Muse and Drudge

by Harryette Mullen

poetry, "engaged & engaging" (Henry Louis Gates)

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1995

About the author

Harryette 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.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book-length poem with four quatrains to the page. Its subject is essentially black experience in the U.S., with a strong suggestion of the Blues and black cultural references threaded in code throughout, often homophonically. For example, the word "Muse" in the title suggests "Mules"; the expression "stark strangled banjos" sounds like "The Star-Spangled Banner." Here's how it appears in its stanza: "devils dancing on a dime / cut a rug in ragtime / jitterbug squat diddly bow / stark strangled banjo." Diddly bow is Bo Diddly (Ellis McDaniels), the musician, and also the diddly-bo, a single-string instrument of African influence. Because HM is said to read pages in random order from the book, there's the distant possibility that its form relates to the African practice of Ifa divination, in which a priest, or babalawo, presents a specific poem from the Ifa canon of 256 (16 x 16)depending on the way in which 16 cowrie shells are cast on a prophecy tray by the supplicant.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This poem MOVES! Luscious language. Try this on:


arrives early for the date
to tell him she's late
he watches her bio clock balk on seepy time
petals out of rhythm docked for trick crimes

flunked the pregnancy test
mistimes space probe, she aborted
legally blind justice, she miscarried
scorched and salted earth, she's barren

when Aunt Haggie's chirren throws
an all originals ball
the souls ain't got a stray word
for the woman who's wayward

dead to the world
let earth receive her piece
let every dark room repair her heart
let nature and heaven give her release

[H · Rating 5 out of 5]

The use of quatrains recalls the ballad form, though the lyric itself overflows + leaks + seeps + admits + sings / pushes past the limits of its container.... so brilliant ... loved swimming thru <3

“I dream a world/ and then what/ my soul is resting/ but my feet are tired” (3)

“handful of gimme/ myself when I am real/ how would you know/ if you’ve never tasted” (3)

"dead to the world/ let earth receive her piece/ let every dark room repair her heart/ let nature and heaven give her release" (39)

"occult iconic crow/ solo mysterioso/ flying way out/ on the other side of far" (40)

"hooked on phonemes imbued with exuberance/ our spokeswoman listened for lines/ heard tokens of quotidian/ corralled in ludic routines" (49)

"tomboy girl with cowboy boots/ takes coy bow in prom gown/ your orange California suits/ you riding into sundown" (52)

"O rose so drowsy in/ my flower bed your pink/ pajamas zig-zag into/ fluent dreams of living ink" (60)

"while I slip into something more funkable/ rub-a-dub with rusty man abrasions/ was I hungry sleepy horny or sad/ on that particular occasion" (73)

"Jesus is my airplane/ I shall feel no turbulence/ though I fly in a squall/ through the spleen of Satan" (76)

"so beautiful it was/ presumptuous to alter/ the shape of my pleasure/ in doing or making/ proceed with abandon/ finding yourself where you are/ and who you're playing for/ what stray companion" (80)

[Anne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not educated enough to have enjoyed this read. I have loved Harryette Mullen poems in the past, so picked this up at a used book sale when I saw it. Reading the five-star reviews, I understand there is history and symbolism found throughout the (monotonous to me) quatrains of this single, book-length poem. I would likely have enjoyed it better if I were reading it in a class with a professor explaining Mullen's cleverness along the way as we read together, but I just didn't get it, and to me a lot of the imagery was disjointed and just didn't make sense. A series of notes in the back explaining all the references would have been helpful for the ignoramuses like me who need extra help. So, I would say this collection is not for the average or beginner reader. It's more for a very well-read poet who has the historical knowledge to make sense of it all and to understand the historical and literary references so that while they read, they could say things like "Wow! That was so clever!" instead of "huh?"

[ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

i didn’t want this to end !! so beautiful. love the rhythm and lyric of this whole long poem.

“my dreams could take/ advantage of me and no/ one would tell me because/ they don’t know where to reach me”

[Angie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Major Field Prep: 109/133
Mullen's book of poetry is a celebration of sound and rhythm. She intricately plays with onomatopoeia, alliteration, homophones, and puns to create a landscape of unexpected sonic combinations that require a reader's close attention. It is a single long poem split into quatrains, all using enjambment, with little formal punctuation. It is rich in literary, historical, mythical, biblical, musical, and political allusions. It is about denouncing the restriction of black women to either "muse" or "drudge" (and the many plays on those words, such as "mules" and "drugs"). It is inadequate to be regaled into the passive inspiration of another's artistic work as well as into the active but mindless labor that allows someone the luxury of creation. Muse and Drudge begins with the belief of a black women's autonomous voice and ability to create, with how "Sapphire's lyre styles." It ends with a direct address call to the reader to "proceed with abandon/ finding yourself where you are." It is the making and sustaining of an unencumbered and autonomous black female voice.

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think Ginsberg gets the credit for coining the term "bop-prosody" in the introductory blurb of Kerouac's Mexico City Blues; however, it still stands as a very good vessel for categorizing more [post]modern poets like Harryette Mullen (if categorize we must). So it is no surprise that in Muse & Drudge we immediately are aware just how playful Mullen's language can be--how teeming with life her quatrains become when spoken outright and out loud. Not only does she sometimes allow for sound to dictate meaning, but she also allows imagery to give way to idealogical themes. How does this help? Well, prick up my ears and my eyes, and you prick up my mind.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This deserves re-reading. I'm intrigued by the form (one long poem in short, mostly three beat, four line stanzas), the music, and the concerns.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This I read for my first independent study. This book is amazing to me. I'm overcome with the desire to read it again thinking about it right now.

[Q · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great first book of sounds

[wordLife · Rating 5 out of 5]

poetry and history meet...