New!Websites for Authors
Tertulia Logo
New!Websites for Authors
The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Book Cover for: Sleeping with the Dictionary: Volume 4, Harryette Mullen

Sleeping with the Dictionary: Volume 4

Harryette Mullen

Paperback
Regular price$23.95With free membership trial$11.9850% off your first book+ Free shipping
In Stock– Ships within one business day

Do you recommend this book?

Yes!

No

Finalist:L.A. Times Book Prize -Poetry (2002)
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."

Book Details

  • Publisher: University of California Press
  • Publish Date: Feb 22nd, 2002
  • Pages: 104
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.24in - 5.72in - 0.39in - 0.32lb
  • EAN: 9780520231436
  • Categories: • American - African American & Black

More books to explore

Book Cover for: The Black Unicorn: Poems, Audre Lorde
Book Cover for: Somebody Else Sold the World, Adrian Matejka
Book Cover for: Selected Poems of Rita Dove, Rita Dove
Book Cover for: Thomas and Beulah, Rita Dove

About the Author

Harryette Mullen is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Tree Tall Woman (1981), Trimmings (1991), S*PeRM**K*T (1992), and Muse & Drudge (1995).

More books by Harryette Mullen

Book Cover for: Regaining Unconsciousness: Poems, Harryette Mullen
Book Cover for: Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary, Harryette Mullen
Book Cover for: Harryette Mullen, Her Silver-Tongued Companion: Reading Poems by Harryette Mullen, Harryette Mullen
Book Cover for: Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*perm**k*t, and Muse & Drudge, Harryette Mullen
Book Cover for: The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews, Harryette Mullen

What people are saying

Mentioner image for: Jacket2 Magazine
Jacket2 Magazine
@jacket2mag
2 years

New at J2: Today we release PoemTalk 172—a conversation about Harryette Mullen's "Sleeping with the Dictionary" with Maxe Crandall, Julia Bloch, and Larissa Lai. https://t.co/oxupFFkgzm https://t.co/TxXYMhbk3y https://t.co/NCatj3nYRl

twitter.com
Mentioner image for: Hammer Museum
Hammer Museum
@hammer_museum
2 years

Art + ideas for a more just world. Exhibitions of contemporary and historical art plus weekly programs on current social issues.

On Thursday, October 20, don’t miss this reading by award-winning poet Harryette Mullen, author of Urban Tumbleweed, Blues Baby: Early Poems, and Sleeping with the Dictionary. Cosponsored by @UCLAenglish, where Mullen is also a professor. https://t.co/M20ZGnuUHo https://t.co/BGVzaD3JBm

twitter.com
Mentioner image for: Mira Rosenthal
Mira Rosenthal
@mira_rosenthal
2 years

Poet, translator, creative writing prof. Just out TERRITORIAL (@PittPoetry 2022) & next translation TO THE LETTER by Tomasz Różycki (@archipelagobks 2023)

@a2poet I highly recommend SLEEPING WITH THE DICTIONARY by Harryette Mullen https://t.co/IQB2dUIS36

twitter.com
Show more

Praise for this book

"Thoroughly delights and constantly surprises. Consisting primarily of short prose poems, this collection highlights Mullen's finely tuned sense of humor and sharp social criticism."-- "African American Review"
"Mullen does not have a Platonic relationship with the dictionary. She does not strive to represent ideas, but to experience an erotic encounter with language in which meanings proliferate. These poems are driven not by control but by possibility as a value, "scattering scat / sporadically all over / forever diaspora." As Sleeping with the Dictionary illustrates, such an affair can be quite a roil in the play."-- "Georgia Review"
"Manipulating language that is "corny," "lame," or "bad" -- such as archaism, slang, dialect, etc. -- Mullen creates puzzles that urge us to confront the historical and social specificity of the linguistic perspectives we bring to reading."-- "Modern Language Studies"
"These idiosyncratic, gleeful poems are designed not to lull or dolefully solace, but to joke, jeer, babble and commit disorderly conduct till standard hierarchies and power relationships are quite discombobulated."-- "Newsday"
"Sleeping with the Dictionary engages questions of racial, sexual, community, and cultural politics within a rigorous yet playful framework of formal experimentation. . . . What is wonderful about Mullen's poetry is that its moments of disruption, cultural reference, and punning are moments that might be read completely differently by different readers."-- "Chicago Review"
"A delightful, challenging collection. Mullen's words do indeed play well with others--they engage in humorous, ironic, and scathing play (sometimes all at the same time) with other words in her poems and with the "other" of the reader."-- "Callaloo"

What people are saying

See more