Harryette Mullen

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 ménage à 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, 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."

Sleeping with the Dictionary

"Harryette Mullen is a magician of words, phrases, and songs . . . No voice in contemporary poetry is quite as original, cosmopolitan, witty, and tragic." --Susan Stewart, citation for the Academy of American Poets Fellowship Urban tumbleweed, some people call it, discarded plastic bag we see in every city blown down the street with vagrant wind. --from Urban Tumbleweed Urban Tumbleweed is the poet Harryette Mullen's exploration of spaces where the city and the natural world collide. Written out of a daily practice of walking, Mullen's stanzas adapt the traditional Japanese tanka, a poetic form suited for recording fleeting impressions, describing environmental transitions, and contemplating the human being's place in the natural world. But, as she writes in her preface, "What is natural about being human? What to make of a city dweller taking a 'nature walk' in a public park while listening to a podcast with ear-bud headphones?"

Notes from a Tanka Diary

Urban Tumbleweed

Three important poetry collections brought together under one cover by Harryette Mullen, author of Sleeping with the Dictionary if you turned down the media so I could write a book then you could look me up in your voluminous recyclopedia -from Muse & Drudge Recyclopedia shows the extraordinary development of Harryette Mullen's career, in her books Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge, all originally published in the 1990s and now available again to new readers. These prose poems and lyrics bring us into collision with the language of fashion and femininity, advertising and the supermarket, the blues and traditional lyric poetry. Recyclopedia is a major gathering of work by one of the most exciting and innovative poets writing in America today.

Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge

Recyclopedia

Fran Ross

Danzy Senna

Oreo

bell hooks

Maya Angelou

Wanda Coleman

Pat Parker

Sonia Sanchez

Alice Walker

Audre Lorde

Gwendolyn Brooks

Cheryl Clarke

Nikki Giovanni

June Jordan

Rita Dove

Lucille Clifton

Nikky Finney

Angelina Weld Grimké

Amina Baraka

Jayne Cortez

Gwendolyn Bennett

Esta antologia oferece um panorama inédito da poesia negra feita por mulheres nos Estados Unidos no século XX, reunindo dezenove poetas com uma amostra significativa de suas produções e linguagens. Ao lado de nomes já reverenciados no Brasil, como Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, bell hooks e Alice Walker, estão poetas ainda pouco conhecidas que constituem o canône da literatura negra mundial. Caso das pioneiras Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn Bennett e Gwendolyn Brooks, e representantes da poesia falada e engajada, como Jayne Cortez e Amina Baraka, que despontaram nos anos 1960 e 1970. Período de grande efervescência da cultura negra nos Estados Unidos, as décadas do Black Arts Movement e do Black Power coincidem, não por acaso, com as primeiras publicações das sólidas carreiras de grande parte dessas poetas, como Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, Pat Parker e June Jordan, seguidas por autoras como Cheryl Clarke, Nikky Finney, Wanda Coleman e ainda as premiadíssimas Harryette Mullen, Rita Dove e Sonia Sanchez. Organizado por Lubi Prates, "Você lembrará seus nomes" conta com um time de tradutoras negras brasileiras renomadas, sendo a maior parte delas também poetas, além de pequenas biografias das autoras reunidas, contextualizando suas vidas e obras.

Antologia de poetas negras dos Estados Unidos do século XX

Você lembrará seus nomes

Hank Lazer

The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be forms an extended consideration not only of Harryette Mullen’s own work, methods, and interests as a poet, but also of issues of central importance to African American poetry and language, women’s voices, and the future of poetry. Together, these essays and interviews highlight the impulses and influences that drive Mullen’s work as a poet and thinker, and suggest unique possibilities for the future of poetic language and its role as an instrument of identity and power.

Harryette Mullen

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