Harryette Mullen - Böcker

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 menage a 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, and 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'.

Harryette Mullen is one of the most exciting innovative poets writing today. This landmark volume is the first of its kind, collecting Mullen's works from 1981 to the present day. Her Silver-Tongued Companion offers a full collection of Mullen's later poetry, with a sampler of poems from her early published work. The volume includes the collections Recyclopedia, Sleeping with the Dictionary, Urban Tumbleweed, Broken Glish: Five Prose Poems, a sampler of poems from Blues Baby, and several previously uncollected poems. Five compelling scholarly essays accompany the texts, offering new insight into Mullen's works, ranging beyond contemporary poetry to consider Mullen's works in wider contexts. Foregrounding Mullen's formal innovation, this Critical Edition will be indispensable to scholars and general readers of Mullen's poetry, and contemporary avant-garde writing more widely. Her Silver-Tongued Companion offers an expansive and illuminating curation of Mullen's extraordinary poetry, tracing the remarkable career of one of the major poets of the twenty-first century.

Harryette Mullen is one of the most exciting innovative poets writing today. This landmark volume is the first of its kind, collecting Mullen's works from 1981 to the present day. Her Silver-Tongued Companion offers a full collection of Mullen's later poetry, with a sampler of poems from her early published work. The volume includes the collections Recyclopedia, Sleeping with the Dictionary, Urban Tumbleweed, Broken Glish: Five Prose Poems, a sampler of poems from Blues Baby, and several previously uncollected poems. Five compelling scholarly essays accompany the texts, offering new insight into Mullen's works, ranging beyond contemporary poetry to consider Mullen's works in wider contexts. Foregrounding Mullen's formal innovation, this Critical Edition will be indispensable to scholars and general readers of Mullen's poetry, and contemporary avant-garde writing more widely. Her Silver-Tongued Companion offers an expansive and illuminating curation of Mullen's extraordinary poetry, tracing the remarkable career of one of the major poets of the twenty-first century.