The poems in "Sleeping With The Dictionary" came off as very witty and funny. It definitely seemed like Mullen enjoyed writing the poems, whether they be her long prose exposés or her nonsensical babbles. I enjoyed them too, as a reader, because they were a great break from the other books we read which were all very obviously trying to pass on serious messages.
One of the reasons I liked this book was because I enjoyed her exploration of language. One example of this is "Coo/Slur".
da red
yell ow
bro won t
an orange you
bay jaun
pure people
blew hue
a gree gree in
viol let
purepeople
be lack
why it
pee ink
It's such a simple thing. All she is doing is playing with the sounds in the names of colors. It's clever because she makes the reader want to read the poem again and again and recite it aloud.
Another poem that plays with language is "Mantra for a Classless Society, on Mr. Roget's Neighborhood". Mullen mixes "synonym-izing" and "alliter-izing" to create this poem. She manages to imbue meaning into it at the same time. It is this careful crafting that I admire and appreciate in Mullen's work. It reminds me of how every line 1984 is so particularly prepared to give the reader the over all sense of the situation just through the sound and hidden meanings in the words.
Finally, in talking about how Mullen plays with language, we of course have to mention her book's title and overall theme. I how she tried to explore every letter of the alphabet through her poems. I only wonder why she had more of some letters than others. I also wonder if she wrote all these poems with the intention of writing an alphabet book or if she had a bunch of these poems already and then just decided to fill in the gaps in the alphabet by writing more.
Other poems that I enjoyed are what I consider to be Mullen's little "jokes" in her book. One such poem is "O, 'Tis William". It reminds me of the classic "Who's on First?" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfmvkO5x6Ng), and I'm sure that she must have heard that and been inspired by it.
Another such poem is "Kamasutra Sutra". "Sutra" means rules, and Kama Sutra is the book containing the rules of love. Thus, I found it interesting that meaning of the poem's title is rules of the rule-book of love. Besides this, the poem itself is clever and funny.
Lastly, I liked how there are little bombs of unknown or unfamiliar words dropped all over the place in this book. They are not usually enough to seriously impede comprehension of the poem, but they are enough of a block to make a reader want to pick up a dictionary. It's almost as if Mullen is trying to get her readers to take the same journey she seems to have taken and really explore language for all its sounds and meanings and synonyms and whatever else is hidden inside it.
Shachi- great post. Very articulate in your observations here. Do you not think Mullen could have a "serious message" underneath all this playfulness. Play, after all, is often about breaking the rules. Check out "Denigration" again!
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I agree with a lot of your points in this post. When you talked about Mullen's use of "synonymizing", I found this extremely effective as well. She uses a lot of elements of "signifyin" in her work, and the synonymizing is a characteristic of this. She alludes to very specific, calculated images by changing the meaning of particular words. For example, she mentions "Mr. Roget's Neighborhood", obviously leading the reader to immediatly think of the children's program, Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. In this case, and in many of the times she signifies, she uses juxtaposition. Here, Mr. Roger's (Roget's) neighborhood is juxtaposed with "a classless society". Her use of cultural references and synonymizing creates contrasting ideas that really cause the reader to think about what she is saying.
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