Sleeping with the Dictionary - Reviews - Book Review

African American Review, Winter, 2002 by Lorenzo Thomas

Harryette Mullen. Sleeping with the Dictionary. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. 85 pp. $14.95.

Harryette Mullen currently enjoys a deserved reputation as a writer who is developing into a major figure in contemporary American poetry. When she first appeared in print, many readers saw Mullen as one of the brightest poetic voices to emerge since the Black Arts Movement era. Tree Tall Woman (1981) gave us finely crafted works that clearly pushed colloquial expression into eloquence. A decade later, after earning a Ph.D. at the University of California-Santa Cruz, Mullen began publishing a series of audaciously unusual poems. Trimmings (1991), S*PeRM**K*T (1992), and Muse & Drudge (1995) offered prose poems and prosodic experiments that revealed Mullen's careful and skeptical study of Gertrude Stein, Gwendolyn Brooks, and other Modernist poets. Mullen's work employed innovative linguistic methods to discuss vexing issues of race and representation, hierarchy (both social and aesthetic) and gender.

Muse & Drudge, a book-length work written in fluent quatrains, is a complex poem full of wordplay and overlapping allusions to literature and popular culture. In addition to affinities with the Language Poets, Mullen's multi-level allusions resemble the practice of Bebop soloists and operate at the velocity of MTV videos. She has also noted Melvin B. Tolson as one of her influences, and attentive readers will recall that Tolson's daunting erudition was both intensified and lightened by a sly, downhome sense of humor. So also does humor frame Mullen's perceptive poetic commentary on patriarchy, feminism, racism, and America's wasteful affluence.

Mullen's newest work, Sleeping with the Dictionary, thoroughly delights and constantly surprises. Consisting primarily of short prose poems, this collection highlights Mullen's finely tuned sense of humor and sharp social criticism. Mullen's targets are drawn from every imaginable source--from ancient history to modern marketing. "Kamasutra Sutra," for example, is a funny and effective feminist statement, while "Dim Lady" and "Variation on a Theme Park" turn the tables on Shakespeare's Dark Lady sonnets. "Exploring the Dark Content," one of her strophic poems, recalls the incisive critique of racial stereotyping that informed the prose poems in Trimmings. Most of the works in Sleeping with the Dictionary, however, are inventive and complex parodies that will leave readers laughing out loud. Some of them will leave you shaking your head. And, like classing Blues songs, several of Mullen's concoctions elicit both responses.

"We Are Not Responsible" is a good example of Mullen at her best. This prose poem exploits the language employed by bureaucracies and corporations to issue disclaimers and self-serving (i.e., liability-limiting) safety instructions. The piece reads in part:

In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on. Before taking off, please extinguish all smoldering resentments. If you cannot understand English you will be moved out of the way. In the event of a loss, you'd better look out for yourself.

What is chilling is that Mullen's masterfully deformed locutions sound more like clarifying paraphrases than like parodies.

Similarly, "Bilingual Instructions" exposes California's myopic and bigoted voter initiatives that dismantle bilingual education programs but "say Yes / to bilingual instructions on curbside waste receptacles" the better to serve security-gated suburbanites and their immigrant lawn maintenance crews. Mullen's poem presents the stark juxtaposition without comment, for none is needed. Indeed, one of the premises of poetry such as this is the idea that the poet's job is to show, not tell. The poet directs our attention to what she knows is important and trusts that we are intelligent enough to understand what we see. Or hear.

The desire to disable corporate jargon and political doublespeak is a mission that Mullen shares with the Language Poets, but that is not the only area of expression that focuses her interest. Some pieces here--such as "Any Lit" and "She Swam On from Sea to Shine"--build upon courtship "fancy talk," folktale formulas, and other elements of African diasporic oral traditions. In such works, Mullen continues along a path pioneered by James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones (1927), the lyrics and narrative poems of Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). All of these works are attempts to do in words what Alain Locke, in The New Negro (1925), hoped to see happen with black folk music: to appreciate the intrinsic value of vernacular forms and deploy them in a manner that could create a new classical (or, at least, literary) vocabulary.

Mullen is not, however, intent upon resuscitating antiquated black vernacular traditions. She is also quite willing to examine the rhetorical possibilities of very recent "spoken word" approaches (which, of course, do have antecedents). "Bleeding Hearts" might be recommended to those who want to upgrade their freestyle "open mic" skills. "Crenshaw is a juicy melon," she begins; and then proceeds to reel off a head-spinning string of anagrammatic threats and boasts such as "I'd rend your cares with my shears. If I can't scare cash from the ashen crew, this monkey wrench has scratch to back my business." Mullen swaggeringly exits with "I'm making bird seed to stick in a hen's craw. Where I live's a wren shack. Pull back. Show wreck. Black fade."