TY - CHAP

T1 - A poetics of Interrogation

T2 - Collective Readership and Authorial Plenum in Harryette Mullen’s Works

AU - Daugaard, Solveig

PY - 2024/7/1

Y1 - 2024/7/1

N2 - This essay engages with Harryette Mullen’s 1995 poem Muse & Drudge, which waspublished partially in response to what its author described as the “aesthetic apartheid” she experienced as a black woman entering the American experimental poetry scene. In Muse & Drudge, Mullen produces a multivocal poetic texture drawing on multiple sources including classical, modernist, and Black Arts literature, media cultural motifs and folk cultural forms – from quilting and graffiti to the dozens and the blues. Hereby, she exposes the exclusion based on racial categories active in the poetic avant-garde and promotes a collective readership that breaks from the ideal of the reader as an independent and solitary figure considered neutral in terms of gender, race, and cultural background. Featuring forms not foremost perceived through the lens of individualized authorship alongside poetic interrogations of canonized authors such as Gertrude Stein, Mullen’s poem also questions fundamental functionalities of print poetry tied to the concept of the self-sufficient author astied to an implicitly white, Western modernity to push for the possibility of a morecollaborative poetics. Also, through interventions into the book’s design, including its cover, and the way metadata is presented, the stability of the individual author as an isolated figure is challenged. In this way, the work is extending its zone of experimentation beyond the page to include the infrastructural conditions of production, distribution and reading of literature, that poetic canonization has relied on for centuries.

AB - This essay engages with Harryette Mullen’s 1995 poem Muse & Drudge, which waspublished partially in response to what its author described as the “aesthetic apartheid” she experienced as a black woman entering the American experimental poetry scene. In Muse & Drudge, Mullen produces a multivocal poetic texture drawing on multiple sources including classical, modernist, and Black Arts literature, media cultural motifs and folk cultural forms – from quilting and graffiti to the dozens and the blues. Hereby, she exposes the exclusion based on racial categories active in the poetic avant-garde and promotes a collective readership that breaks from the ideal of the reader as an independent and solitary figure considered neutral in terms of gender, race, and cultural background. Featuring forms not foremost perceived through the lens of individualized authorship alongside poetic interrogations of canonized authors such as Gertrude Stein, Mullen’s poem also questions fundamental functionalities of print poetry tied to the concept of the self-sufficient author astied to an implicitly white, Western modernity to push for the possibility of a morecollaborative poetics. Also, through interventions into the book’s design, including its cover, and the way metadata is presented, the stability of the individual author as an isolated figure is challenged. In this way, the work is extending its zone of experimentation beyond the page to include the infrastructural conditions of production, distribution and reading of literature, that poetic canonization has relied on for centuries.

UR - https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-harryette-mullen-her-silver-tongued-companion.html

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 9781399523608

T3 - Edinburg Foundations in Avant-Garde Writing

BT - Her Silver-Tongued Companion

A2 - Colby, Georgina

A2 - Mullen, Harryette

PB - Edinburgh University Press

CY - Edinburgh

ER -