Sleeping with the Dictionary

Harryette Mullen. This is a book of Mullen's I hadn't read before-- and it's just as seriously playful as her other books, though perhaps a bit less formally consistent-- she's using homophonic translation, s+7, found text, etc. etc. to form these poems. I appreciated the range in this collection-- it coheres thematically, sure-- I got that she's reading the inherent/embedded prejudices (namely sexism and racism) in 'Standard English'-- but the poems are also linked in their sequencing (alphabetical). This encouraged me, because my thesis is shaping up to be... diverse... formally, and it was a nice reminder that properly sequencing your project/poems can make the whole thing seem a lot more logical.

Some examples of Mullen's play that caught my eye:

(16) You can give a man a rock or you can teach him to rock.

(26) [Eurydice] Can't wait to be sprung from shadow,

to be known from a hole in the ground.

(30) Some of his favorite trees are books.

She also toys with folk and fairy tales-- my favorite is "Once Ever After," which jumps from one fairy tale to the next at lightning speed, each jump sprung from a word or pun--

She couldn't make it gold without his name. Her night shifts in the textile mill. She forgot she was a changeling peasant girl. Spinning, she got pricked. That's where roses fell and all but one fairy wept.

and in "She Swan On from Sea to Shine," Mullen looks backward into more recent history (pre- then post-Civil War America, it seems) and crafts a mythos of her own-- this reminds me of what Mackey's doing, a little-- but whereas Mackey ends School of Udhra with the acknowledgement that his "inlet" into myth and culture can't be totally what it aspires to be (a collective myth?) Mullen's tale concludes,

Revolution is a cycle that never ends. Rumors of May made mermaids murmur. Plato opens utopia to poets on opiates.

Sidenote: in this poem, rather than using 1st person POV, she uses third, which, for some reason, feels totally refreshing and more authentic. Worth imitating.