Proposal
Harald Zapf, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
An Othering of Language: Harryette Mullen's Transpoetic Experiments
Harryette Mullen has only recently been canonized as an African-American author. The
second edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, published early in
2004, includes nine new writers, and Mullen is the only experimental one among them.
Mullen came "from Amiri Baraka to LeRoi Jones", from the blackness of her first book Tree
Tall Woman (1981) and other early poems collected in Blues Baby to the experimentalism of
Trimmings (1991) and S*PeRM**K*T (1992). She now balances experimental artistic form
and cultural context, which can be seen very well in her last two volumes of poetry: Muse &
Drudge (1995) and Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002).
I think she can be considered a paradigmatic "trans-writer" now, because she performatively
creates a realm beyond the discursive borders of difference and identity politics, vernacular
tradition, culturally blind avant-gardism, and "pure" constructivist aesthetics, which
contributes to her elusive location of multiple displacement, a differential position I will also
determine by considering Harryette Mullen's poetic development in the context of the
Language group.
In my paper, I will start with reflections on Harryette Mullen in regard to blackness, American
female experimentalism, and women's writing in general. Then I will deal with Mullen's use
of another language (Spanish) and her hint at the possibility of a truly transethnic poetic
culture in her expressivist volume Tree Tall Woman. At the end of my talk I will focus on her
constructivist poetry in Sleeping with the Dictionary that offers a certain cultural poetics of
displacement by doing transcultural work. Mullen defies the vectorialism involved in the
common notion of "Avant-Garde"; her most exciting poetry is a transpoetic mise en scène of
post-Language American avant-garde writing as spatial praxis.