Sleeping with the Dictionary
4/5
()
About this ebook
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."
Harryette Mullen
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).
Read more from Harryette Mullen
What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to Sleeping with the Dictionary
Titles in the series (10)
Enola Gay Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Commons Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sleeping with the Dictionary Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Green is the Orator Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Writing the Silences Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Voyager Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dark Archive Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Metropole Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Related ebooks
After the Body: New & Selected Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNo Ruined Stone Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWaterbaby Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Fantasia for the Man in Blue Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5the terrible stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Commons Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dialogues with Rising Tides Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Next: New Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sho Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sand Opera Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of Light: Anniversary Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Difference Is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSanctificum Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5All the Fierce Tethers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGood Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5HULL Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rerun Era Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings21 | 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Measures of Expatriation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5White Egrets: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBrood Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Galleons: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Discipline Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Inheritance Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Poetry For You
The Things We Don't Talk About Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pillow Thoughts II: Healing the Heart Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Way Forward Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beyond Thoughts: An Exploration Of Who We Are Beyond Our Minds Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5You Better Be Lightning Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDream Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Waste Land and Other Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Road Not Taken and Other Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Enough Rope: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Works Of Oscar Wilde Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Carrying: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Favorite Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Sleeping with the Dictionary
46 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Sleeping with the Dictionary - Harryette Mullen
All She Wrote
Forgive me, I’m no good at this. I can’t write back. I never read your letter. I can’t say I got your note. I haven’t had the strength to open the envelope. The mail stacks up by the door. Your hand’s illegible. Your postcards were defaced. Wash your wet hair
? Any document you meant to send has yet to reach me. The untied parcel service never delivered. I regret to say I’m unable to reply to your unexpressed desires. I didn’t get the book you sent. By the way, my computer was stolen. Now I’m unable to process words. I suffer from aphasia. I’ve just returned from Kenya and Korea. Didn’t you get a card from me yet? What can I tell you? I forgot what I was going to say. I still can’t find a pen that works and then I broke my pencil. You know how scarce paper is these days. I admit I haven’t been recycling. I never have time to read the Times. I’m out of shopping bags to put the old news in. I didn’t get to the market. I meant to clip the coupons. I haven’t read the mail yet. I can’t get out the door to work, so I called in sick. I went to bed with writer’s cramp. If I couldn’t get back to writing, I thought I’d catch up on my reading. Then Oprah came on with a fabulous author plugging her best-selling book.
The Anthropic Principle
The pope of cosmology addresses a convention. When he talks the whole atmosphere changes. He speaks through a computer. When he asks can you hear me, the whole audience says yes. It’s a science locked up in a philosophical debate. There are a few different theories. There could be many different realities. You might say ours exists because we do. You could take a few pounds of matter, heat it to an ungodly temperature, or the universe was a freak accident. There may be a limit to our arrogance, but one day the laws of physics will read like a detailed instruction manual. A plane that took off from its hub in my hometown just crashed in the President’s hometown. The news anchor says the pilot is among the dead. I was hoping for news of the President’s foreign affair with a diplomat’s wife. I felt a mystical connection to the number of confirmed dead whose names were not released. Like the time I was three handshakes from the President. Like when I thought I heard that humanitarians dropped a smart blond on the Chinese embassy. Like when the cable was severed and chairs fell from the sky because the pilot flew with rusty maps. What sane pilot would land in that severe rain with hard hail and gale-force wind. With no signal of distress. With no foghorns to warn the civilians, the pilot lost our moral compass in the bloody quagmire of collateral damage. One theory says it’s just a freak accident locked up in a philosophical debate. It’s like playing poker and all the cards are wild. Like the arcane analysis of a black box full of insinuations of error.
Any Lit
You are a ukulele beyond my microphone
You are a Yukon beyond my Micronesia
You are a union beyond my meiosis
You are a unicycle beyond my migration
You are a universe beyond my mitochondria
You are a Eucharist beyond my Miles Davis
You are a euphony beyond my myocardiogram
You are a unicorn beyond my Minotaur
You are a eureka beyond my maitai
You are a Yuletide beyond my minesweeper
You are a euphemism beyond my myna bird
You are a unit beyond my mileage
You are a Yugoslavia beyond my mind’s eye
You are