Consider for a moment the dusty and dreary sounding title of the
“National Book Award,” and then read Harryette
Mullen’s poetry, and you will immediately be taken aback by
this UCLA professor’s vibrant and punchy poetic lines.
Lines such as “Paco’s Tacos page gauge pale ale
paranoid android / Parappa the Rapper party hearty Patel
hotel” may not seem like typical poetry, but this playful yet
complex approach to language is central to Mullen’s new
collection “Sleeping With The Dictionary” (UC Press),
recently selected as a finalist for the National Book Award. The
award recognizes exceptional books written by Americans. The winner
will be selected Nov. 20 in New York City.
Like its style, the book’s content mixes the esoteric and
demotic, touching on everything from scientific principles and
Greek mythology to Mickey Mouse and Shakey’s Pizza.
Is it all just fun and games? Not exactly.
“The things that are part of popular culture have
displaced poetry. My revenge is to turn that back into
poetry,” Mullen said.
This fusion of popular culture and more typical poetic concerns
fuels Mullen’s demand for a poetry that engages the
contemporary world.
“I’m always trying to multiply the points of entry
for any reader or anyone sitting in the audience listening,”
she said.
For Mullen, poetry is accessible to everyone because it’s
a part of everyday life.
“We are all familiar with poetry. Poetry is your
heartbeat, your dreams when you wake up and you’ve got this
jumble of images in your head,” Mullen said.
Behind this desire for a new populism in poetry, this mixing of
high and low culture, is Mullen’s serious belief in
poetry’s social usefulness. She sees poetry as something
inextricably bound with the social world, a consoling force whose
presence was obvious after the events of last September.
“People wanted poetry after 9/11. They felt they
didn’t have words,” Mullen said.
Although written before last year’s tragedy, a poem like
“The Anthropic Principle,” seems eerily in-tune with
present concerns.
“One theory says it’s just a freak accident locked
up in a philosophical debate. It’s like playing poker and all
the cards are wild. Like the arcane analysis of a black box full of
insinuations of error,” Mullen said.
This awareness of poetry’s social potential saturates
Mullen’s poetic project. Through combinations of the literary
past and the popular present, Mullen creates a new world that
exists free of the constructed borders of time and social
prejudice.
“That’s been the story of my life, trying to throw
together all of my disparate sources in my own work to suggest that
all of these worlds really are connected.”
The roots of this eclecticism are derived from her childhood
experiences in Fort Worth, Texas, where the young Mullen listened
to black spirituals at the local library, read the Greek myths, and
listened to the Spanish language at the house of her
grandmother’s neighbors.
One might wonder what the National Book Award nomination means
to Harryette Mullen now, far from those beginnings, and after a
20-year career of writing poetry.
“To me it means that people are paying attention to my
work, and that it’s gotten a certain visibility that I never
expected I would ever have,” she said.
Awards, however, seem relative alongside her unceasing love for
language.
“No matter how it ends, I’m happy. If you keep doing
what you love, if nothing else, you have the reward of doing
it.”