Mullen s alterations highlight the neoliberal drive to eliminate social safety nets in favor of personal responsibility you d better look out for yourself because it is not the government s responsibility. In modifying the form of the word lost from the introductory sentence in the poem We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives to loss here, Mullen here implies a connection between the refusal of responsibility to help in that sentence and in this one. Mullen further highlights the refusal of responsibility for a social contract when she mimics the ticketing legalese that often puts passengers on standby because of airline overbooking Your ticket does not guarantee that we will honor your reservations.
Her use of the word reservations in the context of this poem creates a swerve from the word s most obvious meaning. If one might have those sorts of reservations, or limiting concerns, or questions, about the ways a government or business, or a government and its justice system in cooperation with a business, might behave, those reservations may not be honored or respected.
In other words, the poethical swerve in Mullen s airline language leads again to the idea that civil disobedience, a failure to obey instructions, a bad attitude can be unsafe. The idea of reservations or rights that we are [not] bound to respect, or honor, is reiterated not just in the later allusion to the Dred Scott decision but in the next two sentences in the airline instruction motif In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on.
The first sentence plays on the airline rules to limit carry-on items to one piece of luggage. The verb to carry on can mean to act in a silly or obstinate manner one might say to a disobedient or rambunctious child, Stop carrying on!
The implied threat to anyone who will not follow the instructions, who continues to carry on has been considered above, and Mullen s parody of the take-off and landing instructions to extinguish all smoking material that used to be given along with the request to fasten trays and put seats in an upright position warn not just against acting out carrying on but against having any internal reservations, or smoldering resentments, at all.
The instructions are meant to control not just how one acts but how one thinks. This erasure becomes the punning subject of a poem in the book titled Why You and I, which begins, Who knows why you and I fell off the roster?
Mullen addresses not just the immediate political context at the time Sleeping with the Dictionary was published but also reflects enough of the historical context to clarify that oversimplified ways of thinking are systemic and that the complexity of Retallack s poethical swerve is important in resisting oversimplification.
She mimics the language of the news broadcast to suggest that the Euro-centric age that culminates perhaps in its furthest outpost in the western hemisphere has had its position of supremacy shaken. Now as the reel unravels, she continues, switching from the language of the news broadcast to the language of the news reel, with a pun, perhaps, on the real, which unravels, or comes apart as one recognizes its constructedness. She finishes the sentence and the poem by commenting, our story unwinds with the curious dynamic of an action flick without a white protagonist.
In one instance, to unwind means to fall apart, to lose coherence, like Yeats s center that cannot hold, and that would be a key fear of the far right fundamentalists in the U. In the other, more poethical instance, to unwind might mean to relax, to become free of nervous tension according to Mullen s own beloved American Heritage Dictionary.
Hence [. Every poetics is a consequential form of life. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York Monthly Review Press,. Times Topics. New York Times Online, n. NY Houghton Mifflin Company,. The Western Journal of Black Studies. Milestone Documents. Our Documents, n. Primary Documents in American History. The Library of Congress, July. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York Modern Library,. Enrique Chagoya Exhibition at Gallery. Murdock Salon Architects. Fritsch, Jane. New York Times Online, Feb.
A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York Oxford UP,. Jefferson, Thomas. The New Constitution. Merrill D. Keller, Lynn. Iowa City U of Iowa P,. Harryette Mullen and the Contemporary Jazz Voice. Luck, Jessica Lewis. Contemporary Literature. Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York Random House,. Mantyla, Kyle. Right Wing Watch, Dec. McEnaney, Tom. The Daily Bruin, Nov. Michel, Lou, and Dan Herbeck.
NY Mass Market Paperback,. Mullen, Harryette. Everything We Can Imagine. Interview by Kayle G. Interview by Cynthia Hogue. Sleeping with the Dictionary. The Star Trek Encyclopedia. Purcell, Richard. Trayvon, Postblackness, and the Postrace Dilemma. Boundary -.
Retallack, Joan. The Poethical Wager. In the dark night's insomnia, the book is a stimulating sedative, awakening my tired imagination to the hypnagogic trance of language. To go through all these motions and procedures, groping in the dark for an alluring word, is the poet's nocturnal mission. Aroused by myriad possibilities, we try out the most perverse positions in the practice of our nightly act, the penetration of the denotative body of the work.
Any exit from the logic of language might be an entry in a symptomatic dictionary. The alphabetical order of this ample block of knowledge might render a dense lexicon of lucid hallucinations. Beside the bed, a pad lies open to record the meandering of migratory words. In the rapid eye movement of the poet's night vision, this dictum can be decoded, like the secret acrostic of a lover's name. About the Book Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary.
From Our Blog. Reviews "Thoroughly delights and constantly surprises. Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator. We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in Sleeping with the Dictionary may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.
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