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 à trois 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."

Sleeping with the Dictionary (New California Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

Mullen, Harryette

Poetry

University of California Press

Sleeping with the Dictionary (Volume 4) (New California Poetry)

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be forms an extended consideration not only of Harryette Mullen’s own work, methods, and interests as a poet, but also of issues of central importance to African American poetry and language, women’s voices, and the future of poetry.
Together, these essays and interviews highlight the impulses and influences that drive Mullen’s work as a poet and thinker, and suggest unique possibilities for the future of poetic language and its role as an instrument of identity and power.

The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

History & Criticism

University Alabama Press

Speech/Acts brings together new and recent works by a generation of artists influenced by black experimental poetry. Recognizing language as a primary method of expressing and maintaining power, these artists use poetry as a tool to manipulate the conceptual and structural elements of language and the social contexts in which language is employed, appropriated and abstracted. Artists Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Steffani Jemison, Tony Lewis, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Martine Syms all use experimental poetry in their work as a means to interrogate the power structures of language, rendering the experience of blackness more physically and affectively exact. In this volume, their work is presented alongside their poetic forerunners (seminal texts by Fred Moten and Harryette Mullen are reprinted), newly commissioned poetry by Morgan Parker and Simone White, and a new essay by curator Meg Onli.

Speech/Acts (INSTITUTE OF CO)

Arts & Photography

Parker, Morgan

Moten, Fred

Onli, Meg

White, Simone

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Institute of Contemporary Art at University of Pennsylvania/Futurepoem

Trimmings

Tender Buttons Books

Poetry. Harryette Mullen is the mixer. Street, jive, down-home post-mod speech meet at the meat market. Food may be the subject of these short prose-poems, but look at us, teasing ourselves with endless adverts to buy, consume more and better - so long as its packaged right, full color box and shrink-wrapped.

S*Perm**K*T

Singing Horse Pr

poetry, "engaged &amp; engaging" (Henry Louis Gates)

Muse and Drudge

Harryette Mullen, Her Silver-Tongued Companion: Reading Poems by Harryette Mullen (Edinburgh Foundations in Avant-Garde Writing)

Edinburgh University Press

Three important poetry collections brought together under one cover by Harryette Mullen, author of Sleeping with the Dictionary if you turned down the media so I could write a book then you could look me up in your voluminous recyclopedia -from Muse &amp; Drudge Recyclopedia shows the extraordinary development of Harryette Mullen's career, in her books Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse &amp; Drudge, all originally published in the 1990s and now available again to new readers. These prose poems and lyrics bring us into collision with the language of fashion and femininity, advertising and the supermarket, the blues and traditional lyric poetry. Recyclopedia is a major gathering of work by one of the most exciting and innovative poets writing in America today.

Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge

Graywolf Press

"Harryette Mullen is a magician of words, phrases, and songs . . . No voice in contemporary poetry is quite as original, cosmopolitan, witty, and tragic." ―Susan Stewart, citation for the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
Urban tumbleweed, some people call it, discarded plastic bag we see in every city blown down the street with vagrant wind. ―from Urban Tumbleweed
Urban Tumbleweed is the poet Harryette Mullen's exploration of spaces where the city and the natural world collide. Written out of a daily practice of walking, Mullen's stanzas adapt the traditional Japanese tanka, a poetic form suited for recording fleeting impressions, describing environmental transitions, and contemplating the human being's place in the natural world. But, as she writes in her preface, "What is natural about being human? What to make of a city dweller taking a ‘nature walk' in a public park while listening to a podcast with ear-bud headphones?"

Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary

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