Sleeping with the Dictionary SYNOPSIS
Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. In her ménage àtrois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. With its arbitrary yet determinant alphabetical arrangement, its gleeful pursuit of the ludic pleasure of word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect, Mullen's work is serious play. A number of the poems are inspired or influenced by a technique of the international literary avant-garde group Oulipo, a dictionary game called S+7 or N+7. This method of textual transformation—which is used to compose nonsensical travesties reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"—also creates a kind of automatic poetic discourse.
Mullen's parodies reconceive the African American's relation to the English language and Anglophone writing, through textual reproduction, recombining the genetic structure of texts from the Shakespearean sonnet and the fairy tale to airline safety instructions and unsolicited mail. The poet admits to being "licked all over by the English tongue," and the title of this book may remind readers that an intimate partner who also gives language lessons is called, euphemistically, a "pillow dictionary."
FROM THE CRITICS
Village Voice
Mullen's infectious linguistic torques can entrance readers.
LA Times Book Review
[An] exuberant book. Sleeping with the Dictionary may be lexicon lust, but it's no one-night stand.
Memphis Commercial Appeal
Mullen acts as a sort of Gertrude Stein rap artist, bending street language, word games and alphabetical arrangement to the arbitrary dictates of Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary, all mixed with a healthy dose of gleeful textural transformation and automatic writing.
Boston Review
Harryette Mullen's latest set of artful mishearings and mis-writings gives you the queasy sense that you haven't been paying enough attention. . . . Submit to its 'Blah-Blah' and you'll be bothered and delighted by what you find there.
Publishers Weekly
It's been over six years since Mullen published her last book, Muse & Drudge, a series of terse, wacky quatrains which barnstormed through plangent blues to "rhime rich" rap, from Language poetry-style minimalism to "the doubles" of the playground dis. Mullen's fifth book 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"), surrealistic 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 peepers 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." Some poems expose, mischievously, the basic foibles of human sexual relations. Others, like "Present Tense" and "We Are Not Responsible," hone political realities through 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." All of the work here is full of such energy, invention and pleasure that the dictionary surely awoke refreshed. (Feb.) Forecast: Mullen's Freeing the Soul: Race, Subjectivity and Difference in Slave Narratives was published in 1999 by Cambridge University Press, and she is currently teaching creative writing and African American literature at UCLA. Poems from her long unavailable 1981 debut, Tall Tree Women, along with other early works, are due to be reissued by Bucknell University Press in April. Her three small press books from the '90s (Trimmings, S*Perm*K*T and Muse & Drudge) remain in print and oft assigned, but this volume's visibility and accessibility should make it a breakthrough. Look for some prize nominations, and a possible "new & selected" next time around. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
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