I hadn't intended to read Harryette Mullen this weekend. It was serendipity. I almost typed Serpentdipity...a word of the sort Mullen would casually invent in her ceaseless gifts for neologism in the English language.
We stopped at an actual library (imagine!). I'm ashamed to admit I haven't been in a library in many months. The internet has changed my consumption patterns immensely. That library has always been Harrisburg's most-frequented, and it was a ghost town on a Saturday afternoon, leading me to ask if everyone else is doing just like me and finding the library not as necessary these days. Though, to be fair, Lee is usually the one that does the library c.d raids and gets out the allowed 20 at a time, usually finding gold for me to rip into my Windows Media player. Lately, he's shocked me by remembering which poets I read maybe five years ago and bringing me their latest books. Sometimes he's remembering poets I've since forgotten! How lucky am I? And he doesn't even like poetry, so somebody please canonize him in the next century.
Anyhoo, I read Sleeping with the Dictionary a few years ago, and really loved it. I thought it had the kind of readability where it could almost become a bestseller. I thought the poetry was fun (that Verboten word in criticism) as well as exceedingly smart. It was exceedingly smart, fun and revelatory play with language--what survives in poetry usually as the years take their toll on other books. I was happy to see Mullen got some major national award nominations for that, and sorry to see it didn't bring home the gold. I'm annoyed that I don't have a copy of it here. I had ordered it once from an online bookseller who then came back with a bullshit email like "Sorry...this book wasn't really in stock." And somehow I have failed to replace it, although in the back of my mind I know I am looking to restore it to easy access.
So I confess I was rather ignorant about her earlier work, apart from the pieces I had seen in magazines where I was publishing poetry or reviews and had the serendipity to stumble on a few pages of her writing. I confess I liked what I saw but wasn't snared yet. The reviews of Muse & Drudge were everywhere and pretty darn effusive. The excerpts in the reviews were strong. So I figured she had "arrived" with that book. Turns out (on reading Recyclopedia) my facile assessment was about correct.
Mullen, in her brief preface, points out that "Trimmings and S*PeRMK*T are serial prose poems that use playful, punning, fragmented language to explore sexuality, feminity, and domesticity. These companion pieces began as my response to Gertrude Stein's simplet yet elusive poetic prose." Further on in the preface she particularizes, "My books Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T correspond to the "Objects" and "Food" sections of Stein's Tender Buttons.I share her love of puns, her interest in the stuff of life, and her synthesis of innovative poetics with cultural critique. However, my own prose poems depart from her cryptic code to recycle and reconfigure language from a public sphere that includes mass media and political discourse as well as literature and folklore."
I think that's a pretty savvy and accurate portrayal of her own writing. But who should know better than the author, right?
These two early books weren't as good a read for me today. In fact, there is a pretty exciting evolution that goes on with the three books, which pretty much form an arc from immaturity to poetic maturity. Of course, it doesn't always happen like this for poets, and for most poets it never happens at all, unfortunately!
This is not to say that the two early books don't have interesting moments. They do. Readers of Mullen know she is often a very funny poet, and that's present from the start of her career. My problem with Trimmings is that it remains pretty much what it sounds like: a critique of female dress and female image representation. This book is an extended deconstruction. The irony of the title points to the fact that something essential is being trimmed away in this dumbshow of desires calculated, projected, implied, thwarted or buried, which we call fashion.
Some of the poems satisfy themselves with cliches and some of the poems want more. Here is where she shows she has an enviable gift for writing extremely short poems, of one or two lines which are just perfect. Witness: "Night moon star sun down gown. Night moan stir sin dawn gown." Try speaking that one a few times. I've imagined that poem meaning about a dozen different things after reading it only twice.
Others act out Lucifer's fall and compress all of Milton in a meditation on a sexy shoe: "A little tight, something spiked, tries on a scandal. One of a pair vamps it up with a heel. If the shoe fits, another mule kicking, a fallen, arch angel loses sole support."
These are the entire poems, the lines I'm giving you...none of the poems are titled. Stein titled her short pieces but then usually the titles were red herrings anyway, with rare exceptions.
These are some of the successful poems in this full-length collection. But many of the poems skewer targets too obvious, the flounces and ribbons and frills of false innocence, or enforced innocence. The great ear of the poet never fails though; even when the poem itself fails to astonish the sounds usually will. Take a sexual poem like this, which doesn't really work for me, although the acoustics in the room are great: "Akimbo, bimbos, all a jangle. Tricked out trinkets, aloud galore. Gimcracks, a stack. Bang and a whimper. Two to tangle. It's a jungle."
Is this following poem a portrait of Josephine Baker?
"In feathers, in bananas, in her own skin, intelligent body attached to a gaze. Stripped down model, posing for a savage art, brought color to a primitive stage."
The poems seem to remain too literally a critique of fashion to cut their moorings to referentiality the way Stein's poems do, and the critique tends to be a little too predictable. This is an early book, and it is fascinating to watch the gifts sifting into place. She knows how to put a great strange portal of an ending on the book with this poem...
"Thinking thought to be a body wearing language as clothing or language a body of thought which is a soul or body the clothing of a soul, she is veiled in silence. A veiled, unavailable body makes an available space."
This is a splendidly put philosophical Uber-question. Are we wearing language or is language wearing us? Which is spirit, which is physical grossness? And which is prior, thought or language? That thought comes first (the more obvious answer) might imply one is limited in one's interpretaton of what might constitute a "language." And why is this all couched in imagery which could be a wedding? Are we marrying language ("a body of thought")? Who or what is the Bride here?
This closing poem is about as memorable and beautiful as any intricately tooled conceit you will find in John Donne. A great way to end a book of poetry is with an open-ended question, and Mullen certainly leaves it wide open!
S*PeRM**K*T does seem to be a bazaar of poems. Who but a genius would think to walk through the grocery store and turn it into a book of poems? And what better way to know a culture than by its true, day-to-day marketplace.
You can almost always tell what aisle Mullen is pushing her poetic cart down, whether MEATS or the aisle nook with prophylactics as the poems ping and clang off the material objects which engendered them with sonic delight. I think the tabloids at the check-out counter keep filtering in many of these poems; to be honest, aren't those headlines really the most powerful verbal stimuli in every grocery store?
Witness this poem: "Desperately pregnant nubile preferred stock girls, deliver perfect healthy psychic space alien test tube babes, in ten or less, or yours is free, we guarantee." Okay Dominos is marrying the Weekly World News there most likely, but it leaves me laughing with an X-Files shiver.
Some of the poems get a little too literal, as in the following poem which was doubtlessly written in the mental MEATS aisle although it's every bit as gynecological as it is carnivore, leaving us to wonder about the connection: "It must be white, a picture of health, the spongy napkin made to blot blood. Dainty paper soaks up leaks that steaks splayed on trays are oozing. Lights replace the blush red flesh is losing. Cutlets leak. Tenderloins bleed pink light. Plastic wrap bandages marbled slabs in sanitary packaging made to be stained. A three-hanky picture of feminine hygiene." Wait, did she just slip an abortion in there?
Her work is scary sometimes because it's so close, it's on your heels, it's reading your thoughts over your shoulder...the way the tabloids are....how else do you think they get those headlines...it's really what you're thinking...when you're asleep or otherwise dipping over to the other side of thought.
How about a t.v. dinner in poetry? "Chill out a cold, cold world. Open frost-free fridget. Thaw and serve slightly deferred gratification, plucked from the frozone, hard packed as slab of ice aged mammoth. Cool cache stashed between carbon dated ziplocked leftovers and soothing multicolored safety tested plastic teething ring."
I love the neologism there, "frozone." That's just perfect. Again, is this a carnivore thing with the plastic teething ring keeping cool in there for baby next to the carnivore's dead ersatz mammoth? Okay, I guess that one suffers a bit from its straightforward description, doesn't really leave a lot of negative capability.
The poems in this second collection are funnier and more willing to depart from their stated subject matter, split the axes of mental light in the poem leaving beautiful prismatic effects like a piece of Iceland spar. It's growth we are witnessing and the dendrochronology plays like a strange record when you put the needle in the groove.
Muse & Drudge is an accomplished work, and I don't feel confident discussing it at length here as I just gave it a first read. Of this book, the author has written "When I wrote Muse & Drudge, I imagined a chorus of women singing verses that are sad and hilarious at the same time. Among the voices are Sappho, the lyric poet and Sapphire, an iconic black woman who refuses to be silenced."
It's rather like reading Shakespeare's Sonnets or some intricate serial poem that you know you will need to reread several times to even begin to make all the connections. There's more darkness in these poems, because this work is much more socially engage. The use of language at this stage has reached virtuosity; she's every bit as daunting on first read as a Zukofsky or an Olson. Just throwing out some first perceptions here...the poems seem to start out in a Sapphic mode, but then quickly move towards a VERY ambiguous exploration of (literary) Negritude; it's almost as though the poet is ventriloquizing Negritude as a literary modality, and this leads to discomfort for the reader. And yet one senses this distancing is necessary. Even the tragic masks change. The poems are polymorphous perverse and exceedingly various. They range from the above-mentioned political critiques to things as wild as cunnilingus-critiques ("wishing him luck/she gave him lemons to suck/told him please dear/improve your embouchure") to insults that would make Catullus jealous to great poetic portraits of friends or lovers done in a marvelous in petto style. She slips with ease from high diction to street talk, and the importations (verbal and imagistic) range from African to Caribbean to Gullah to you-name-it.
Muse & Drudge is a multifarious work wherein a poet who has reached maturity is writing about anything and everything in her sights, and turning it all into very strong poetry. The mouth and ear fall in love with poems like these. I would be hard-pressed to think of five other poets writing in English who have such an ear right now. I'll close with her closing poem (notice the clever ambiguous en"jam"bment, which again turns something low/sexual into an intricate conceit!) which bids such a graceful adieu to her readers:
just as I am I come
knee bent and body bowed
this here sorrow's home
my body's southern song
cram all you can
into jelly jam
preserve a feeling
keep it sweet
so beautiful it was
presumptuous to alter
the shape of my pleasure
in doing or making
proceed with abandon
finding yourself where you are
and who you're playing for
what stray companion
What can one say to language like that? Selah.
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