Sleeping With The Dictionary
Harryette Mullen
publisher: University of California Press, 2002
isbn: 0-520-23143-0
price: $14.95
It's been over six years since Mullen published her last book, Muse & Drudge, one of the best books of poetry of 1995. A series of terse, wacky quatrains borrowed liberally from Clarence Major's From Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African American Slang, Muse barnstormed through a plethora of recognizable, though singularly torqued, styles, from the plangent blues to "rhime rich" rap, from Language minimalism to "the doubles" of playground dissing fame.
Sleeping With The Dictionary is no less unconventional, and more diverse -- prose poems, exhaustive alphabetical language-salads like "Jinglejangle" ("Mingus Among Us mishmash Missy-Pissy mock croc Mod Squad mojo moldy oldie"), Bretonian odes to her erotic other, Oulipian word-replacement poems, short stories that recall the quasi-fantastic realism of John Yau, and strange rewrites of classics, such as this riff on Shakespeare's famous sonnet:
My honeybunch's peeper's are nothing like neon. Today's special at Red Lobster is redder than her kisser. If Liquid Paper is white, her racks are institutional beige. If her mop were Slinkys, dishwater Slinkys would grow on her noggin.
[20]
"She Swam On from Sea to Shine," which seems to be autobiographical though is equally motivated by alliteration and puns, recalls Joyce in the retreat into nonsense language to create a perverse mirror of the harsh roteness of childhood religious indoctrination:
They taught girls to knit. They taught her to hit the piano. They taught all the girls to say hell merry fuller grays, Dolores wit chew, blast duh art dower mung wimmen, blast dis fruit uh duh loom, cheez whiz.
[63]
Some poems, like "Present Tense" and "We Are Not Responsible," hone political realities through obscure writing restraints that lift her parataxis beyond the obviousness of much "new sentence" writing and into histrionic absurdity:
Now that the history of civilization has been encrypted on a grain of rice, it's taken the starch out of the stuffed shorts. Now as the Voice of America crackles and fades, the market reports that today the Euro hit a new low.
[57]
Other poems expose, in a mischievous way not incommensurate with the adolescent vibe running throughout, the basic foibles of human sexual relations:
Entwined in a passionate embrace
with his beloved wife
the holy one exclaimed,
"I have reached Enlightenment!"
His devoted partner responded,
"I'm truly happy for you, my love,
and if you can give me another minute,
I believe I'll get there too.
[45]
At times the poems -- like the title poem, which relates how the dictionary is a "versatile partner, conversant and well-versed in the verbal art" -- recalls the strict parallelisms of Christian Bök's recent Eunoia, but Mullen opens her book up to social realities, or perhaps the particular "cyborgian" reality of being a minority writer in a time after the debates about the essentialism of race have faded, and language has stepped in to tell us all that there's something artificial, alien, hybrid, and susceptible to the spirit of algorithmic manhandling -- not to mention wild humor -- in everything we say and do.
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