lyrical and cohesive. The roster is impressive: Alice Smith; Jamila Woods and Standing on the Corner; moor mother and Aquiles Navarro; Jeff Parker and Ruby Parker; Shala Miller; Meshell Ndegeocello and Kelsey Lu.”
No luck finding any of the songs or the album as of this writing other than the limited edition EP on vinyl.
It makes sense that Smith and the gallery are keeping that immersive multi-sensorial experience for people who go to the gallery, for now. It keeps it intimate in present time, for folks who go there or are there or can be there any time soon.
Does it make me wish I lived in or could teleport to New York and experience all of it! Or maybe I will go in March as part of my turning 60 in 2024. If you’re an old or new friend or client who wants me to do that, reach out!
Seriously, can you picture me, the 1/2 Jewish girl from suburban subsistent middle class Connecticut who played rugby and squash at Vassar, read management and literature, planned graduation parties, and took future financiers on tours of NYU’s Stern School of Business while it was still on Wall Street (ish). Who spent years in marketing and 11 in Manhattan in the late 80’s to 90’s wearing suits and shilling credit cards, Pepsi stuff, and other assorted services, while finding her way to the canyons of LA for a brief stop before twenty-plus years in SF (that’s for another story).
Can you picture her on a stage in the East Village where she once lived in an illegal sublet with a shower in the kitchen, dripping from a hole in the ceiling, dropping poems that go with shmears at all-night restaurants like Veselka or waxing high on matzoh brei from B&H Dairy getting graduated bobs from punk hair stylists on St. Mark’s Place before she graduates with non honors but plenty of beer blasted and near failures in stats and accounting re-balanced by management and literature, finance for art history majors, and advertising class photo shoots with dear friends (you do the math and guess the brand) Todd Erlandson, Sherry Leigh Hoffman, Claudia Cromie, and the Tom Clapper. Apparently, I still dig colorful togs (and pens).
https://www.converse.com/
Can you picture me sharing this wandering poem about Wanda right now? You don’t even have to because it’s right here.
Thanks for reading my first typed piece for #tlc thelisaclapper.com and following some of the links, Cauleen’s show, and Wanda reading her own poetry on YouTube thanks to g.i.g. worldwide entertainment. Some of it even has her on video!
More Wanda in this search and on her author page on poetrypoetryfoundation.org.
Check back in a week with more poems and writing about things, people, and poems. Meanwhile, take a tour around thelisaclapper.com and reach out with a striking reflection or a point of inflection. I’d love to hear from you!
Yay!
