Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Thompson, Gordon E.

Titel

Hearing a New Musical Instrument: Harryette Mullen’s Critical Lyricism

Ist Teil von

• Black Music, Black Poetry, 2014, p.143-162

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The poet Michael Palmer remarked, “reading Harryette Mullen’s work is a bit like hearing a new musical instrument for the first time, playing against a prevalent social construction of reality” (Academy of American Poets, n.d.), and what is most striking and “new” about Mullen’s poetic writing is not only its bold and diverse collage of stylistic technique that draws simultaneously from jazz, blues, hip-hop, and soul, but influences that emerge also from classical formalisms, avant-garde and experimental practice, European, postmodern, and innovative atonalities. Her poetry offers a new space in which her virtuosic hybridist practice places text beyond binaries that concern black-versus-white or minor-versus-major and into a more complex and compelling arena of postgenre and postnational poetics. This is a blended space of identification, and as such, her poems are as varied as these multiple points of identification and range from performative, rhythmically complex jazz poems (for example, “Playing the Invisible Saxophone/en el Combo de las Estrellas,” collected in Feinstein and Komunyakaa 1991: 159), or experimental, formalist language poems (“Coo/Slur” in Mullen 2002b: 17), to the collision of languid, bluesy quatrains and jumpy hot-jazz fragments that manifest in her long poem Muse & Drudge.1 Mullen’s diversity and stylistic agility is united, however, by a concern for music’s influence, or rather, the inseparability of language, music, and sound in lyrical, poetic expression. Perhaps Feinstein summarizes this perfectly in his assertion that poetry of this kind is a “synaesthesia of musical and literary innovations” (Feinstein, cited by Thompson in this volume), and, like the lyric modality that intersects the varied discussions of black music and poetry in this volume, lyricism connects Mullen’s texts and instantaneously crashes against her mixtured, speckled, and plural approach.