ABOUT THIS BOOK

The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be forms an extended consideration not only of Harryette Mullen’s own work, methods, and interests as a poet, but also of issues of central importance to African American poetry and language, women’s voices, and the future of poetry.

Together, these essays and interviews highlight the impulses and influences that drive Mullen’s work as a poet and thinker, and suggest unique possibilities for the future of poetic language and its role as an instrument of identity and power.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Harryette Mullen teaches American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at UCLA. She is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge, winner of a PEN Beyond Margins Award. Her book Sleeping with the Dictionary was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Polish, German, Swedish, Turkish, and Bulgarian.

REVIEWS

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“An absolutely stellar collection of writings and interviews offering insight into the context and history of African American innovative poetry and art (including Harryette’s own poetry).”
—From the introduction by Hank Lazer, author of The New Spirit and Lyric and Spirit: Selected Essays 1996–2008

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“This collection will be the first full book of critical and occasional pieces by Harryette Mullen and is a long-anticipated event in literary publishing likely to find a deeply appreciative audience. It will not only enlighten readers as to Mullen’s thinking, but will make important contributions to scholarship in the areas of poetics, African American literature, and the arts in contemporary America.”
—Aldon Lynn Nielsen, author of Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism and coeditor of Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction xiii

I. Shorter Essays

1. Imagining the Unimagined Reader: Writing to the Unborn and

Including the Excluded 3

2. Poetry and Identity 9

3. Kinky Quatrains: The Making of Muse & Drudge 13

4. Telegraphs from a Distracted Sibyl 18

5. If Lilies are Lily White: From the Stain of Miscegenation in Stein’s “Melanctha” to the “Clean Mixture” of White and Color in Tender Buttons 20

6. Nine Syllables Label Sylvia: Reading Plath’s “Metaphors” 29

7. Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem: Wislawa Szymborska in the Dialogue of Creative and Critical Thinkers 35

8. Theme for the Oulipians 44

9. When He Is Least Himself: Paul Laurence Dunbar and Double Consciousness in African American Poetry 49

10. Truly Unruly Julie: The Innovative Rule-Breaking Poetry of Julie Patton 57

11. All Silence Says Music Will Follow: Listening to Lorenzo Thomas 60

12. The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Stretching the Dialogue of African American Poetry 68

II. Longer Essays

13. African Signs and Spirit Writing 79

14. Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Beloved 102

15. Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness 130

16. Phantom Pain: Nathaniel Mackey’s Bedouin Hornbook 155

17. A Collective Force of Burning Ink: Will Alexander’s Asia & Haiti 162

18. Incessant Elusives: The Oppositional Poetics of Erica Hunt and Will Alexander 173

III. Interviews

19. “The Solo Mysterioso Blues”: An Interview with Harryette Mullen by Calvin Bedient 185

20. An Interview with Harryette Mullen by Daniel Kane 204

21. An Interview with Harryette Mullen by Elisabeth A. Frost 213

22. An Interview with Harryette Mullen by Cynthia Hogue 233

23. “I Dream a World”: A Conversation with Harryette Mullen by Nibir K. Ghosh 258

Bibliography 267