Sleeping with the Dictionary
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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 àtrois 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."LA Times Book Review[An] exuberant book. Sleeping with the Dictionary may be lexicon lust, but it's no one-night stand.
AcknowledgmentsAll She Wrote3The Anthropic Principle4Any Lit6Ask Aden8Between9Bilingual Instructions10Black Nikes11Blah-Blah12Bleeding Hearts14Bolsa Algodon15Coals to Newcastle, Panama Hats from Ecuador16Coo/Slur17Daisy Pearl18Denigration19Dim Lady20Dream Cycle21Ectopia22Elliptical23European Folk Tale Variant24Eurydice26Exploring the Dark Content27Fancy Cortex28Free Radicals29The Gene for Music30Hitched to a Star33Jinglejangle34Junk Mail44Kamasutra Sutra45Kirstenography46The Lunar Lutheran48Mantra for a Classless Society, or Mr. Roget's Neighborhood49Music for Homemade Instruments50Naked Statues51Natural Anguish52Once Ever After53O, 'Tis William54Outside Art56Present Tense57Quality of Life58Resistance Is Fertile60She Swam On from Sea to Shine61Sleeping with the Dictionary67Souvenir from Anywhere68Suzuki Method69Swift Tommy70Ted Joans at the Cafe Bizarre71Transients72Variation on a Theme Park75Way Opposite76We Are Not Responsible77Why You and I78Wino Rhino79Wipe That Simile Off Your Aphasia80Xenophobic Nightmare in a Foreign Language81X-ray Vision83Zen Acorn84Zombie Hat85
