Sleeping with the Dictionary/Blues Baby: Early Poems
2003; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-5804
Autores Tópico(s)Multilingual Education and Policy
ResumoHarryette Mullen. Sleeping with the Dictionary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 85 pp. $14.95 Harryette Mullen. Blues Baby: Early Poems. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002. 146 pp. $24.95 Harryette Mullen's most recent collection of poems, Sleeping with the Dictionary, engages questions of racial, sexual, community, and cultural politics within a rigorous yet playful framework of formal experimentation. Most of Mullen's poetry to date makes use of word games and formal constraints (many of them borrowed from the OuLiPo), using these devices to push disruption and referential difficulty to its limit. While these formal and thematic elements are present throughout Mullen's work, the singularity of each of her books is remarkable. Where Muse & Drudge (1995), for example, is a long poem constructed of quatrains, Sleeping with the Dictionary is a collection of shorter works that alternate between a wide range of styles. Where the earlier book allowed the reader to grow comfortable in the formal frame of the quatrain, this new book asks readers to constantly change how they are reading and what they are reading for. Some of the poems in Sleeping with the Dictionary appear to be primarily sound-based; others are referential and even autobiographical-a return in some ways to the mode of Mullen's 1981 debut, Tree Tall Woman (reprinted in Blues Baby: Early Poems), although this move now occurs through the lens of formal experimentation. This mixing of styles keeps the reader 011 tiptoe as she shuttles between various means and modes. Between begins My ass acts bad / Devil your ears Charybdis / Good engagements deep blue sea (9). This poem is followed by the overtly topical Bilingual Instructions: say No / to bilingual instruction in schools // Californians say No / to bilingual instructions on ballots // Californians say Yes / to bilingual instructions on curbside waste receptacles: Coloque el recipiente con las flechas hacia la callel Place container with arrow facing street (10). Shifting styles again on the next page, Black Nikes is a prose poem that resists narrative development in favor of playful juxtapositions as each sentence draws on an idea or image from the previous one: need quarters like King Tut needed a boat. A slave could row him to heaven from his crypt in Egypt full of loot. We've lived quietly among the stars, knowing money isn't what matters. We only bring enough to tip the shuttle driver when we hitch a ride aboard a trailblazer of light (11). is instructive about these multiple forms and contents is the way each new shift expands the political potential for Mullen's work, demonstrating that cultural and political change is an act achieved on the level of definition-Mullen knows that what matters is who controls what means what. In an interview with Daniel Kane, Mullen says What attracts me to Oulipo, besides their sense of humor, is their systematic effort to demystify the poetic process.1 This comment suggests to me that Mullen's politics are based on the humor of disruption. Sleeping with the Dictionary seeks to find the pleasure available in language by exploring the various uses of connection and reference, but it is a pleasure aimed at rethinking the consequences of reading; when readers get a joke, or make a connection in any given poem, they engage poetic process on the level of creation rather than reception. Her poem Elliptical, for instance, is a series of sentences containing implied or direct universal quantifiers such as always and never followed by an ellipses. The poem begins: just can't seem to... They should try harder to... They ought to be more... We all wish they weren't so... (23). becomes apparent in this poem is not the idea that cultural and racial dialogue, or even critique, is impossible, but that the form of such dialogue is complex, necessarily involving all the misunderstandings, assumptions, or insights that we bring with us. …
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