Both Christine Hume and Reginald Harris emphasized Harryette Mullen's unique success with playful word use. We spoke in class about how she uses signifyin' to lead her readers in a very specific direction, using "new kids of doublespeak and vernacularized idiom" (Hume), with examples like "war of the noses". The reader is inclined to begin to read a sentance one way, but after carefull looking realizes that she is taking us in a completely different direction. As Harris puts it, "She realigns phrases from popular culture and advertising, transforming the familiar so that language can regain its freshness, making the overly familiar strange and illuminating." This is a key concept in signifyin', and Mullen often uses this strategy in SLEEPING WITH THE DICTIONARY.
We talked about "Ectopia" for a while yesterday, and it was really interesting how we all interpreted the poem differently. We all got the same general feeling from it, however, even if our images were so different. One can read several of her word selections in different ways, changing the imagery. "Tear". As in rip? Or cry? "Bow", as in the thing you tie, or "take a bow"? There is no right answer :)
"Mullen dresses down set notions of gender, class, and race in America with a razor-edged wit." "The project of reordering...writes large the need for social rearrangement." Hume makes these important observations. I knew that whatever Mullen was doing was successful, and this gives a great explanation as to why and how. How come playfulness with words and sentance structure is successfull in this case? Well, bam! See above.
I, along with the reviewers of SLEEPING WITH THE DICTIONARY honestly don't have a lot to say, because the book rather speaks for itself. Mullen takes "clear positions" and is not secretive about her agenda. I'm just impressed by how she can take such a serious and pressing topic and create enjoyable, witty readings out of it while the reader is still taking the topic seriously!
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Sarah-
ReplyDeleteI am really intrigued by your last paragraph of this post about how Mullen creates creative and fun poems from such serious topics, such as race and gender issues, and the reader, who also finds fun in reading the poems, still takes the topic seriously. I wonder what it is about her poems that allow us to do that? Allows us to still find the seriousness behind the word play. Perhaps it is simply because the issues addressed here force us to take them seriously no matter how they are presented. For example, we are never going to take the issue of blacks versus whites or men versus women lightly. But, on the other hand, I think it is something more than just the content. I think there is something in Mullen's technique that allows us to "play seriously". But I have not figured out what that might be...
maybe it is the wittiness Mullen exudes in the games or maybe it is the combination of the words she chooses (light words juxtaposed with heavier ones: date rape and lollygagging are two specifics I can remember in her jingle jangle poem)
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