Harryette mullen biography samples
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Interview with Harryette Mullen
Cynthia Hogue
Department of English
Bucknell University
hogue@
Born in Alabama, Harryette Mullen grew up in Texas, the daughter of teachers and the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Baptist ministers in the still-segregated south. While completing a B.A. in English at the University of Texas at Austin, she began writing seriously, participating in the burgeoning black arts movement in the s. She received a Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and teaches African American literature and creative writing at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her works include four collections of poetry, most recently Muse & Drudge (Singing Horse Press, ), and a critical study, Gender, Subjectivity, and Slave Narratives (Cambridge University Press, ).
Known for her innovative, &#;mongrel&#; lyric poetry (as Mullen puts it in a interview with Calvin Bedient pub • By Ellie Rifkin and Meredith Foulke Primary Sources: King, Rosamond S. “‘Word Plays Well with Others:’ Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary.” Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. King opens her review of Sleeping with the Dictionary by placing Mullen in context in the literary world; although Mullen had not published a book for six years prior to Sleeping with the Dictionary, she remained active in journal and anthology publishing. King praises Mullen for the complexity of references in the collection, describing the variety of formal techniques as “a literary circus.” The poems King writes off (going so far as to call one “forgettable”) are the more nonsensical ones, which lean too heavily on the alphabetical conceit. This isn’t a dismissal of Mullen’s formal experiments though; King later notes that “the less meaning is apparent in the poem, the more the reader is encouraged to read more for feeling than for sense” (). • Poet At a Glance&#x; Sources Harryette Mullen is best known as a poet but has also written short stories, essays, and non-fiction prose. Mullen, who has been called the Queen of Hip Hop Hyperbole
by the Hispanic writer, Sandra Cisneros, has published five volumes of poetry, and her work has been included in several anthologies. Mullen&#x;s creative use of homophones, metaphors, puns, and aphorisms, make even her short poems seem longer, almost filled with meaning and imagery. She writes from the vantage point of being African-American, female, and a feminist. Her poetic style is that of a language poet. According to Joan Houlihan, a critic for The Boston Comment,The Language Poet must construct, not just a poem, but an uber-poem, a poem that does more than &#x;mean&#x; something, a poem that eclipses westernized thought structures, transcends cultural products, and frees minds enslaved by capitalism. Radically PC (Poetically Correct), Lang Harryette Mullen Annotated Bibliography
Mullen, Harryette –