Sleeping with the Dictionary (New California Poetry, 4) [Paperback]

Harryette Mullen (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520231430 | ISBN-13: 978-0520231436 | Publication Date: February 22, 2002

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."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

It's been over six years since Mullen published her last book, Muse & Drudge, a series of terse, wacky quatrains which barnstormed through plangent blues to "rhime rich" rap, from Language poetry-style minimalism to "the doubles" of the playground dis. Mullen's fifth book is no less unconventional, and more diverse prose poems, exhaustive alphabetical language-salads like "Jinglejangle" ("Mingus Among Us mishmash Missy-Pissy mock croc Mod Squad mojo moldy oldie"), surrealistic odes to her erotic other, Oulipian word-replacement poems, short stories that recall the quasi-fantastic realism of John Yau and strange rewrites of classics, such as this riff on Shakespeare's famous sonnet: "My honeybunch's peepers are nothing like neon. Today's special at Red Lobster is redder than her kisser. If Liquid Paper is white, her racks are institutional beige. If her mop were Slinkys, dishwater Slinkys would grow on her noggin." Some poems expose, mischievously, the basic foibles of human sexual relations. Others, like "Present Tense" and "We Are Not Responsible," hone political realities through histrionic absurdity: "Now that the history of civilization has been encrypted on a grain of rice, it's taken the starch out of the stuffed shorts." All of the work here is full of such energy, invention and pleasure that the dictionary surely awoke refreshed. (Feb.) Forecast: Mullen's Freeing the Soul: Race, Subjectivity and Difference in Slave Narratives was published in 1999 by Cambridge University Press, and she is currently teaching creative writing and African American literature at UCLA. Poems from her long unavailable 1981 debut, Tall Tree Women, along with other early works, are due to be reissued by Bucknell University Press in April. Her three small press books from the '90s (Trimmings, S*Perm*K*T and Muse & Drudge) remain in print and oft assigned, but this volume's visibility and accessibility should make it a breakthrough. Look for some prize nominations, and a possible "new & selected" next time around.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Harryette Mullen's latest set of artful mishearings and mis-writings gives you the queasy sense that you haven't been paying enough attention. . . . Submit to its 'Blah-Blah' and you'll be bothered and delighted by what you find there."--The "Boston Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 85 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press (February 22, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520231430
• ISBN-13: 978-0520231436
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.7 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #90,032 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Fun, April 12, 2004

By 

Adam Strauss (Louisville, Ky) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sleeping with the Dictionary (New California Poetry, 4) (Paperback)

Until reading this collection, I was no fan of the prosepoem; now, since having spent many delicious times with this volume, I can no-longer say that. Mullen's works in Sleeping With The Dictionary are frequently fabulously playful, often have wonderful aural effects, and can be an hybrid of the laugh-out-loud funny and point-blank seriousness.

"K was burn at the bend of the ear in the mouth of remember": K was born at the end of the year in the month of December"--Marvelous!

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Too much of a good thing at times., June 7, 2005

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sleeping with the Dictionary (New California Poetry) (Hardcover)

Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California, 2002)

I have found there to be a weird dichotomy in the world of poetry: in my experience, the better a person is at reading in front of a crowd, the worse their books are bound to be. I have seen some people give awful performances in front of a mike from some of the best-written books of poetry in my collection. (To be fair, my experience with poets who have both published and read is limited, and there are certainly exceptions to the rule; T. H. Cornell's Magnetosphere comes immediately to mind, as does Stan Heleva's "Palm Sunday.") I saw Harryette Mullen read on a show called Lunch Poems on one of the university-sponsored channels no one ever watches on Dish Network, and I found the experience to be such that I immediately put this book on hold at the library, figuring it would be one of poetry's enduring classics.

Parts of it, in fact, are just that. Mullen has a way with sound that comes through on the printed page, rather like Timothy Donnelly. As with Donnelly's recent release, Mullen's book is the kind of thing that should be studied, with great care, by the legions of wannabe "slam" and performance poets who get up there and try to pass off what they do as poetry week after week. Contrary to what you, the reader, will likely experience if you drop in unannounced at a poetry slam, poetry and sound do, in fact, mix, and sometimes they do it exceptionally well. The best pieces in Sleeping with the Dictionary are sterling examples of this.

The book's main problem is that sometimes the sound is all that's there. While it's a far better curse with which to be afflicted to sound good and be meaningless than to be full of meaning and sound like a gravel pit (in the world of poetry, anyway), sonic-minded poets of the twentieth century have always realized that for this sort of thing shorter is better. When Mullen gets her sonic mind into five- to ten-page pieces, it's hard not to look at the tricks used in the creation of these poems and see them as just that: tricks. It is impossible to argue that they're not deftly manipulated, and that if this were cabinetwork you'd be looking at the creations of a master craftsman, but lord knows a lot of master craftsmen have done some hideously rococo scrollwork over the years.

If you pick this up (and you should, especially if you aspire to read your poetry aloud before an audience of strangers), start by concentrating on the shorter pieces here, and absorb the way Mullen makes the sounds bounce and click off one another like billiard balls. That's what poetry's supposed to sound like. Which makes me wonder why it just didn't work in a spoken forum.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sound and Sense aplenty, April 13, 2008

By 

J. P. Craig (Montgomery, AL, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sleeping with the Dictionary (New California Poetry, 4) (Paperback)

Mullen's work rewards attention. It is playful and noisy, or musical, and it also has a great deal to say. However, it says what it says in a Steinian way, so it's best not to expect an essay or content that's always summarizable. The best example, I think, is her "Dim Lady," a transformation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 into more modern terms. Other poems work similarly, like "We Are Not Responsible," which in repurposing the language of the baggage disclaimer to "relatives" reveals or sends up, to me anyway, the sort of corporate callousness that leaves people stranded in an airliner on the tarmac for hours at a stretch.

Mullen ain't Frost, nor is she James Tate nor Gertrude Stein. She's Mullen, and there's plenty to her work besides "surface" euphony. If you can't see the seriousness in her play, give her another chance; there's plenty of there there.