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Harryette Mullen. Sleeping with the Dictionary. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. 85 pp. $14.95.
Harryette Mullen currently enjoys a deserved reputation as a writer who is developing into a major figure in contemporary American poetry. When she first appeared in print, many readers saw Mullen as one of the brightest poetic voices to emerge since the Black Arts Movement era. Tree Tall Woman (1981) gave us finely crafted works that clearly pushed colloquial expression into eloquence. A decade later, after earning a Ph.D. at the University of California-Santa Cruz, Mullen began publishing a series of audaciously unusual poems. Trimmings (1991), S*PeRM**K*T (1992), and Muse & Drudge (1995) offered prose poems and prosodic experiments that revealed Mullen's careful and skeptical study of Gertrude Stein, Gwendolyn Brooks, and other Modernist poets. Mullen's work employed innovative linguistic methods to discuss vexing issues of race and representation, hierarchy (both social and aesthetic) and gender.
Muse & Drudge, a book-length work written in fluent quatrains, is a complex poem full of wordplay and overlapping allusions to literature and popular culture. In addition to affinities with the Language Poets, Mullen's multi-level allusions resemble the practice of Bebop soloists and operate at the velocity of MTV videos. She has also noted Melvin B. Tolson as one of her influences, and attentive readers will recall that Tolson's daunting erudition was both intensified and lightened by a sly, downhome sense of humor. So also does humor frame Mullen's perceptive poetic commentary on patriarchy, feminism, racism, and America's wasteful affluence.
Mullen's newest work, Sleeping with the Dictionary, thoroughly delights and constantly surprises. Consisting primarily of short prose poems, this collection highlights Mullen's finely tuned sense of humor and sharp social criticism. Mullen's targets are drawn from every imaginable source-from ancient history to modem marketing. "Kamasutra Sutra," for example, is a funny and effective feminist statement, while "Dim Lady" and "Variation on a Theme Park" turn the tables on Shakespeare's Dark Lady sonnets. "Exploring the Dark Content," one of her strophic poems, recalls the incisive critique of racial stereotyping that informed the prose poems in Trimmings. Most of the works in Sleeping with the Dictionary, however, are inventive and complex parodies that will leave readers laughing out loud. Some of them will leave you shaking...