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S*PeRM**K*T
Poetry. Harryette Mullen is the mixer. Street, jive, down-home post-mod speech meet at the meat market. Food may be the subject of these short prose-poems, but look at us, teasing ourselves with endless adverts to buy, consume more and better—so long as it’s packaged right, full color box and shrink-wrapped.
- GenresPoetry
45 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1992
2 people are currently reading
92 people want to read
About the author
Harryette Mullen
29 books105 followersHarryette Mullen is an American poet, short story writer, and literary scholar. She was born in Florence, Alabama, grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and attended graduate school at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As of 2008, she lives in Los Angeles, California. She wrote poems such as Land of the Discount Price, Home of the Brand Name.
Mullen began to write poetry as a college student in a multicultural community of writers, artists, musicians, and dancers in Austin, Texas. As an emerging poet, Mullen received a literature award from the Black Arts Academy, a Dobie-Paisano writer’s fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters and University of Texas, and an artist residency from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. In Texas, she worked in the Artists in Schools program before enrolling in graduate school in California, where she continued her study of American literature and encountered even more diverse communities of writers and artists.
Mullen was influenced by the social, political, and cultural movements of African Americans, Mexican Americans, and women in the 1960s-70s, including Civil Rights, Black Power, the Black Arts Movement, Movimiento Chicano, and feminism. Her first book, Tree Tall Woman, which showed traces of all of these influences, was published in 1981.
Especially in her later books, Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, Muse & Drudge, and Sleeping with the Dictionary, Mullen frequently combines cultural critique with humor and wordplay as her poetry grapples with topics such as globalization, mass culture, consumerism, and the politics of identity. Critics, including Elisabeth Frost and Juliana Spahr, have suggested that Mullen’s poetry audience is an eclectic community of collaborative readers who share individual and collective interpretations of poems that may provoke multiple, divergent, or contradictory meanings, according to each reader’s cultural background.
Mullen has taught at Cornell University, and currently teaches courses in American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. While living in Ithaca and Rochester, New York, she was a faculty fellow of the Cornell University Society for the Humanities and a Rockefeller fellow at the Susan B. Anthony Institute at University of Rochester. She has received a Gertrude Stein Award for innovative poetry, a Katherine Newman Award for best essay on U.S. ethnic literature, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a PEN Beyond Margins Award for her Recyclopedia (2006). She is also credited for rediscovering the novel Oreo, published in 1974 by Fran Ross. Mullen won the fourth annual Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers in 2010.
Mullen began to write poetry as a college student in a multicultural community of writers, artists, musicians, and dancers in Austin, Texas. As an emerging poet, Mullen received a literature award from the Black Arts Academy, a Dobie-Paisano writer’s fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters and University of Texas, and an artist residency from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. In Texas, she worked in the Artists in Schools program before enrolling in graduate school in California, where she continued her study of American literature and encountered even more diverse communities of writers and artists.
Mullen was influenced by the social, political, and cultural movements of African Americans, Mexican Americans, and women in the 1960s-70s, including Civil Rights, Black Power, the Black Arts Movement, Movimiento Chicano, and feminism. Her first book, Tree Tall Woman, which showed traces of all of these influences, was published in 1981.
Especially in her later books, Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, Muse & Drudge, and Sleeping with the Dictionary, Mullen frequently combines cultural critique with humor and wordplay as her poetry grapples with topics such as globalization, mass culture, consumerism, and the politics of identity. Critics, including Elisabeth Frost and Juliana Spahr, have suggested that Mullen’s poetry audience is an eclectic community of collaborative readers who share individual and collective interpretations of poems that may provoke multiple, divergent, or contradictory meanings, according to each reader’s cultural background.
Mullen has taught at Cornell University, and currently teaches courses in American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. While living in Ithaca and Rochester, New York, she was a faculty fellow of the Cornell University Society for the Humanities and a Rockefeller fellow at the Susan B. Anthony Institute at University of Rochester. She has received a Gertrude Stein Award for innovative poetry, a Katherine Newman Award for best essay on U.S. ethnic literature, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a PEN Beyond Margins Award for her Recyclopedia (2006). She is also credited for rediscovering the novel Oreo, published in 1974 by Fran Ross. Mullen won the fourth annual Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers in 2010.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
April 17, 2021
«Flies in buttermilk. What a fellowship. That's why white milk makes yellow butter. Homo means the same. A woman is different. Cream always rises over split milk. Muscle men drink it all in. Awesome teeth and wholesale bones. Our cows are well adjusted. The lost family album keeps saying cheese. Speed readers skim the white space of this galaxy.»
July 20, 2007
I *love* this book. I lend it out often. Its dimensions are pleasing, and I think it's a good book for people who don't usually read poetry.
Want to read
August 27, 2007I wrote a paper on Mullen's Muse & Drudge, and was able to gather a lot of info about her poetic aesthetic from research about this book...
January 20, 2022
Refreshing spearmint gums up the words. Instand permkit combs through the wreckage. Bigger better spermkit grins down family of four. Scratch and sniff your lucky number. You may already be a wiener.
- pg. 30
S*PeRM**K*T is a challenging indictment of consumer culture and conformity, written, in contrast to these themes, in a style that asserts the poet's individuality. Even as she is describing the spiritual vacuum that is the aisles of a supermarket, she appears to incorporate herself, details of her writing process (where she writes "lines" read not lines in a supermarket but lines of a poem)...
Lines assemble gutter and margin. Outside and in, they straghten a place. Organize a stand. Shelve space. Square footage. Align your list or listlessness. Pushing oddly evening aisle catches the tail of an eye. Displays the cherished share. Individually wrapped singles, frozen divorced compartments, six-pack widows express themselves while women wait in family ways, all bulging baskets, squirming young. More on line incited the eyes. Bold names label familiar type faces. Her hand scanning throwaway lines.
- pg. 1
In countless way, Mullen confronts us with the blandness of consumer culture...
Pyramids are eroding monuments. Embalmed soup stock the recyclable soul adrift in its newspaper of double coupons. Seconds decline in descent from number one, top of the heap. So this is generic life, feeding from a dented cant. Devoid of coloured labels, the discounted irregulars.
- pg. 3
with the redundancy of consumer culture...
.Just add water. That homespun incantation activates potent powders, alchemical concentrates, jars and boxes of abracadabra. Bottled water works trickling down a rainy day watering can reconstitute the shrinking dollar. A greenback garnered from a tree. At two bucks, one tender legal portrait of Saint No-Nicks stands in for clean-shaven, defunct cherry chopper. Check out this week's seasonal electric reindeer luz de vela Virgin Mary mark downs. Choose from ten brands clearly miracle H-2-O. Pure genius in a bottle. Not municipal precipitate you pay to tap, bu dear rain fresh capped at spring. Cleaner than North Pole snow, or Commander in Chief's hard-boiled white collars. Purer than pale saint's flow of holy bread of drops distilled from sterile virgin tears.
- pg. 4
with the ugly realities of consumer culture...
Kills bugs dead. Redundancy is syntactical overkill. A pinprick of peace at the end of the tunnel of a nightmare night in a roach motel. Their noise infects the dream. In black kitchens they foul the food, walk on our bodies as we sleep over oceans of pirate flags. Skull and crossbones, they crunch like candy. When we die they will eat us, unless we kill them first. Invest in better mousetraps. Take no prisoners on board ship, to rock the boat, to violate our beds with pestilence. We dream the dream of extirpation. Wipe out a species, with God on our side. Annihilate the insects. Sterilize the filthy vermin.
- pg. 10
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January 13, 2025i understood maybe one page of this 🫡
March 20, 2025
"Toe jam must ’cause jelly don’t."
May 6, 2011
I read "S*Perm**K*T" after "Tree Tall Woman" and I appreciated her deviation from traditional poetry solely on principle. She wrote prose-poetry and I thought this was an interesting take using the theme of grocery stores and supermarkets and fusing life lessons and narratives with elements related to the theme. In terms of my connection to the material emotionally, mentally, and intellectually, it definitely waned from Tree Tall Women. I found that I was less interested in the narrative she was taking me through and just hoping to be impressed by the cleverness of her writing. The following poem was one that piqued my interest:
Pyramids are eroding monuments. Embalmed soup stocks the recyclable soul adrift in its newspaper boat of double coupons. Seconds decline in descent from number one, top of the heap. So this is generic life, feeding from a dented cant. Devoid of colored labels, the discounted irregulars.
I found it to be incredibly clever and on some level quite deep, but I didn't really care about the material as a whole.
Another poem:
A daughter turned against the grain refuses your gleanings, denies your milk, soggy absorbency she abhors. Chokes on your words when asked about love. Never would swallow the husks you’re allowed. Not a spoonful gets down what you see of her now. Crisp image from disciplined form. Torn hostage ripening out of hand. Boxtop trophy of war, brings to the table a regimen from hell. At breakfast shuts out all nurturant murmurs. Holds against you the eating for two. Why brag of pain a body can’t remember? You pretend once again she’s not lost forever.
This definitely had more of a narrative and I found myself very interested in what she had to say with this poem. I wish more of her material in this book had a clearer sense of purpose that was more in line with what I found in "Tree Tall Woman".
Pyramids are eroding monuments. Embalmed soup stocks the recyclable soul adrift in its newspaper boat of double coupons. Seconds decline in descent from number one, top of the heap. So this is generic life, feeding from a dented cant. Devoid of colored labels, the discounted irregulars.
I found it to be incredibly clever and on some level quite deep, but I didn't really care about the material as a whole.
Another poem:
A daughter turned against the grain refuses your gleanings, denies your milk, soggy absorbency she abhors. Chokes on your words when asked about love. Never would swallow the husks you’re allowed. Not a spoonful gets down what you see of her now. Crisp image from disciplined form. Torn hostage ripening out of hand. Boxtop trophy of war, brings to the table a regimen from hell. At breakfast shuts out all nurturant murmurs. Holds against you the eating for two. Why brag of pain a body can’t remember? You pretend once again she’s not lost forever.
This definitely had more of a narrative and I found myself very interested in what she had to say with this poem. I wish more of her material in this book had a clearer sense of purpose that was more in line with what I found in "Tree Tall Woman".
August 22, 2007
unrelenting...
February 11, 2015
The musicality in the book is fantastic, and it is easy to get lost in it. Underneath that, I find her to make excellent points or observations of the mundane.
June 9, 2015
Difficult but interesting
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews