Harryette Mullen Annotated Bibliography

By Ellie Rifkin and Meredith Foulke

Primary Sources:

King, Rosamond S. “‘Word Plays Well with Others:’ Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary.” Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. pp. 536-538.

King opens her review of Sleeping with the Dictionary by placing Mullen in context in the literary world; although Mullen had not published a book for six years prior to Sleeping with the Dictionary, she remained active in journal and anthology publishing. King praises Mullen for the complexity of references in the collection, describing the variety of formal techniques as “a literary circus.” The poems King writes off (going so far as to call one “forgettable”) are the more nonsensical ones, which lean too heavily on the alphabetical conceit. This isn’t a dismissal of Mullen’s formal experiments though; King later notes that “the less meaning is apparent in the poem, the more the reader is encouraged to read more for feeling than for sense” (537). She concludes that Sleeping with the Dictionary is a challenging and complex construction, and recommends that readers take it in a few poems at a time rather than all at once.

Mullen, Harryette Romell. “Imagining the Unimagined Reader: Writing to the Unborn and Including the Excluded.” The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be : Essays and Interviews, edit by Mullen and Hank Lazer, University of Alabama Press, 2012, p 3-8.  ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/davidson/detail.action?docID=997588.

Mullen uses her essay to explore who her writing reaches and to whom it is available. She discusses the ways in which the focus on language in her poetry can be exclusionary. Given how entrenched her work is in American English, it does not translate very well, and her insistence on playing with and manipulating the familiar in the English language—such as idioms, clichés, nursery rhymes, jingles, and dialects—also requires a certain level of cultural literacy. Though she does not spell out a critical thesis or directly engage with critical literature on the subject, she demonstrates what many other, far denser texts set out to explain: the idea that language poetry and poetry that demonstrates identity are mutually exclusive is ultimately impossible. Our use of and access to language creates a context that cannot be erased. Rather than making any particularly explicit argument, Mullen walks the reader through the exercise she herself goes through after she finishes writing, considering who her readers are, who cannot access her work, and who her readers might be in the future.

Mullen, Harryette. Interview with Barbara Henning. “Conversation with Harryette Mullen: From A to B.” Not Enough Night, spring  2010, www.naropa.edu/academics/jks/publications/notenoughnight/spring-10/conversation-with-harryette-mullen.php. Accessed 28 October 2017.

As part of an MFA class she was teaching on Sleeping with the Dictionary and guided by the interest of deconstructing the mythic figure of the all-knowing author, Barbara Henning interviewed Harryette Mullen about the process of constructing the collection. In the interview, which is driven by explanation rather than argument, Mullen elaborates on the book’s title and inscription, noting that the phrase “sleeping with the dictionary” calls attention to a relationship with language that exists both on a conscious and and unconscious (“sleeping”) level. She adds that this is a Surrealist-inspired view of language. The interview travels through the avant-garde influences on Mullen’s work, from Surrealism to Steinean modernism to Oulipo. Mullen credits the Oulipeans with a structured set of “rules for how to break rules.” The repetition of a pattern, even if that pattern is the breaking of established rules of poetry, makes the pattern legible to readers; taking cues from the Oulipeans, Mullen decided to eschew specific poetic conventions (the division between everyday speech and poetic voice, for example) while maintaining others (the book’s structure, though alphabetical, follows the accepted format of titled, separated poems). Many of the poems were inspired by news items and the language we use to talk about day-to-day life.

Mullen, Harryette Romell. “Poetry and Identity.” The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews, edited by Mullen and Hank Lazer,  University of Alabama Press, 2012, pp. 9-12.

This short essay is part of a larger collection of Mullen’s essays and interviews compiled and edited by Mullen and Hank Lazer. In it, Mullen discusses public response to her work and the limits of anthology. As her career progressed, Mullen transitioned from writing poems that would place her work within the canon of African-American poets who perform “representative blackness” to work more formally avant-garde in spirit and form. Because of this shift, Mullen has been able to look at the process of anthology formation from two distinctive and often-separate vantage points. This essay is an interesting way of looking at Mullen’s positionality within American poetry, since Mullen herself is the one analyzing the field. Concluding that her bifurcated anthology experience has given her greater insight into both aspects of her work as an avant-garde poet and scholar of African-American literature, Mullen closes the essay with the hope that her continued existence and literary output will continue to challenge scholars’ instincts to place writers into simple categories.

Mullen, Harryette Romell. “Telegraphs from a Distracted Sybil.” The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be : Essays and Interviews, edit by Mullen and Hank Lazer, University of Alabama Press, 2012, p18-19.  ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/davidson/detail.action?docID=997588.

In this essay, Mullen walks the reader through her artistic growth from “[taking] the risk of abandoning the precisely located black female subjectivity of my first, folksy book–Tree Tall Women,”  to the works Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T, which were so distant from her identity that she feared she might one day be remembered as a white man (19). She progresses from there to Muse and Drudge, which is “an attempt on my part to return to a more-­or-­less recognizably ‘colored,’ ‘negro,’ ‘black,’ or ‘Af­ri­can Ameri­can’ base of folk-­ street-­ blues-­ based riffs, rap, and rheto­ric without returning to the specifically located subjectivity of my earlier work” (19). Mullen notes that she “wanted to use all that I’ve learned since I strayed from the beaten to the off-­beat path but still keep my promise to meet the devil at the crossroads and walk a mile in some other body’s down-­or-­upbeat sneakers, as the case may be, with plenty of wordplay along the way” (19). By walking us through her journey, Mullen shows us, with self-effacing humor, her relationship to several disparate literary categories — and how she wound up at the crux between identity and Language poetry where so many scholars place her.

Mullen, Harryette Romell. Sleeping With the Dictionary. University of California Press, 2002.

Mullen’s work in this piece clearly exemplifies many of the points highlighted both in her own writing about her work and in scholarship by literary critics. As case studies, we can look at “Black Nikes” we can see Mullen’s manipulation of common phrases such as “our bodies wait for now I lay me down to earth,” which inverts the idea of the soul being raised to heaven in death from the traditional “Now I lay me down to sleep” (11)  The line “Please page our home and visit our sigh on the wide world’s ebb,” is not only a pun on homepages and websites but plays on the famous “ET Phone Home,”  highlighting the point made by Mullen and many others that cultural literacy, and therefore cultural context, is a crucial part of her work (11). Another example is in “Coo/Slur,” where her manipulation of the words for colors like “brow won’t” and “be lack” suggests a position of “lack”ing or a sense of insufficiency on the part of people of color, while “why it” invites a questioning of the position white people hold in society (17). Throughout Sleeping with the Dictionary, Mullen pushes words to the edge of meaning, then combines them to maximize their ability to evoke readers’ interpretations and reactions.

Thomas, Lorenzo. “Sleeping with the Dictionary.” African American Review, vol. 36, no. 4, Winter2002, pp. 697-699. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=8966293&site=ehost-live.

Like most other Mullen scholars, Thomas highlights the ways in which Mullen falls in the middle of a cross-section between identity and Language poetry, but as a reviewer, Thomas does not need to run through the theories on Language poetry to make his point: Mullen’s work is important because of the ways in which she manipulates familiar language in the service of making social commentary and engaging with current issues. The entire piece is dedicated to strong praise of Mullen’s work and its social importance. Notes Thomas: “[Sleeping with the Dictionary] is also a resounding challenge to those who still foolishly think–now in the 21st century–that the English that English-Speaking African people create is not our language” (699).

Secondary Sources:

Amorim, Lauro Maia. “The Invisible Blackness of Harryette Mullen’s Poetry: Writing, Miscegenation, and What Remains to Be Seen.” Revista De Letras, vol. 52, no. 1, 2012, pp. 101–120. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23654910.

In this scholarly essay, Lauro Amorim deconstructs Harryette Mullen’s fascination with the dictionary itself. Rather than simply functioning as a repository of knowledge, the dictionary often serves as a gatekeeper, determining, quite literally, what is legible and what is not. Amorim connects the idea of legibility with the identities at play in Mullen’s poetry, noting that her writing at the edge of linguistic scrutability connects with the perspectives in her work of people at society’s margins. By putting Mullen’s poems in conversation with the theorizing Mullen has done about her own work (in interviews and in essays like “Poetry and Identity”), Amorim concludes that Mullen’s writings not only challenge categorization but also demand visibility. By refusing to divide herself between the Black Arts and Language camps, Mullen is performing a “critical repositioning of what blackness can be” (118). This repositioning occurs both on the page and in her position as a member of the larger American literary world.

Beall, Emily P. “‘As reading as if’: Harryette Mullen’s ‘cognitive similes.’” Journal of Literary Semantics, vol. 34, no. 2, 2005, p. 125-138.

Beall connects Mullen’s works to the theory of cognitive poetics, which aims to defamiliarize the reader from the subject of a literary work in order to re-present the world in a more creative manner. Mullen, Beall argues, takes this defamiliarization of language to an extreme that forces readers to reconsider their normal strategies for reading and for viewing the world. Using Peter Stockwell’s theory of cognitive poetics to analyze Mullen’s poem “Wipe That Smile Off Your Aphasia,” Beall looks at the effects of Mullen’s choice to refigure the common idiomatic construction “as _ as _” (i.e. “as happy as a clam”). Mullen, in reversing the placement of adjective and noun in order to construct lines like “As onion as I can,” not only creates a nonsensical poetic logic of her own, but in doing so reveals the nonsensical basis of much of our common figures of language. This semantic analysis of Mullen’s work ignores many of the contextual references that make Sleeping with the Dictionary such a rich text, but Beall’s focus on the mechanics of Mullen’s innovation provides an example of the poet’s success at breaking down not just literary but linguistic convention.

Frost, Elisabeth A. “‘Ruses of the lunatic muse’: Harryette Mullen and Lyric Hybridity.” Women’s Studies, vol. 27, no. 5, 1998, pp. 465-481.

Frost, like other critics, places Mullen at the intersection of Language and Black Arts poetry, and uses her as an example of the ways these two disparate movements actually did similar work through their focus on language in its context: Language poets want to disrupt language, Black Arts poets want to foreground its socio-historical context, and Mullen wants to do both. Despite Mullen’s avant-garde rejection of narrative continuity, however, her work still functions within the tradition of lyric poetry. Rather than a lyric “I,” Mullen’s poetry uses the lyric “we”; her fragmented prose poems contain both varied individual voices and a first-person, collective voice. The hybrid nature of Mullen’s poetics, in which her language is “dense with allusion and word-play,” enacts the focus on community, on familial and interpersonal ties, that pervades her poetry (466). Mullen’s hybrid poetics, Frost argues, go beyond the avant-garde connection of form and politics, foregrounding language as a remnant and perpetuator of our culture’s complicated social and racial history.

Lempert, Benjamin R. “Harryette Mullen and the Contemporary Jazz Voice.” Callaloo, vol. 33, no. 4, 2010, pp. 1059–1078. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40962782.

Lempert begins this scholarly article by giving context for the relationship between jazz music and African-American poetry, noting that the two forms have inspired and imitated one another since the mid-1900s. His close readings of Mullen’s poems from Sleeping with the Dictionary demonstrate the ways that Mullen uses wordplay to enact a jazz-styled improvisation. The fundamental musicality of Mullen’s voice is evident in the fact “that [Mullen’s poems] can enact these musical effects without reducing themselves to nonsense syllables” (1062). Still, there are limits to the comparison; since a poem is an edited object rather than a live piece, its performance of chance and spontaneity can only ever be a performance. Mullen’s poems, then, exist on a level somewhere between the musical and the written; poems such as “Coo/Slur,” a work in which each word of each short line can be read in several different ways, complicate audible understandings of poetry. In a single collection, Mullen creates poems that function at a sonic level like an improvised jazz solo, poems whose intertextuality and network of references invoke the kind of mimicry often present in great jazz soloists, and poems that resist sonic comprehensibility altogether; together, the work functions on a musical level that is at times comprehensible and at times intentionally disorienting.

Luck, Jessica Lewis. “Entries on a Post-Language Poetics in Harryette Mullen’s ‘Dictionary.’” Contemporary Literature, vol. 49, no. 3, 2008, pp. 357–382. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27563802.

Luck, like many other scholars, criticizes the false dichotomy between Language poetry and lyric or identity poetry, especially regarding Mullen’s work, but takes her argument a step further by contending that the use of identity actually reinforces and makes more radical the emphasis on language because of the way readers are forced to interact with it in its context. She draws on cognitive theory and especially on the concept of emergence, which states that identities are shaped and grown organically through life experience. Luck ascribes the function of emergence to poetry as well, and also describes the concept of possession, the semiotic and aural interactions we have with language in our minds. These phenomena create “the ‘unsplittable relationality’ of the poet’s embodied experience of language,” an idea that Luck co-opts from art theory (363). Mullen’s emphasis on semiotics and aurality, as well as the way her poetry grows out of the familiar American-English lexicon, mutually recreate and reinforce the interdependence of signs, sounds, context, and identity.

Robbins, Amy Moorman. “Harryette Mullen’s “Sleeping with the Dictionary” and Race in Language/Writing.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 51, no. 2, Summer2010, pp. 341-370. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=57754800&site=ehost-live.

Though the article includes Harriet Mullen in its title, its entire first third does not mention her name. Instead, those first pages are dedicated to walking through literary theory on Language and Identity/Lyric poetry and, again, criticizing the false dichotomy between the two, as most Mullen scholars do. In giving an overview of current poetry scholarship, Robbins calls attention to the notion of a dominant white, male, heterosexual identity that underpins the questioning of  the subjectivity of identity undertaken by the largely white Language school. The article, like others, points to sociocultural linguistic context as a key flaw in the constructed binary, and also points out the issues that a dominant identity questioning its subjectivity could lead to the erasure other identities and sociocultural contexts. Only after Robbins has worked through all of the literature to reach the conclusion that identity cannot be removed from language poetry does the piece shift to Mullen’s work and how she demonstrates that point. “Running through Mullen’s work, then,” she argues, “are interwoven concerns with language abstraction, reappraisal and critique of specifically black identity-formations, and réévaluation of the critical dichotomy separating African American writing from formally innovative writing” (335).

Tremblay-McGaw, Robin. “Enclosure and Run: The Fugitive Recyclopedia of Harryette Mullen’s Writing.” MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, vol. 35, no. 2, 2010, pp. 71-94. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2011380380&site=ehost-live.

Tremblay-McGraw structures her argument around the mutual dependence of the polarized concepts of “enclosure,” (“Identity, history, and the archive, but also, racism, exclusion, and limitation”), and “run,” (“mobility, flight, escape, critique, ongoing poesis, and revision”) (71). Ultimately, her argument seems to be a fairly similar, at least in terms of its literary application, to the more common dismantling of the (false) dichotomy of identity/lyric and Language poetry. However, the argument is unique in that it draws on historical scholarship, and Mullen’s own graduate work on slavery in particular, to connect physical flight and literal reinvention of identity to the reuse and reinvention of language to escape enclosing linguistic parameters. Tremblay-McGraw argues that running or escaping allows a person to recreate or re-identify themselves by re-appropriating their past, creating a palimpsestic identity. Mullen’s work, the piece argues, is also a palimpsest: the new writing that grows from the manipulation of common language will always bear the traces—and have meaning influenced by—the original.

Tertiary Sources:

“Poetry after Language.” ARCADE, http://arcade.stanford.edu/colloquies/poetry-after-language. Accessed 19 Oct. 2017.

The introductory post for this Stanford Colloquy offers a clear, concise definition of Language or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry as “rejecting traditional conceits of voice, ego, authenticity, and expression, language poets instead labored to expose the device, to dispel the illusion” (1). The accessibility of this definition allows for a body of scholarship that includes the work from the colloquy but also extends to the myriad counterpoints, extrapolations, and interpretations of the concept of Language poetry. The piece also positions Language poetry as an important political movement, ultimately posing the question “How has contemporary avant-garde poetic practice incorporated, extended, or critiqued the relation between poetic language and political formation?” which proves a useful guiding framework for the study of Mullen’s work (1).