Customer Reviews

Sleeping with the Dictionary (New California Poetry)

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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!

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.

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.

This must be one of my favorite books! Not just of poetry, either. Mullen's use of language is both quirky and genius. Ok, so it's a little much with the long alphabet babble towards the middle...but the book is overwhelmingly filled with insight, revealing language manipulation, and a charming love of language!

Plus, she's really nice! (She replied to my email. Very cool.)

One of my favorite books of poetry; it has stayed with me through the years since I first read it. Mullen has so much fun playing with language. But she also shares deeper, subtle messages about society and human nature through her playful compositions.

I love this book. I've read it cover to cover like returning to a special place in the woods in your own mind. Mullen brings you there but burns different pathways to the center lit with so much light. Little magmalicious gems tumbling down the vol/cano:e, down the volcano by conoe or something of a brightening.