Full Description
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'.
Contents
Acknowledgments All She Wrote The Anthropic Principle Any Lit Ask Aden Between Bilingual Instructions Black Nikes Blah-Blah Bleeding Hearts Bolsa Algodon Coals to Newcastle, Panama Hats from Ecuador Coo/Slur Daisy Pearl Denigration Dim Lady Dream Cycle Ectopia Elliptical European Folk Tale Variant Eurydice Exploring the Dark Content Fancy Cortex Free Radicals The Gene for Music Hitched to a Star Jinglejangle Junk Mail Kamasutra Sutra Kirstenography The Lunar Lutheran Mantra for a Classless Society, or Mr. Roget's Neighborhood Music for Homemade Instruments Naked Statues000 Natural Anguish Once Ever After O, 'Tis William Outside Art Present Tense Quality of Life Resistance Is Fertile She Swam On from Sea to Shine Sleeping with the Dictionary Souvenir from Anywhere Suzuki Method Swift Tommy Ted Joans at the Cafe Bizarre Transients Variation on a Theme Park Way Opposite We Are Not Responsible Why You and I Wino Rhino Wipe That Simile Off Your Aphasia Xenophobic Nightmare in a Foreign Language X-ray Vision Zen Acorn Zombie Hat
