keep your muse slender

Picked up Harryette Mullen’s Recyclopedia the other day, which includes her books S*PeRM**K*T, Trimmings, and Muse & Drudge. In S*PeRM**K*T, Mullen uses common language—advertising jargon, specifically—to drive home her theme of, as Mullen herself said in an interview with Daniel Kane, “The direction of what's called globalization. Are we members of a global village, or just consumers or investors in a virtual global market?” She uses jingles recognizable to all American consumers, but adds unexpected endings, twisting them and coaxing out new meanings. The following are several examples from her untitled prose poems in S*PeRM**K*T: “Don’t wait to be told… you explode”; “Never let them see you… eat”; “Raise your hand if you’re sure… you’re not.”
In doing so, Mullen plays with the reader’s expectations. American society has become so conditioned that the public doesn’t question advertising slogans; they simply accept them and hum along. By twisting these phrases, Mullen points out the folly of consumerism, capitalism, and the good old American drive to succeed.
Each prose poem is assigned a different product/image; reading the poem has the sense of strolling through the supermarket. Petroleum, bug spray, breakfast cereal, pork products, baby food, buttermilk, soup cans, frozen food, and meat: all of these images work with the idea of consumerism and the global market. The title, whose asterisks can be easily filled in to spell “supermarket,” works with this idea as well, but if the poem is a jibe at the American dream, the existing title of “sperm kit” works to highlight the plastic, endless permutations of the Aryan ideal in American culture. Mullen’s brilliance lies in the fact that both of these themes work simultaneously, which makes S*PeRM**K*T so successful.
A harsh examination of gender roles appear repeatedly in this work; in one poem, Mullen says, “But the gleam of a sigh at a spotless rinsed dish. Spots herself in its service, buffed and rebuffed… The silver dropped at dinner announces the arrival of a woman at a fork. She beams at a waxing moon.” The wordplay in this poem is exquisite: with the double meaning of “rebuffed,” as in women’s traditional, subservient place in society, as well as the polish theme; the image of a piece of silverware being dropped at dinner because of a woman at a fork—which the reader will immediately free associate with “woman at work;” a woman beaming at a “waxing moon,” both a term for a phase of the moon and a hint that the woman’s place hasn’t changed, for she is still waxing and polishing in the household.
The last poem in the section seems to reiterate the emptiness of it all: “Flies in buttermilk. What a fellowship… Homo means the same… Our cows are well adjusted. The lost family album keeps saying cheese.” After pages of detailing each idiosyncracy
of the American dream—pointing out the folly that others blindly accept—Mullen ends the book with the last line of her last poem, “Speed readers skim the white space of this galaxy—” seeming jab at the readers of her book, who are just as guilty as everyone else of falling into the trap of the American dream, consumerism, and mindless allegiance to ideas presented to the American people by society. Through using the ingenious backdrop of a supermarket, Mullen paints a bleak, tongue-in-cheek portrait of American culture; with images of typical supermarket products, she critiques society’s values, body image, gender roles, family life, consumerism, and the American dream.

Harryette Mullen’s excerpt from “Trimmings” works so well, in the way that some of Stein’s language works; it makes sense intuitively, though not necessarily logically. When I read these poems, I got the sense that she was describing a prostitute. Lines like, “Opens up a little leg, some slender, high exposure… Buy another peek experience, price is slashed” and “A tomato isn’t hard. It splits in heat, easy,” lend to this idea. One of the best lines I’ve ever read to describe a woman’s place, according to society, is in the second to last stanza. “Her paper parasol and open fan become her multiplication of a rib which is connected and might start a fire for cooking.” The imagery—paper parasol, fan, cooking—all enforce the docile, domestic role of a woman (traditionally), while the open fan imagery transforms into the “multiplication of a rib,” hinting at the Creation story, where woman is made from Adam’s rib, and therefore, as a part (which is connected), is inferior and forced to serve him, cheerfully, eternally (start a fire for cooking.)
While it does seem that Mullen was talking about a prostitute in this poem, she could also be referring to the role for women in society as a whole. I can’t remember who said this—it was a late 19th century female writer, I think—who said that marriage was just a form of prostitution, because women married for financial benefits (to be taken care of) for sex, making it nothing more than glorified prostitution. The text may or may not support this, but the fifth stanza includes very virginal imagery; “Or strayed mermaid, tail split, bleeds into the sea. With brand new feet walks unsteady on land, each step an ache.”
Muse & Drudge is the only book not written in prose poems. Instead, Mullen uses free verse, but wordplays in her signature style, interjecting dialect choices into pop culture references like “Miz Mary takes a mack truck in/ trade for her slick black cadillac” and twists idioms: “you have the girl you paid for/ now lie on her.”

I’m a fan.

Link for Mullen interview: http://www.writenet.org//poetschat/poetschat_h_mullen.html