This essay engages with Harryette Mullen’s 1995 poem Muse & Drudge, which was
published 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 as
tied to an implicitly white, Western modernity to push for the possibility of a more
collaborative 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.