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Snail Mail from Coast to Coast: An Interview of Harryette Mullen by Barbara
Henning When Harryette Mullen and I discussed this interview in June, we at first considered a fast techno-sophisticated e-mail interview. Both of us, however, preferred the summer pace of snail mail. Our initial plan was to exchange postcards. Postcards are great for questions, quips and slogans, but not for an in depth response. As the interview unfolded, I was sending postcard questions and Harryette was responding back mostly with letters. One of the disadvantages of using the US post office is the indefinite delay for carrying, and I (as usual) almost always mailed a card the day before Harryette's response. The result was lots of overlapping and dislocation. The following is excerpted from this exchange.
The lines "hip chicks ad glib/flip the script" refers to the performance of female rappers, specifically Salt N Pepa, who used rap as AIDS education through their song, "Let's Talk About Sex." When I sought a line to complete the quatrain that fit the rhythmic and phonemic patterning of the other three lines I'd written, "tighter than Dick's hat band" popped into my head, as an automatic simile that I'd heard throughout my childhood whether my mother or grandmother referred to tight clothing, or tight situations. But it was only in t he context of the lines about female rappers, whose tight distichs (couplets) inform my own improvisational approach to rhythm and rhyme in this poem, that I grasped, for the first time, the origin of this folk simile: a metaphorical description of a condom. I saw a continuum, in terms of "oral tradition" or "verbal performance style" from my own matrilineal heritage -- in a religious, lower middle class family that spoke of sexuality through metaphor, circumlocution, and euphemism --to the bold public style of today's women rappers. The poem embraces all of that, while also using language as verbal scat. Print and electronic media, as well as orality, provide my materials. It would be fair to say that lines like "divine sunrises/Osiris's irises/his splendid mistress/is his sis Isis" strike the reader as something close to pure word-and-sound-play, but this verse also alludes to the project of Afrocentrism. Even a relentlessly language-centered quatrain like "mutter patter simper blubber/.../mumbo-jumbo palaver gibber blunder" is intended to comment on the loss of indigenous languages of enslaved Africans, while its recurring sound patterns also suggest homophones of kinship terms mother father sister brother, thus setting up an analogy between loss of language and loss of kinship. Similarly, the admittedly nonsensical lines "marry at a hotel, annul em/nary hep male rose sullen/let alley roam, yell melon/dull normal fellow hammers omelette" play on my own name, Harryette Romell Mullen, by echoing and scrambling the phonemes sounded in the name. . . . Yet I recognize that this poem, despite random, arbitrary, even nonsensical elements, is saturated with the intentionality of the writer. I am aware that the poem presents difficulties for any reader, because of its specific and topical references to subculture and mass culture, its shredded, embedded, and buried allusions, its drift between meaning and sound, as well as its abrupt shifts in tine or emotional affect. These effects all contribute to what Peter Hudson, a black canadian who reviewed the book in Afro News called the poem's "restless, unsettled nature" and "the overall irreverence and off-key eloquence that characterize the work." I'm imagining that this letter and your first postcard will cross somewhere
over the Midwest, and our "snail mail" interview will have begun.
I'll write you again from Boulder, where I'll be spending a week at Naropa.
As hectic as life gets, snail's pace seems just write to me!
June 21, 1996 #2. Dear Barbara, that postcard you sent with Beaton's photo of Stein & Toklas, with kinky black wire dangling over Alice's head, gets to the point of Trimming's origins: my reading of Tender Buttons and Melanctha. The pleasure & horror of those two works, especially stirred me up, riled me, got me thinking about the effects of race & sexuality in language. I'm starting a letter I'll try to send before I go to Boulder. © Harryette 6-22-96. Dear Barbara, I remember that the first time I tried to read Stein, I really couldn't stand it. It was boring & repetitious in away that I found obnoxious. Years later, after I'd been reading more intensively and thinking more critically about language, when I returned to Stein especially Tender Buttons, I was astonished at the freshness of her language, which still seems innovative and intriguingly enigmatic. What really struck me was the complexity of meaning found in the utter simplicity of her syntax. It reminded me of sophisticated baby talk, and I am very interested in baby talk, a marginal language used mainly by women and children. Tender buttons appeals to me because it so thoroughly defamiliarizes the domestic, making familiar "objects, rooms, food" seem strange and new, as does the simple, everyday language used to describe common things. As critic Elisabeth Frost has noted my poetic language is more public and social, less private and hermetic than Stein's. Louis Cabri and Jeff Derksen also have commented that the language in Trimmings is less a disjunctive idiolect, more a layering and juxtaposing of communolects. Trimmings was in part a reflection on the marginality of women and of "the feminine" in language. (As well as a reflection on the feminization and marginalization of poetry, and certainly my own marginality as a black woman in relation to the dominant cultural construction of the feminine.) It is a "minor" genre, the prose poem. It's also a list poem which I thought of as a form congenial to women, who are always making lists. Of course, the catalogues (of heroes, ships, and so forth) in epic poems evoke a masculine tradition, not to mention David Letterman's lists. However, a whole poem composed of a list of women's garments, undergarments, & accessories certainly seems marginal & minor, perhaps even frivolous & trivial. Actually it was an inside joke for me to begin Trimmings with "the belt" since a convention of epic poetry is to begin "in the middle." So that joke I was having with myself was about the epic poem versus the little list poem, which has become a workshop cliche: in this case a list of feminine apparel. Each prose poem is a unit of the "long poem" that is itself a list, with each item described figuratively, as in true riddles. I also quickly understood that the structure of the poem was like a hologram. Each prose poem basically does the same thing as all the rest, since whatever the trope, it is the woman's body that appears consistently in every figure as the tenor of which clothing is the vehicle. This simply extends and elaborates a metonymical tendency already present in everyday usage: "skirt" and "petticoat" also commonly refer to women as well as to clothing worn by women. I also borrow or recycle language and/or syntactical structures from a variety of folk and mass culture genres, including: riddle, nursery rhyme, fairy tale, prayer, television commercial, cliche, tabloid headline, and weather report, as well as from specifically African-American forms including the blues and the dozens. Love & Rockets, Harryette. 6/27/96 Dear Harryette--hello from my office in Brooklyn. I loved reading your letter which did arrive before my two postcards. . . . In Muse & Drudge. . . I always knew when I was an outsider, looking in from another cultural experience or even from my own purposeful alienation from everyday television & advertising . . . I'd get one line, lose the next, then a meaning would come through that had only resonated before and then . . . . lv Barbara 6/29/96 Dear Harryette . . . You speak of your "layering and juxtaposing of communolects". In my own work, I think of quilting and women's work as a kind of feminine ecriture, a way of gaining authority and of smashing oppressive authority, in a quiet subversive way. Your process of writing this poem by beginning with lists and generating other lists and improvising on these is quite different than composition by waiting for "inspiration" or "deep feeling. could you speak about the effects--if any--Oulipo methods have had on your practice. again . . . Barbara Dear Barbara, so here I am in Taos, visiting with a couple of friends that I met when I was here years ago courtesy of the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. As I drove down from Colorado, I caught several rain & thunderstorms but now it's hot & dry again. Today I walked up in the mtns of San Cristobal to see where the fires burned the forest. A swath of blackened blasted tree skeletons, and a tiny green sprout of oak tree coming up out of the scorched ground. © Harryette 2:54 PM 7/15/96 Our family stressed the value of education and literacy. Books and book knowledge were revered in our household. At the same time, it was apparent that the love of language prevailed also among folks in the black community who were less connected to books and literacy. One's knowledge and verbal skill were always subject to being tested in practical situations and everyday encounters, when it was important to be able to interact with people, whether or not they were highly educated or deeply literate. This community valued anyone with strong skills in oratory, storytelling, poetry, song, and verbal contests of various sorts. It was okay to be bookish, but you also had to be able to talk the talk. Playing the dozens, signifying, capping, sounding: all of these forms of verbal dueling were ways we learned to use language, wit, and humor to defend ourselves against verbal aggression. Every child had a large repertoire of formulaic greetings, insults, taunts, and retorts, which often exploited the mnemonic force of rhyme and rhythm. "What's cooking, good looking?" "Ain't nothing cooking but the beans in the pot, As children, we memorized poetry for school and church programs, and we recited folk poetry on playgrounds and in backyards as we jumped rope and played other games. We not only repeated these conventional utterances from the folk tradition, but we also invented new rhymes and songs. I remember my first real job, at fourteen, working for minimum wage as a waitress at a camp for rich white kids. All of the kitchen and dining staff were black, while the owners of the camp and all of the counselors and campers were white. The white folks were kept completely separate from the colored folks who were there to serve them. They slept in bright, airy cottages with hand painted tile in the bathrooms. (We knew this because we could earn a little extra money by cleaning their cabins between the two summer camping sessions.) We were housed in crude shacks with concrete showers that were infested with scorpions. We used to invent satirical verses about our bosses that we sang on the way to and from work each day. "Miss Johnson's such a dried out hag, The linguistic, regional, and cultural differences marked by southern dialect, black English, Spanish and Spanglish are fundamental to how I think about language, and how I work with language in poetry. My attraction to the minor and the marginal, to the flavor of difference in language, has something to do with this sense of heteroglossia that was part of the environment of my childhood in Texas. The southern dialect was both familiar and foreign to me, since I grew up in working class and middle class black communities in the south, and in a family divided between people from the north and people from the south, all of whom were educated speakers of standard English. The heterogeneity of these various communities has influenced me, often in complex, unpredictable, and subliminal ways. I think of myself and my writing as being marginal to all of the different communities that have contributed to the poetic idiom of my work, but at the same time it is important to me that I work in the interstices, where I occupy the gap that separates one from the other; or where there might be overlapping boundaries, I work in that space of overlap or intersection. I have spent much of my life in transit from one community to another, and as a result I often feel marginal to them all. Yet I also feel something in common with people who are very different from one another. I try in my work to make my marginality productive. By necessity, the margin has become a positive space where I am free to do my work. This concern is at the heart of Muse & Drudge, a poem that deliberately addresses a diverse audience of readers, with the expectation that no single reader will comprehend every line or will catch every allusion. My association with communities of intellectuals??a result of my experience as a student and teacher in universities, as well as my practice as a poet??has given me an aesthetic and critical language with which to examine and interrogate my other connections and experiences. I do see my work as a poet and as a critic overlapping, intersecting, and reinforcing each other in various ways. Ideas for poetry often come from the critical reading and writing that I do in other contexts. Race and gender theory clearly have influenced my work as a poet, especially in my last three books. Sociolinguistics, ethnography, and folklore have also been influential disciplines which I sought out through elective courses during my undergraduate years at the University of Texas at Austin. I'd worked with younger students in the Artists in Schools Program in Texas, and that job put me in contact with a state?wide network of Anglo, Chicano, and African American writers. While I lived in Texas, I also began to attend regional meetings of southern black writers, around the time my first poetry book was published. These meetings were usually held in Tougaloo, Mississippi, or in Atlanta or New Orleans. One memorable meeting was a conference of black women writers held at Spelman College. I was invited to read, among others, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gloria Watkins (bell hooks) who was completing her dissertation at UC Santa Cruz, where I had just been accepted for graduate school. Morrison mentioned that she had just begun a novel to be called Beloved. Hooks' first book, Ain't I A Woman, had recently been published, after she had persisted through several rejections. I stayed at the home of Bambara, who amazed me with her energy and her sense of connection to the community. . . . Oulipo has been important to me because of this group's systematic cataloguing and exuberant invention of textual operations and literary techniques. I was interested in Oulipo's vigorous exploration of the ludic aspects of writing, as well as their theory and practice as intellectuals and artists. In Oulipo's erudite tongue?in?cheek manifestos I found a pleasurable convergence of work and play. The first time I used Oulipo constraints in a creative writing course was at Cornell, where my students initially resisted because they thought these guys were elitist, and because my students cherished the romantic idea of poetry as the inspired expression of a uniquely perceptive individual. Yet what I found useful, as a poet and as a creative writing teacher, was Oulipo's demystification of creative process and aesthetic technique. Their idea of "potential literature" liberates the writer to concentrate on the process, rather than the product, of writing. O rose so drowsy in I have found that using constraints in this way expands the possibilities for improvisation, as various textual operations may be tried at different points in the writing process. Such flexibility makes it possible to use even the most severe constraint, without fear of it being too rigid, mechanical, or stifling to the writer's individuality. Rather, it simply gives the writer a more eclectic array of aesthetic tools. This was helpful, I think, to students intimidated by Georges Perec's amazing feats of writing first a lipogrammic novel without the letter "e" and then a univocalic novel in which "e" is the only vowel. You asked me to say more about the quatrain that plays on my name. Did I mention that the idea came from an essay by linguist Roman Jakobson about Shakespeare's anagrammatic play on his name in one of the sonnets? Jakobson argues plausibly that the bard's first and last name are encoded in scrambled phonemes distributed through the words of the poem. This goes a step further than simply noting that Shakespeare puns on the name "Will." It suggests a more cryptographic reading of the sonnet. Whether this is conscious wordplay on Shakespeare's part, or the linguist's obsession, is left unresolved in the essay. Anyway, I liked the idea of the poem containing a hidden riddle. The prose poems in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T resemble the form of a true riddle, which is a metaphorical description usually containing a block element that is often based on a linguistic confusion such as a pun. . . . You've asked about the poem as women's work, as piece work, like quilting. Those ideas are consonant with my own methods and metaphors of writing. The poem also comments on quilting/writing as artists' work, and as a metaphor of tradition as the interaction of continuity and discontinuity. stop running from the gift Love & Rockets, Harryette. P.S. I didn't know it was so long. I'm trying out a new laptop
Thank you so much for this interview, Harryette. Tyree Gupton's project
is dear to my heart, |