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

Harryette Mullen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 31, 2006

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 & Drudge

Recyclopedia shows the extraordinary development of Harryette Mullen's career, in her books Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Mullen's avant-garde word games, applied to the marrow of African-American experience, rightly won plaudits for Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002): poets and critics alert to innovation knew about Mullen a decade earlier, when three small-press volumes put her on the map. The contents of all three reappear in this collection, along with a brief new preface from Mullen. The first two (as she explains) build on Gertrude Stein's great modernist prose poems, full of non sequiturs and sexual puns, to make language undermine racist clichés: "The color 'nude,' a flesh tone. Whose flesh unfolds barely, appealing tan. Shelf life of stacked goods." The slightly longer paragraphs of the second volume (whose title means both "supermarket" and "sperm kit") are more complicated and self-conscious: "So this is generic life, feeding from a dented cant. Devoid of colored labels, the discounted irregulars." The ambitious if sometimes scattered Muse & Drudge abandons prose poetry for long chains of irregularly rhymed quatrains, taking on politics, poetics and history: "how a border orders disorder/ how the children looked/ whose mothers worked/ in the maquiladora." Linguistic experiment has rarely sounded so bluesy and cool. (Nov.)
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Review

"Mullen's is a stunningly lyrical voice, rich and resonant, engaged and engaging." --Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

"In her previous four collections, Harryette Mullen's influences have ranged from language poetry to the rhythms and playfulness of the black vernacular . . . Suffused with both politics and literary theory, Mullen's language refuses to be weighed down by either." --The New York Times Book Review

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press (October 31, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555974562
• ISBN-13: 978-1555974565
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #95,236 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars spirals and kinky quatrains, July 30, 2008

By 

S. Muench (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge (Paperback)

Mullen's three book collection is vertiginous and virtuosic. Her punning and homophonic-connotative cleverness which stacks her poems into multi-valenced spinning tops dizzies one's head with cloudy turbulence. She should be written multiple "wolf tickets" for speeding. If you don't appreciate this book on a first read, please revisit it at a later date.

5.0 out of 5 stars wor(l)d muse-ic, October 8, 2011

By 

Case Quarter (CT USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge (Paperback)

three previously released publications now between one cover, recycled as it were, in a recyclopedia, though the recycling aspect has referents as accurate to the puns ms mullen delights in.

in her first collected book she cites gertrude stein as gadfly, and i see no reason to look further. the snippets from Trimmings, terse sentences about the clothing and accessories of women, speak to stein's sense of word play. in toto:

'Releases from valises. Scientific briefs. Chemists model molecular shadows structure mimic dancers. Shirt on the line, a flapper's shimmy shake in a silk chemise. A shift, a woman's movement, a loose garment of manmade fabric. Polly and Esther living modern with better chemistry.'

S*PeRM**K*T (supermarket) continues the wordplay, puns and associations within the same form as Trimmings, continuing her scratching of stein. this time she turns to food in as many permutations as she can cook up. something for the man of the house:

'What's brewing when a guy pops the top off a bottle or can talk with another man after a real good sweat. It opens, pours a cold stream of the great outdoors. Hunting a wild six-pack reminds him of football and women and other blood spoors. Frequent channels keep high volume foamy liquids overflowing, not to be contained. Champs, heroes, hard workers all back-lit with ornate gold of cowboy sunset lift dashing white heads, those burly mugs.'

Muse & Drudge (either verb or noun or both) takes a cummings' leap to quatrains in lowercase, absence of capital letters is her only comparison to cummings. in subject matter as well as wordplay mullen has her own work cut out with her word associations, the pun and the steps of the assonance, her literary roots go deeper than cummings, tapping into john skeleton more so than her claims of sappho. she cites her title from callimachus. i see the muse and the drudge transcendent from sappho and sapphire as figures to categories. what ms mullen has given her reader in Muse & Drudge is picture of black women historically and internationally.

'honey jars of hair
skin and nail conjuration
a racy make-up artist collects herself
in time for a major retrospection

her lady's severe beauty
and downright manner
enhance the harsh landscape
positioned with urban product

mule for hire or worse
beast of burden down when I lay
clean and repair the universe
lawdy lawdy hallelujah when I lay

tragic yellow mattress
belatedly beladied blues
shines staggerly avid diva
ruses of the lunatic muse'

mullen's work is interactive and entertaining, highly rewarding for readers who choose to spend time here.

5.0 out of 5 stars One of my favorites, October 9, 2010

By 

Anne Rettenberg (New York City) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge (Paperback)

This is one of my favorite poetry books. Harryette Mullen is a master (mistress?) of wordplay. This is a collection of three previously published collections. I am most fond of "Trimmings," Mullen's mini-poems using women's clothing as a basis for alliteration, puns, observation and commentary mixed together. "Supermarket" (or "S*PeRM**K*T) does something similar with food. "Muse & and Drudge" is a bit different, a collection of poems that are more song-like with elements of blues although also full of alliteration and puns. The poems appear inspired by aspects of American consumerism, race and women's experience among other themes.