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Harryette Mullen

Autor(a) de Sleeping with the Dictionary

13+ Works 565 Membros 6 Críticas 2 Favorited

About the Author

Harryette Mullen teaches in the English department and African American Studies program at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Obras por Harryette Mullen

Associated Works

McSweeney's Issue 22: Three Books Held Within By Magnets (2007) — Contribuidor — 335 exemplares
The Best American Poetry 2001 (2001) — Contribuidor — 223 exemplares
The Best American Poetry 1994 (1994) — Contribuidor — 170 exemplares
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (2020) — Contribuidor — 170 exemplares
Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009) — Contribuidor — 113 exemplares
The Best American Poetry 2014 (2014) — Contribuidor — 78 exemplares
Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor (2006) — Contribuidor — 66 exemplares
The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink (2012) — Contribuidor — 63 exemplares
Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry (1997) — Contribuidor — 56 exemplares
Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin (2016) — Contribuidor — 55 exemplares
The Ecopoetry Anthology (2013) — Contribuidor — 48 exemplares
The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007) — Contribuidor — 33 exemplares
Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade (2006) — Contribuidor — 30 exemplares
No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets (2003) — Contribuidor — 29 exemplares
This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets (2024) — Contribuidor — 21 exemplares
The Best American Poetry 2023 (The Best American Poetry series) (2023) — Contribuidor — 19 exemplares
What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America (2015) — Contribuidor — 16 exemplares
South by Southwest: 24 Stories from Modern Texas (1986) — Contribuidor — 10 exemplares
Souvenirs of a Shrunken World (2008) — Selected by — 2 exemplares

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Nome canónico
Mullen, Harryette
Nome legal
Mullen, Harryette Romell
Data de nascimento
1953-07-01
Sexo
female
Nacionalidade
VS
Local de nascimento
Florence, Alabama, USA
Ocupações
dichter
professor of English

Membros

Críticas

I needed to update my poets and Harryette Mullen was a good pick to start. Her love of words was evident. Which letters didn't have a poem associated with them? I thought that interesting and wondered if she had planned it that way. Very very clever poet. I will read more of her work, happily.
1 vote
Assinalado
BarbF410 | 2 outras críticas | May 22, 2022 |
This was a good choice for my read-a-poem-every-morning-and-night routine, because Harryette Mullen wrote Urban Tumbleweed in a similar fashion, except I believe she did a poem every day which took a year and I read 2 pages every day which took about a month. But this was meditative in the sense of you're supposed to let thoughts come to you without judgement (or so I've heard, I've never meditated). So in that sense, Mullen is truly meditating on the things she depicts every day... from nature to pop culture, true crime to daily life, not judging anything as 'bad' or 'good', but just depicting it as she sees it. This is a worldview that I think I will try to adopt for a change.

There are a lot of nature poems in this collection, which made it a fitting replacement now that I've finished my big Mary Oliver book, but there's also a lot about Los Angeles, a city that I don't know much about. It's an effective portrait of LA culture, and some of the more dystopian parts about celebrity culture or technology reminded me of books like "Something New Under The Sun" by Alexandra Kleeman. It's not that Mullen exaggerates things in this book, but when you put a microscope on something like "Octomom" or Venice Beach, the grotesque is put front-and-center. But maybe this is my bias creeping in, and she's merely depicting Californian culture as part of its environment, something that the title "Urban Tumbleweed" encapsulates.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
jooniper | Sep 10, 2021 |
If there were a poetic equivalent to the "Talent Deserving Wider Recognition" category on Downbeat's annual Jazz Poll, Harryette Mullen would be found there. While her first works were more obviously, albeit loosely, autobiographical, and inspired by the Black Arts movement, her later collections (Trimmings, Muse and Drudge, and SPermKT) show the influence of Gertrude Stein, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, and word association games. The older pieces—recently collected in Blues Baby: Early Poems (Bucknell University Press, 2002)—do little to prepare the reader for the fractured slogans and linguistic experimentation evident in the later, richer books.

Sleeping with the Dictionary continues Mullen's serious wordplay. Using language games like S+7 (replacing words from familiar texts with words found seven entries away from them in the dictionary), "Tom Swifties," and "The Dozens," the poems, prose poems, and vignettes in Mullen's Dictionary shake up and reimagine the language. She rings changes on legalese, safety instructions, and fables. Shakespeare's sonnet 130 gets translated for tastes both colloquial ("My honeybunch's peepers are nothing like neon") and corporate ("My Mickey Mouse, when Walt waddles, trips on garbanzos"). She realigns phrases from popular culture and advertising, transforming the familiar so that language can regain its freshness, making the overly familiar strange and illuminating. Her concerns about the place of women in society and race have not disappeared—"This system needs your moral fiber like a bowl of X brand flakes," she writes in "Resistance is Fertile"—only now they are conveyed by what seem, at first, to be more indirect methods.

Many of the poems in Sleeping with the Dictionary also have an erotic edge. Mullen, who once defined poetry as "Words playing with each other," declares in the title poem:

Retiring to the canopy of the bedroom, turning on the beside light, taking the big dictionary to bed, clutching the unabridged bulk, heavy with the weight of all the meanings between these covers, smoothing the thin sheets, thick with accented syllables—all are exercises in the conscious regimen of dreamers, who toss words on their tongues while turning illuminated pages. To go through all these motions and procedures, groping in the dark for an alluring word, is the poet's nocturnal mission. Aroused by myriad possibilities, we try out the most perverse positions in the practice of our nightly act, the penetration of the denotative body of the work.
Not all of the entries in this Dictionary work as effectively. At times the words and phrases Mullen strings together, while humorous, go on too long after their initial point is made ("Baa baa, Baba, Bambam, Bebe, Berber, Bibi, blah-blah, Bobo, bonbon, // booboo, Bora Bora, Boutros Boutros, bye-bye" indeed!) or their meaning is too hermetic to be easily deciphered. Overall, however, Sleeping with the Dictionary contains more than enough light, heat, and sheer pleasure to bring Harryette Mullen the attention she so richly deserves.
… (mais)
1 vote
Assinalado
rmharris | 2 outras críticas | May 22, 2013 |
Entertaining at a few points, but nothing I'd recommend. (This coming from someone who loves to read poetry, by the way.)
 
Assinalado
whitewavedarling | Nov 17, 2008 |

Prémios

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Estatísticas

Obras
13
Also by
24
Membros
565
Popularidade
#44,255
Avaliação
3.9
Críticas
6
ISBN
13
Marcado como favorito
2

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