Discussion Post #4: Recycling Fragments of Language: Harryette Mullen and Lauren Russell

You might find yourself lost in Harryette Mullen’s lyric poetry. Baffled, even:

Sapphire’s lyre styles

plucked eyebrows

bow lips and legs

whose lives are lonely too

These first lines of Muse and Drudge (Mullen’s 4^th book of poetry, we are only reading a small section of it) give us a taste of the signature playfulness and flexibility of Mullen’s language: her penchant for wordplay, puns, rhythms, even non-sensical phrases. 

Mullen explains, “On the one hand, I feel that because Muse and Drudge is so fragmentary, wherever parts of the text came from really doesn't matter because it is really not a complete thought about anything. It is very much a book of echoes. Some of the fragments rhyme and some don't, and that is basically the principle of the book- the recycling of fragments of language” (Mullen, in Interview with Elisabeth Frost) You don’t have to decode the “fragments,” but it does help to recite them aloud—you’ll hear them a different way each time you read them. 

Master of Allusion 

There’s a method to the madness of Muse and Drudge: sprinkled throughout each quatrain (4-line stanza) of this book are a number of allusions—indirect references—to classic literature, American history, jazz and blues. 

The first quatrain contains references to Sappho (the ancient Greek poet known for her lyric poetry); Sapphire (a stereotype for a raucous black woman) lyres (the ancient bowed instrument that originally accompanied lyric poetry) and song lyrics: “whose lives are lonely too” is the last line of Billy Strayhorn’s famous composition, “Lush Life.” (My favorite version is this one, performed by the amazing Sarah Vaughan.) 

Fragments of beauty rituals and bodies abound, too: “plucked eyebrows/bow lips and legs.” By putting all of these references in the same quatrain, Mullen draws a connection between classical poetic genius, black women, jazz musical tradition, a modern innovation. Writing, Mullen suggests in the title “Muse and Drudge,” is part “muse” (poetic inspiration) and part drudgery—hard, unglamorous, but ultimately rewarding work.

Didn’t catch all this? Mullen, who is also a professor at UCLA, is very intentional in her use of allusions, but she doesn’t expect everyone in her audience to get all of them. In fact she seems to prefer when they don’t, as evident in this interview: 

BEDIENT:

From what you’ve said already about a few of the quatrains, I take it that the poem is extremely dense with allusions to a great many things. Probably every quatrain has several allusions in it.

MULLEN:

Yes.

BEDIENT:

Does it matter to you whether or not these allusions are detected by many readers?

MULLEN:

I know they won’t be detected by many readers. Some readers will get some, and other readers will get others, and that’s fine; that’s as it probably should be.

BEDIENT:

Why is the allusive method important to you?

MULLEN:

It’s important to me because I wanted the poem to be interesting and complex, as I think experience is, language is; language has that capacity. I was interested in concentrating, distilling and condensing aspects of orality and literacy.

Orality and Literacy

The link between “orality” and “literacy” is just what we’ve been talking about for the past few weeks, and Mullen’s poetry condenses these concepts nicely. She is known to encourage collective readings of her poetry, where each audience member reads a different quatrain aloud. Sometimes the effect is tongue twisting, humorous and illuminating (try reading this alliterative combination 5 times fast: lyre styles, brows, bows, lips, legs, lives lonely. ) 

Or this quatrain, which is an anagram (a word, phrase, or name formed by rearranging the letters of another)of Mullen’s own name:

marry at a hotel, annul ‘em

nary hep male rose sullen

let alley roam, yell melon

dull normal fellow hammers omelette

Mullen described her approach in an interview for Contemporary Literature: "I am writing for the eye and the ear at once, at that intersection of orality and literacy, wanting to make sure that there is a troubled, disturbing aspect to the work so that it is never just a 'speakerly' or a 'writerly' text." 

Puns are a staple of Mullen’s poetics, some are playful and serious at once, like this stanza that uses images of fabric to touch on music, race and cultural appropriation:

white covers of black material

dense fabric that obeys its own logics

shadows pieced together tears and all

unfurling sheets of bluish music

Our goal is not only to notice that something unconventional or experimental is going on, but to ask: what is the effect of this formal experimentalism? How does it serve to highlight, enhance or alter meaning? What is its impact on us as readers: is it baffling, exhilarating, frustrating, illuminating? 

Dream-Clung, Gone 

You can hear echoes of Mullen in Lauren Russell’s poem “Dream-Clung, Gone.” Russell extends Mullen’s ideas about orality and writing.  Russell references music explicitly, but also plays with sound, repetition, and rhythm to craft a poem about memory: 

Undertow of dive bar juke unboxed

Driving past a rust-red door unjambed

Coin-operated groove side-shimmies, unflung

A seamlessly upholstered stool’s unwound

Compare this quatrain's use of wordplay with one of Mullen’s. Hear the echo of the word “clung” in the repetition of “unboxed, unjambed, unflung, unwound.” Note also the personification of absence in the second stanza (and also the longer length of the lines as the poem shifts to narrative, telling a story about loss.) The “absence” sings: “this is the clang of a dream-clung gong,” a rif on the title of the poem that turns the word “gone” into a ringing, reverberating instrument: “gong.” Like Mullen’s work, Russell's poem allows its meanings to resonate rather than being definitive.

 Discussion Questions: This week, you have the option of responding to another one of the discussion questions rather than responding to a classmate.

1.    Choose your favorite quatrain from the excerpt of Muse and Drudge and do a paragraph-long brainstorm of everything it reminds you of.

2.    Mullen writes: "I am writing for the eye and the ear at once.” Quote parts of parts of the "Muse and Drudge" that seem written for both “eye and ear” or that remind you of sound, music, or speech.

3.    Recruit a friend of family member to read ‘Dream-Clung, Gone” or section of a  “Muse and Drudge” aloud with you. What was their reaction? Did anything change when you read the poem out loud?

4.    Using these poems as inspiration, write your own quatrain (4 lines) that contains: 1 pun, one reference to music, and one example of alliteration.