Harryette Mullen, Her Silver-Tongued Companion

Harryette Mullen is Professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is the author of several poetry collections. She is a recipient of a Stephen Henderson Award, Jackson Poetry Prize, United States Artist Fellowship, Academy of American Poets Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Katherine Newman Award for Best Essay on Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry. In 2023 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Polish, Swedish, Danish, Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, Russian, Hungarian, Kyrgyz and Vietnamese. Her poetry collections include Recyclopedia (2006), winner of a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A collection of her essays and interviews, The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be, was published in 2012. Her poetry collection, Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary, was published in 2013. Open Leaves / poems from earth was published in 2023. Georgina Colby is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Westminster. She has published widely in the field of avant-garde writing and feminisms. Her books include Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible (2016), and the collections Reading Experimental Writing (2019) and, as co-editor, The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible (2020). She is the series editor (with Eric White) of Edinburgh Critical Studies in Avant-Garde Writing and Edinburgh Foundations in Avant-Garde Writing.

• AcknowledgementsPreface, Lee Ann BrownIntroduction: Imagined Readers, Georgina Colby Her Silver-Tongued Companion, Harryette MullenPart I: Collected Poems 1981-1982Blues Baby: Early Poems (1981-82)Of Two MindsA Woman is Dreaming Cartoon MenYou Who Walked Through the Fire She Landed on the MoonPart II: Poetry CollectionsRecylopedia (2006)Trimmings (1991)S*PeRM**K*T (1992)Muse & Drudge (1995)Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002)Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary (2013)Part III: Uncollected Poems 2001-2021Liberation of Ms. Liberty The Fire This Time Poetry for Dummies Summer Salt Unacknowledged Legislator Waving the FlagSugar Land Curious Strangers Remove Offensive Language Antarctica Broken Glish Devil’s Ashtray Immaterial Not Dead Yet "Blue herons persist" Barbaracrostics Y the Or?Part IV: Critical EssaysAlan Gilbert, ‘The Costs of Style: Harryette Mullen’s Blues Baby and Freestyle’Emily Greenwood, ‘On Being Amused: Harryette Mullen’s Muse and Drudge’Solveig Daugaard, ‘Collective Readership and Authorial Plenum in Harryette Mullen’s Works’Ayesha Ramachandran, ‘Recycling Shakespeare: The Question of the Lyric in Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping With the Dictionary’Daniel Kane, ‘‘Native or Not’: Harryette Mullen’s Tanka Diary’ContributorsBibliography

With Her Silver Tongued Companion, we are gifted the most complete critical edition to date of one of our greatest poets. Never-before-seen unpublished work in conversation with new critical writings and beloved collections is a crucial advancement of scholarship in contemporary poetry. Harryette Mullen’s work opens a space for infinite readings and readerships, interrogating the notion of a single audience; as she has stated, "I write for myself and others. An other is anyone who is not me. Anyone who is not me is like me in some ways and unlike me in other ways. I write, optimistically, for an imagined audience of known and unknown readers." Mullen’s poems insist that Blackness and the avant-garde are inextricable; her commitment to formal innovation, sonic virtuosity, intertextuality, and her utilization of techniques from many important poetry movements (Oulipo, Language Poetry, Feminist Poetry) makes her a singular figure in American literature. With the breadth of work represented in these pages, we can finally see the artistic trajectory of a decades-long career accompanied by the critical inquiry it deserves. This is an essential collection for both lifelong readers of Mullen and those new to her exhilarating work.