Cynthia Hogue

Department of English
Bucknell University
hogue@bucknell.edu

 

Born in Alabama, Harryette Mullen grew up in Texas, the daughter of teachers and the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Baptist ministers in the still-segregated south. While completing a B.A. in English at the University of Texas at Austin, she began writing seriously, participating in the burgeoning black arts movement in the 1970s. She received a Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and teaches African American literature and creative writing at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her works include four collections of poetry, most recently Muse & Drudge (Singing Horse Press, 1995), and a critical study, Gender, Subjectivity, and Slave Narratives (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

 

Known for her innovative, “mongrel” lyric poetry (as Mullen puts it in a 1996 interview with Calvin Bedient published in Callaloo: “We are all mongrels” [652]), Mullen is concerned to diversify the predominant aesthetic of “accessibility” that characterizes contemporary African American poetry and criticism. In “‘Ruses of the lunatic muse’: Harryette Mullen and Lyric Hybridity” (Women’s Studies 1998), Elizabeth Frost terms Muse & Drudge a “poetic hybrid” that draws on both Stein and blues, among other influences–a lyric long poem exploring “the diverse influences and languages of a miscegenated culture” (466). The interview that follows was conducted on May 25, 1998 in Los Angeles, where Mullen lives and I had arranged to meet her just prior to the 1998 American Literature Association Conference in San Diego.

 

Cynthia Hogue: I want to start with your origin tale. How did you start writing? Why?

 

Harryette Mullen: You could say there are several origins. There’s the origin of writing which for me goes far back, since I could hold a pencil. I’ve been writing to entertain myself and writing rhymes, stories, and cartoons as gifts to other people… making booklets for friends, and greeting cards for family members with little rhymed verses in them that I would illustrate. I always had a notebook as a child and I would sketch in it and write in it. This started because my mother was always working She was the breadwinner. She taught at an elementary school and she would often have to go to meetings and she had other jobs as well. So we always knew we had to be quiet and entertain ourselves. My sister and I read a lot and we both scribbled and drew a little bit. It was a way of keeping us out of trouble.

 

The first time I had a poem published was in high school and it just happened because the English teacher made everyone write a poem. That was our assignment. She submitted the poems to a local poetry contest and my poem was chosen as the winner. It was published in the local newspaper. So that was my first published poem. As an undergraduate I continued to write for my own amusement and also I went to poetry readings. There were lots of African and African American poets coming to visit the University of Texas and I tried to go to as many readings as possible. Some of my friends were writers too. So I just kept writing. Then one of my friends insisted that I had to do more with my poetry. He was a poet and knew that I was writing, but I wasn’t attempting to publish my work, wasn’t participating in readings. I was at an open reading one night and he asked me, “Are you going to read your work?” I said, “I didn’t bring anything,” and he said, “We’re going to go home. I’m going to sign you up on the list and by the time you go home and get your stuff it’ll be close to your turn.” That was the first time I read in public and after that, I really started to think I could face an audience and see myself as a poet. I had been writing forever but not thinking that what I wrote was poetry or that I was a poet, but writing and drawing and reading all went together. They were all part of the same activity.

 

CH: I want to turn to the evolution of your work. How would you describe that first collection, Tree Tall Woman?

 

HM: The book was influenced by the poets that I was reading and hearing. I was definitely influenced by the Black Arts movement, the idea that there was a black culture and that you could write from the position of being within a black culture. At the time, my idea about black culture was very specific to being Southern, eating certain foods, and having certain religious beliefs. I have a broader sense of what blackness is, what African-ness is, or what a collection of cultures might be, where before, I think my idea of blackness was somewhat provincial. Or definitely, it was regional.

 

CH: “Regional,” meaning monologic?

 

HM: Part of what people were doing with the Black Arts movement was, in a sense, to construct a positive image of black culture, because blackness had signified negation, lack, deprivation, absence of culture. So people took all of the things that had been pejorative and stigmatized, and made them very positive, so that chitterlings, which was the garbage that people threw away from the hog, became the essence of soul food. Words were turned around in their meaning and all the things that were thought of as being pejorative aspects of blackness became the things to be praised. So, that project had created a space for me to write. I didn’t have to carry out that project because it had already been done; I didn’t have to say “I’m black and black is beautiful.” Actually, by the time I was writing, that was getting a little repetitive and almost boring. I wanted to write within the space that had been created without necessarily repeating exactly what those folks had done. At the same time, I now see that I had a kind of restricted idea of what it meant to write within a black culture or with a black voice. The idea of a black voice or black language–black speech–is much more problematic for me today than it was at that time. I felt I knew what it was to write in a black voice and it meant a sort of vernacularized English. I think that it’s much more complicated than that. For instance, my family spoke standard English at home. Educated, middle-class, black speakers are code-switchers, and what we really did was learn to switch from standard English to a black vernacular in certain situations when that was called for. In our case, my sister and I went through people saying, “You talk funny. You talk proper. Where are you from? You don’t sound like you are from here,” just because we were speaking standard English. The idea that there is a black language that is a non-standard English, that standard English, therefore, is white, is very problematic. In the work that I am doing now, I’m actually trying to question those kinds of distinctions that are being made between the standard and the non-standard. I wouldn’t say that standard American English is in any way a white language. It’s a language that is the result of many peoples’ contributions. In fact, if you look in the American Heritage Dictionary, Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps are among the people consulted for their usage panel. So people really need to think harder about those distinctions that are being made.

 

CH: But it was a journey before you began to experiment with the code-switching poetically?

 

HM: Right. Partly, it had to do with going back to school, going back to graduate school and reading about language. Also, there was, even when I was an undergraduate, a whole movement of sociolinguistics and folklore, partly because there was no African American literature being taught while I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas.

 

CH: You didn’t even read Zora Neale Hurston?

 

HM: Zora Neale Hurston was not in the canon. She was out of print. Alice Walker was one of the people who helped bring Zora Neale Hurston back into print, and that was happening around the time that I was an undergraduate, but it hadn’t yet reached the classroom. I was an English major. I was interested in different kinds of literature. I also took Spanish, so I was reading literature in Spanish. I took courses in classical literature. I didn’t know Greek or Latin, but I read the works in English because I wanted to have the background. There was no African American text, even in American Literature classes that I took. We didn’t read Invisible Man. We didn’t read Richard Wright. We didn’t read any black women. The places where I was able to read any black writers were in African Literature courses because UT Austin had a very strong African and Oriental Languages Department. They were bringing in African poets like Kofi Awoonor and Dennis Brutus and novelists as well, like Chinua Achebe. There were all these African writers around and sometimes Caribbean writers. So I took a course in Caribbean literature. I took courses in Anglophone African literature, and Afro-American folklore, which was offered through Anthropology. Roger Abrahams, who is known for working on black folklore, was teaching at UT Austin at that time and I took two or three courses with him. My understanding of African American culture really had a lot to do with taking these folklore courses. What’s so interesting now, in retrospect, is that I had never heard of most of this Afro-American folklore because a lot of it was based on urban folklore that he had collected from black men on street corners in Philadelphia. He went from there to collecting in prisons because he could get a higher concentration of black men from different parts of the country. He would go to federal prisons and collect twenty different versions of “The Signifying Monkey.” His book Deep Down in the Jungle is a result of that research. I never would have heard such stuff, because my family’s version of black culture was: our household, our church, our school. It wasn’t the street corner and it definitely was not the prison.

 

Here was this white man who was teaching me Afro-American culture, and it was practically all new to me. There were some folk tales that I had heard before, but a lot of it–like the toasting tradition–was completely new to me. Now I see, of course, that it is very much a male-centered performance. You don’t see a lot of women, especially a lot of middle class women, going around reciting these toasts. Now I feel that I understand why I kept having this experience of “Why don’t I know this? Why is this the black culture and I don’t have a real familiarity with it?” This is definitely a black culture that was marked for class and for gender in a way that did not include my own experience, but if you had talked about black people who go to church two or three days a week and who work very hard and are thrifty and try to avoid entanglements with the law, that is the culture that I knew. Partly what was going on was that people were fascinated with those aspects of black culture that were most different from what they saw as white middle class culture. There was a book that I read at the time actually called Black and White Styles in Conflict about people’s use of language and their ideas about how they conduct themselves in any kind of discourse. What is described as the “white style” was my family’s style and we lived totally in the black community. We were segregated in a black community! My parents had gone to a historically black college, Talladega College in Alabama. My mother taught in a segregated black public school in Texas. We lived in a neighborhood that was 99.9% black and it was a black world that we lived in, but according to this book, our style was a “white style” and the “black style” was the style of people my mother considered to be not well-educated. A certain style was a marker of education and class within the black community, but it was a marker of race within the mainstream. This was what was perceived as black.

 

It’s taken me a while to clarify this distinction in my own mind and to realize it bothers me, because I’m not sure that black children today know that blackness and education are not mutually exclusive. It used to be that we were taught, “Yes, you should be a code-switcher because that way, you could talk to everybody.” Now, these kids think, “If I learn Standard English, then I am less black.” When they go to get a job, they are less able to qualify for the job if they can’t switch to Standard English (if that’s the mode of the workplace). Or they have trouble in school, because that is the language of instruction. The idea that Standard English is not just a tool that everyone can use, but is the possession of white people is harmful to black children and anyone else speaking a variant dialect. All of these things bother me now.

 

CH: You grew up in Fort Worth in the sixties and went to college in the early seventies before the Black Studies movement had reached the University of Texas or widely nationally?

 

HM: We were marching, protesting for better representation in the student body and the faculty, recruiting more minority faculty. There was an Ethnic Studies course that was required for education majors. We had a black publication that was folded into the school paper. It was The Daily Texan, the school paper, and then once a month, we folded in our Black Print supplement and I worked on that. I also worked on The Daily Texan as an editorial assistant. I wrote editorials for the paper on race subjects usually, and that’s what they wanted me to do.

 

CH: I wonder why?

 

HM: Yeah, really. I wrote an opinion column and then I worked on the staff for the black publication as well. We had some extremely right-wing Regents at that time. It was difficult, and we were forced to develop our political consciousness of who we were and why we were there. Austin was the place of one of the Supreme Court decisions, Sweatt vs. Painter, and I actually knew the nephew of Heman Sweatt, the man who entered the law school with much resistance to his admission. He was put in this room by himself with law books, and that was their way of complying with the requirement that he be admitted to the law school. He was not allowed to sit in the classroom with the other law students.

 

CH: And this was what year?

 

HM: Sweatt vs. Painter was in the fifties. [The case was decided in 1950.] Around the time of Brown vs. Board of Education. Sweatt’s nephew was going to UT Austin when I was there–that was very much living history for us. There were racial incidents happening. The first day that we moved into the dorm, there was a big brouhaha because some white parents didn’t want their child in a room with a black roommate. Everyone had gotten a form that said, “Do you mind having a roommate of another race?” and this girl had said she didn’t mind, but her parents did mind, so the school moved her out of the room and gave her a white roommate. That set the tone.

 

CH: Let’s talk for a moment about the groups that were bringing in the black artists. There was a group that was publishing The Black Print monthly and a Black Arts movement in Austin. Did the University sponsor the readings?

 

HM: Yes. These were readings on campus that were sponsored by departments. Many of the African writers came because of the strong African Languages Department. Some of them were visiting lecturers and I think that possibly, the English Department sponsored some of the readings even though they weren’t necessarily teaching these people’s work in the classroom. We also connected, through Black Print, with some of the writers. We published, or actually re-printed poems from people like Michael Harper and maybe Nikki Giovanni or Gloria Oden. I remember when Haki Madhubuti came. He was still Don L. Lee at the time. I had come from my English class to the reading with my Shakespeare book. I didn’t have any of his books and I couldn’t buy any because I was too broke, but I got him to sign my collected works of Shakespeare. He laughed; that is how it was. These writers’ work was not in the curriculum but they were there because they were on the circuit and someone had invited them. Feminist poets were coming too. I remember going to see Adrienne Rich read and Audre Lorde. There was also a group in Austin called Women and Their Work, and they did a lot to promote literature and art by women. They were one of the first organizations to sponsor me at a reading. There was also a group called Texas Circuit. I was starting to see that there was a world out there where people were poets and writers and that was their life. I hadn’t really thought about that. I just thought, “Okay, I am going to school and I’m going to be a teacher and that will be my life.” Then this other possibility opened up. It helped to see people who were women and who were black and who were American, who were poets and that was their identity.

 

CH: You talked yesterday about beginning to hear the language poets around San Francisco after you started graduate school and how Nathaniel Mackey, himself influenced by Robert Duncan and Amiri Baraka, was an important mentor for you.

 

HM: He was an important presence.

 

CH: Presence?

 

HM: Yes.

 

CH: And you began to see a different possibility for your poetic voice? Even from your first book, were you already positioning your work, or negotiating your work in dialogue with, rather than in imitation of, what you were hearing?

 

HM: I think so, because I felt it was possible to enter the space that was created. My identity was part of everything that I wrote, so it gave me a freedom to write a poem about a mother braiding her daughter’s hair that was a very black poem, but didn’t have to say, “This is a black woman braiding her black child’s black hair.” There were those poems where blackness had to be asserted and I appreciated what that act of assertion had accomplished. It allowed me to write a simple poem about a mother braiding her child’s hair or a poem about a quilt, just the warmth of the quilt. I realized that I was choosing certain subjects that would allow me to explore aspects of black culture and community and family. I think Tree Tall Woman is really about relations among black people, whether it’s family or intimate relationships or just being in the world as a person who has a particular perspective, but it was not having continually to point out that I was writing from a black perspective. That was just part of the work.

 

CH: And this is the work that you were writing by the time you were in graduate school?

 

HM: No, by graduate school I was responding to the idea that identity is much more complex and much more negotiated and constructed. I didn’t exactly have an essentialist notion of identity and culture, but I did think that I knew what black culture was, especially since as an undergraduate, I had learned about the other side of black culture that I hadn’t really experienced. I felt pretty well-versed. Then, I began to think about the subject as the problem, which was a lot of what graduate school is about, deconstructing the subject. There was resistance on the part of feminists and people of color who were saying, “Just as we are beginning to explore our subjectivity, all of a sudden, we are going to deconstruct the subject and it doesn’t matter who is writing?”

 

CH: Say, “The author is dead.”

 

HM: And it doesn’t matter who wrote it; it is language writing itself. There was resistance to that notion. I was really intrigued by it. On the one hand, we used to joke about how there should be a moratorium on certain kinds of writing because we’ve had enough of that. On the other hand, I thought I should think seriously about how poststructuralism applies to me because I didn’t think it applied to me in the same way it would to, say, a white male writer because a white male writer had a tradition to look back upon that I didn’t have. I had some tradition as a black writer, but it wasn’t regarded in the same way. I had to think about how this discussion of the subject would apply to me. I had to expand my sense of black subjectivity, to see that it is more complicated and dispersed throughout the diaspora. Black people do not necessarily speak the same language or have the same beliefs. There may be some things they have in common, but there is a lot of diversity at the same time. Muse and Drudge is the result of that thinking. Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T are ways of moving in that direction. Those two books are influenced by Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and by my reading as a graduate student, reading the theory, particularly feminist theory, and thinking about language not as transparent but constructed. Muse and Drudge in some way allowed me to put together the kind of exploration of black culture that I had been doing in Tree Tall Woman and the kind of playing with language and form that I had been doing with Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T.

 

It allowed me to put these things together and also, it helped me to put audiences together because I had lost the audience for Tree Tall Woman. I didn’t see them when I would read Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T because for one thing, I started to get more readings on campuses than in communities. Tree Tall Woman attracted audiences in community venues. Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T got me a lot of invitations to read at colleges and universities. Part of it might have to do with the fact that I was part of that milieu, as a graduate student and as an assistant professor when I started out at Cornell. I was already known to people. But I would look out at audiences and there would be no people of color. Period. I would be the only person of color in the room–not that there is anything necessarily wrong with that but there is something a little bit odd about it. I would think, “What happened to all the black folks? Why aren’t they able to relate to this?” I made sure that my picture was on Trimmings–not just to see me, but to see that a black person wrote this book. It was a shock to go to reading after reading and there would be no people of color in the room. Muse and Drudge was written partly to bring the audience back together again.

 

CH: Did it work?

 

HM: Yes, it’s happening. It’s still the case that I am reading a lot on college campuses, but I will see black people, I’ll see some Latinos, I’ll see some Asian American students there. Part of it has to do with people of color feeling that they can actually deal with literature. People who are bilingual may feel that they have deficiencies in English. Partly it has to do with people being second and third generation in their family to go to college. When I was a student at UT Austin, most of the people in my cohort were the first in their families to go to college. First generation has to go out and be doctors and lawyers, business people. They have to be able to make back the investment for their families. I think my literary activity is possible because in my family, I was the third generation to attend some type of college. My maternal grandfather was in the Seminary. One of my grandmothers went to normal school and was an elementary school teacher. Since I was third generation, that created a certain tolerance in my family for my wanting to be a liberal arts major. Also, the kinds of jobs that people in my family had all had to do with having a respect for literacy. Being a teacher, being a pastor, a printer, a clerical worker. I never found even one other black student at UT Austin who was majoring in English. I was the only one. In every class that I attended, I was the only black person. And not a single black professor. I took Ethnic Studies to get a black professor. But in the English department, no. We had one person of color, a Japanese American who was teaching Emerson. That’s how it was.

 

CH: No women taught at that time, or very few.

 

HM: The white women professors I had were definitely inspirational to me. There were certain younger women who were my models and they made me feel that I could do that. They were intellectual and serious. They didn’t get tenure. Of the three that I am thinking of, not a one of them got tenure at UT Austin and now one of them is writing Gothic novels. She was a Chaucer scholar.

 

CH: In Trimmings the language becomes more a subject for analysis, rather than a vehicle for expression, or in addition to being a vehicle for expression, and gender becomes a subject that you are really contemplating. Charles Bernstein calls this book “a poetics of cultural modernism.” Sandra Cisneros says of your later book Muse and Drudge that “language and rhetoric always come up.” You are “the queen of hip hyperbole,” as she puts it. What interests me is that you kind of burst into this linguistically innovative and thematically feminist verse. You say at the end of Trimmings that you wanted to think about language as clothing and clothing as language and that you wondered why women’s writing has traditionally been so ephemeral. How you do that in Trimmings?

 

HM: A lot of it had to do with my engagement with Stein’s text, Tender Buttons. I remember my earlier attempts to read Stein and thinking, “I can’t read this! I can’t understand it!” I felt frustrated but it was intriguing. I thought, “She acts like she thinks she knows what she’s doing.”

 

CH: Frustrated by the opaqueness?

 

HM: Right. The language is elusive and there is a secretive quality about Stein’s work. She has her own idiosyncratic approach to language, and you get the sense that she definitely knows what she is doing but I felt I just didn’t get it. I probably first tried to read Stein as an undergraduate, but I got frustrated and left it. Then when I went back as a graduate student, armed with a lot more theory and a lot more critical attitude about language, all of a sudden, Stein was making sense to me. Also, I really appreciated the elegance of what she was doing, elegance in the way that scientists and mathematicians use it, that you use the fewest elements. An elegant solution is not too complicated. By using words and the syntactical structures over and over again–often there’s a series, a list, and the only punctuation is periods and commas–she is boiling down language to the absolute, essential elements. I began to understand that that was a different way to use language, a way of using language that forces the reader either to throw it down, or else if you stick with it, to enter another subjectivity. The language seems to create an alternate subjectivity. I thought, “This is really powerful, what she is doing with language.” I could see how putting items in a series created different ways of reading the sentence. Syntactically, it can be read as items in a series or it can be read as appositives. Are these things contiguous with or equivalent to each other? That is suggested by the way she uses punctuation.

 

Around that time, I must have read Ron Silliman’s The New Sentence and I was very interested in the idea of the paratactic sentence and what that sentence is able to do poetically because in a way, the paratactic sentence, because of the compression, is more poetic than a prose sentence. I mean, you could have a prose sentence that uses the paratactic syntax, but there is something about parataxis itself that acts as a sort of poetic compression. I was interested in the technical, syntactical construction and how to use that to allow more ambiguity in the work, to create different levels of meaning using a prose paragraph, a prose poetry paragraph as the unit. Also, I was interested in Tender Buttons. The units operate separately and collectively. That really helped me with the form of Trimmings because you could read it as separate poems, you could read it as a longer poem that is composed of these units, these paragraphs. In a way, each paragraph is doing the same thing and there is a metonymical construction where the female body is constructed around metonymy.

 

I was analyzing what Stein was doing to figure out what I could use and I found that on a lot of levels, I could use what she was doing: the structure of the book itself, in terms of using a prose-poetry form, and a paratactic sentence that is compressed, that is not really a grammatical sentence but that makes sense in an agrammatical way, in a poetic way. Also, in her use of subject matter, where she is dealing with objects, rooms, and food, the domestic space that is a woman’s space and with the ideas of consumption, our investment in objects, our consumer fetishism. At the same time, I read Marx on commodity fetishism. So, all these things came together for Trimmings.

 

S*PeRM**K*T is really the companion of Trimmings. On the one hand, it’s the woman with the wardrobe and on the other, it’s the woman with her shopping list in the supermarket, because women are still constructed through advertising as the consumers who bring these objects into the household. S*PeRM**K*T was about my recollections of jingles that have embedded themselves in my brain. We used to have to memorize poetry, the nuns made us do that in Catholic school, and we had to do that also for church programs. It’s harder for me to recall some of that poetry than these ads, partly because the ads are just so quick, but twenty-year-old jingles are embedded in my brain and I thought about the power of those jingles, that mnemonic efficiency of poetry, of the quick line that is economical and concise and compressed. Even more than Trimmings S*PeRM**K*T is trying to think about the language in which we are immersed, bombarded with language that is commercial, that is a debased language. Those jingles are based in something that is very traditional, which is the proverb, the aphorism. Those are the models, so I try to think back through the commercial and the advertising jingle, through the political slogan, back to the proverb and the aphorism to that little nugget of collected wisdom, and to think about the language that is so commercialized, debased, and I try to recycle it. The idea of recycling is very much a part of S*PeRM**K*T, to take this detritus and to turn it into art. I was definitely thinking about visual artists who do that, collage artists and environmental artists, and things like the Heidelberg House in Detroit, where people take actual trash and turn it into a work of art.

 

CH: The play, or the pun, on “meat market” is most obviously visual but also linguistic. You open signaling the metapoetic moment to the poem: “Lines assemble gutter and margin.” Maybe I don’t get the poetic lines by that first line, but I certainly do when I get to: “More on line incites the eyes. Bold names label familiar type faces. Her hand scanning, throwaway lines.” You read the lines and you read between the lines.

 

HM: You read as you stand in line.

 

CH: You read as you stand in line, right–holding your “individually wrapped singles, frozen divorced compartments, six-pack widows.” Is it accurate to read this passage as a breakdown of gender relations?

 

HM: Well, people are hailed, as they say. You are ideologically hailed through your race, your class, your gender. You come to identify the ways that you are hailed and so you are identifying with a particular gender, with a particular race or class, or all at the same time. Or sometimes you are divided up into compartments and sometimes you are hailed for your class, but not your race or your gender. I always wanted to use the pun as a lever to create the possibility of multiple readings. Yes, it’s about the lines at the supermarket and about the lines on a page and, well, the supermarket as an environment of language. There is so much writing in a supermarket. There are signs everywhere, labels on products, and I liked the idea of the supermarket as a linguistic realm where there are certain genres of writing. Instructions as a genre of writing. Every trip to the supermarket became research and a possible excursion into language. I wanted to broaden the idea of the supermarket so that it works like clothing in Trimmings. The supermarket becomes the reference point, the metonymic reservoir of ways that we see the world and ourselves in it. We are consumers; that’s how we are constructed as citizens. People consume more than they vote. It’s more important what you buy than what candidates you vote for. That has overtaken our sense of ourselves as citizens in a civic society.

 

CH: In terms of critically thinking about the discourses that we hear, your work suggests that we consume rather than think through language. At the end of Trimmings, you discuss how your identity as a black woman writing about constructions of dominant femininity goes into the book. A word like “Pink,” for example, signifies femininity in the dominant culture, but “pink” and “slit” apply equally to a sewing catalog and girlie magazine. You write that as “a black woman writing in this language, I suppose I already had an ironic relationship to this pink and white femininity. Of course if I regard gender as a set of arbitrary signs, I also think of race–as far as it is difference that is meaningful–as a set of signs. Traces of black dialect and syntax, blues songs and other culturally specific allusions enter the text with linguistic contributions of Afro-Americans to the English language.” So you were already thinking about how to infuse traditionally poetic language, and we might even say, the tradition of poetic innovation–if we look at Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha with its traces of black dialect and syntax.

 

HM: This is another frustrating Gertrude Stein experience! Is she racist or is she just playing with the idea of race?

 

CH: I taught that novella in New Orleans to a fairly diverse class and I had to stop teaching it. We couldn’t get past its representations of race.

 

HM: Too much contention?

 

CH: Well it wasn’t the contention; it was pain. It was an undergraduate class. Black students were very used to the thoughtless expression of racism in New Orleans, but they hadn’t seen it at that level of conscious expression. It was too painful for them to discuss. I ended up just stopping the attempt to discuss and analyze it.

 

HM: Wow. I know that Richard Wright championed this work and actually, if you think about it, there are some similarities between it and Native Son, even though they had very different agendas. The naturalistic mode in which he was working also put blackness into a kind of stark relief in a way that happens in Melanctha as well, although she does it in a seemingly more playful manner. He seems very deadly serious. They both seem to be interested in the cultural significance of blackness and whiteness and the whole set of signifiers that are called into play when you question the whole idea of difference.

 

CH: Before we get into Muse and Drudge, how did that come into play in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T?

 

HM: In Trimmings, I actually found myself at a certain point becoming alarmed, because I wanted the book to be about feminist ideas, a feminist exploration of how femininity is constructed using clothing, how the clothing itself speaks to, or is emblematic of, certain kinds of constraints on women’s bodies. That is one of the issues I wanted to deal with: the overlap at that time of pornography and fashion, the kind of photography that was very trendy in fashion magazines. There was a lot of S & M imagery in the eighties. We read The Story of O in a graduate seminar at Santa Cruz. I was horrified and fascinated because all of a sudden, the discourse of pornography and sadomasochism was taking over the feminist conversation in the same way that pornography seemed to be taking over fashion. So I was really wondering, “What does this mean?” The other thing had to do with the critique by black women and other women of color of the very way that feminism was constructed around the needs of white women without always considering the sometimes very different needs of women of color who were not middle-class, or working-class white women who also had problems with academic feminism. I think a lot of us were puzzled by why we were reading The Story of O in a women’s studies class. Does this really make sense? I actually found that book hard to read, it was painful to read. Partly my book was really setting out to be an explication of white feminism, but then I felt kind of uneasy doing that. I was thinking about the dominant color code for femininity. It is pink and white. English literature is full of the “blush.” I felt that I had to include images of black women. Trimmings grew from my response to Stein. One of my poems even cannibalizes Gertrude Stein’s “Petticoat” poem. My reading of Stein’s “Petticoat” poem also brings Manet’s “Olympia” into the picture. I had an insight that she might have also been thinking about that painting, with her “Petticoat” poem.

 

CH: Would you read that passage from your poem?

 

HM:

A light white disgraceful sugar looks pink, 
   wears an air, 
pale compared to shadows standing by. To plump 
   recliner, 
naked truth lies.  Behind her shadow wears her 
   color arms 
full of flowers.  A rosy charm is pink.  And 
   she is ink.  The 
mistress wears no petticoat or leaves.  The 
   other in shadow,
a large, pink dress.

 

I’m using the language of Stein. She has a “light white,” “an inkspot,” “a rosy charm.” So I put those words into my poem. Then I expanded to give the reader an image of Manet’s painting of the white nude with the black woman in the shadows who’s obviously a servant. Manet contrasts the white woman’s body and the black woman’s body with the white woman’s body constructed as beautiful, feminine, seductive, also a little outrageous. The black woman is basically just a part of the decor but her presence seems to enhance the qualities that are attributed to the white nude. In a way, the whole book is really built around this: both my active and my somewhat critical engagement with Stein, my problematic relation to the Western icon of beauty and the black woman’s relationship to that, and my interest in representation itself, whether it is a visual representation or a representation in language. I didn’t think it was enough just to have that, so I put some other things in here that were definitely meant to investigate alternative female images. I put in the Josephine Baker poem and the “bandanna” poem because it was unsettling to me just to investigate this white femininity without some kind of black experience being represented as well. There are also “cool dark lasses” wearing their shades, maybe jazz divas, someone like a Billie Holiday. I have “the veiled woman” at the end. I remember at this time in graduate school, I read a book, Veiled Sentiments,by Lila Abu-Lughod, about the Arabic traditions of veiling women, so that was in my mind as well. It’s a way of taking a woman’s body out of circulation but she’s still being controlled in the culture.

 

CH: But not being specularized?

 

HM: Right. She is outside of the gaze or she is protected from the gaze. Some of the radical Islamic fundamentalists think that they are actually liberated by wearing the veil. I was using this work to explore such questions and problems. This book is connected to Muse and Drudge because Muse and Drudge is a book about the image and representation of black women, and Trimmings has more to do with the representation in the dominant culture of white women, although there are black women here and there. Muse and Drudge is intended to think about folk representations, popular culture representations, self-representations of black women, and to think about how to take what is given. There is a whole set of codes, a whole set of images that we really don’t control as individuals. They are collective and they are cultural. The problem as a writer is: how do you write yourself out of the box that you are in? Muse and Drudge is an attempt to take those representations and fracture them, as I try to do with breaking up the lines and collaging the quatrains together, sometimes from four different sources. It was an attempt to use this language as representation, to use it in a self-conscious way as code, as opposed to taking the code as something that is real. The body exists but there is a way that your body is interpreted based on a historical and social context. I take that and use it as material, as opposed to saying well, that defines you; that’s what makes you who you are. I have a certain faith as a writer that we can use language in a liberatory way to try to free ourselves. But at certain point, I was concerned that I was continuing to be trapped, in the prison house, right? A lot of the strategies had to do with my breaking out. I had to take things and riff on them, as a musician improvises on a melody and really creates a new song. It’s based on the same old traditional standard but sounds new when it is performed in this way.

 

CH: Aldon Nielsen, in his recent book Black Chant, and Elizabeth Frost, in a recent essay in Women’s Studies, have both discussed your work as fundamentally reconfiguring our understanding of black cultural productions. Frost characterizes Muse and Drudge as a hybrid serial-poem, a “heteroglossic series,” structured by the blues quatrain but working with Bahktinian heteroglossia, with a lot of languages, various cultural registers. I will confess to you that when I read Trimmings, I missed many of the references to black identity until I had read some of your criticism, even though I was really thinking about it. For example, in the section that you just read, I noted “shadow” when I first read the passage, but it didn’t signify anything more than the literal meaning. After reading your criticism, the light lit. It’s not possible for a white reader to miss the signifying in Muse and Drudge. You talked the other day about the practice of code-switching, and I wanted you to talk a bit more about how you are working with that in Muse and Drudge, the significance of including black dialect with the simultaneous invocation of Sappho as the poem opens up.

 

HM: With “Sappho and Sapphire”? Because Sapphire has been a pejorative figure for black women ever since the old Amos & Andy television comedy, and before that, a radio program with white men doing their version of black dialect. So it was actually an extension of the minstrel tradition where “black face” was done linguistically instead of in a visual way. Later black actors performed these stereotypes in the television comedy. So the black woman, Sapphire, was a loud-mouth, aggressive, the image of the supposedly emasculating black woman with the husband who is hen-pecked. She was a shrill harpy and she always dressed in grotesque outfits as well, with hideous hats. So in the sixties, when people were reversing the signification of these pejorative terms, black women reclaimed Sapphire as an assertive, vocal black woman who stands up for her own opinions. You know, just take that negative stereotype and make it positive. Sapphire is actually an entry in the Feminist Dictionary with a discussion of this process of inversion. Of course, there is an African American writer who has taken this as her pseudonym as a poet and a novelist also. I definitely wanted to think about Sapphire singing the blues and Sapphire as Sappho, singing the blues. One of the people, my cohort at UC Santa Cruz, Diane Rayor, translates ancient Greek and has published a book called Sappho’s Lyre. I transformed her title in my first line, “Sapphire’s lyre,” to think about a crossroads of ancient lyric poetic tradition. If we think of ancient lyric poetry, we have to think of Sappho. This is a place where a woman is actually one of the forerunners and foremost practitioners of the art. We don’t have too many areas where that is the case, so I’m honoring this woman and I’m also thinking about the blues tradition and Diane Rayor’s translations, really, because she is trying to bring Sappho into a very contemporary American language. It seemed to me that Sappho is singing the blues. Sappho’s like a blues singer, to me, in translation. So, that was the conceit that allowed me to go on with this poem and to investigate my own connections with this tradition, which was actually called into question by people like the language poets who feel that the lyric poem is too much entangled with a subject they want to deconstruct. I have a certain attachment to the lyric subject, but the lyric subject in this poem is multiple, not singular. It is many voices and contradictory voices. It is a heteroglossia or maybe a cacophony of voices.

 

CH: And it’s very playful. You have lines like, “Up from slobbery,” which are very funny and playful, yet at the same time, very critical of a particular voice.

 

HM: Yes. In Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington talks about learning “the gospel of the toothbrush” and part of what those educators thought they were doing was teaching people how to be decent and clean. In order to qualify for the rights of American citizens, you have to be decent and clean. That’s assuming that blacks weren’t already, but had to be taught how to do this!

 

CH: And also placed. It allowed them to be placed in a perennially subservient position.

 

HM: Yeah, his entrance exam was, in a sense, to sweep the floor. He talks about how he was assigned to sweep a floor when he came to apply for admission to Hampton, implicitly an admission requirement. So even to gain admission at this school, he had to be willing to sweep the floor, which is very appropriate considering what they trained people to do. Each one of those lines is a kind of tag for a whole possible conversation that the poem doesn’t stop to engage in. It just gives the tag and keeps moving.

 

CH: Why?

 

HM: Partly because I wanted the poem to have that quality of quick movement from one thing to another, from one subject or thought to another, from one mood or emotion to another. Partly because I wanted things to be in flux, a state of flux, a state of change. If you stand still too long, they will put chains on you, so you want to keep moving. This is one of the things that is most fascinating to me about the slave narratives I was studying while I was writing my dissertation. The true freedom in the slave narrative is at the point of deciding to escape and the journey north. Once they get to the north, they are, again, part of a hierarchy and they are still at the bottom of that hierarchy. If everyone is free in the North and you are still working as a servant and living in someone else’s house and having to obey the master of the house, you are earning wages, but you are still at the bottom of the hierarchy. The freedom that people experience is actually when they are on the road, in flight. I associate that with writing, for myself. The time that I am free is when I am writing. The poem is running; the poem is flying. There is an expression that is part of African American folklore–when people are telling tall tales they say, “If I’m lyin’, I’m flyin'” because they are pushing the limits of language.

 

CH: We theorize identity as being fluid and that seems very pertinent to your work, through the punning and the word play. A word is never fixed; it’s always bleeding into a new identity by the process of association but in practice, once we fix that theory of identity as fluid, then it solidifies into something more inflexible.

 

HM: Right, it’s a paradox.

 

CH: I’m also fascinated by what seems a new spiritual register in the collection. Maybe I’m missing it in the earlier collections.

 

HM: I think it is more deliberately in use in Muse and Drudge than it had been.

 

CH: I recognized some of the references to Yoruba and Achebe’s “ancestor dances,” references to Orishas and the “deja voodoo queens”–that kind of wonderful word play that you are always engaging in! I wondered how that functioned in the poem as a whole. Would you talk about that a bit?

 

HM: Partly those things are allusions. They work in the poem as allusions to the African Diaspora, cultures, and spiritual traditions. They expand the idea of blackness. They suggest both continuity and discontinuity. That is knowledge that I have acquired through reading, through study. It is not knowledge that I have directly through experience or practice. My family is Baptist. That is the religious or spiritual base that I come from regardless of whether I currently go to church or not.

 

CH: Your grandfather was a Baptist minister?

 

HM: My grandfather and one of my great-grandfathers also. My grandmother was the daughter of a Baptist minister and she married a Baptist minister. My family is very, very deeply religious. I think that I am spiritual; I am not religious in the same way that they are and I am not tied to the church in the same way that they are. I am interested in these African spiritual traditions partly because I think that in some ways, there are continuities for people who call themselves Christians. In my family, there was this other side of spirituality that I now understand to be retentions of African spiritual systems. In my family, because we were always so much involved with the church, there was the sense that those things were dangerous and that we don’t really want to deal with them, but we also don’t dismiss them.

 

CH: These things?

 

HM: Voodoo. Christians didn’t believe this stuff and just dismissed it and also educated people didn’t believe this stuff. My ideas about it have changed, partly because of what I see in my own family. They used to say to us that we should not eat food in other people’s houses because you don’t know who in the community might have a grudge against you or someone in your family. If we were with our family and invited to have dinner with some friends, that was one thing, but as children just wandering around at that time, people would invite you in. You could be playing with some kids and they would have you over to eat or old ladies might invite you in for tea cakes. My mother would warn us not to do that. She said they could harm you that way, through your food. At the time we thought, “Well, what are they going to do, poison us? Or does she think their kitchen isn’t clean enough?” This is what we would think, but now I realize that my mother meant they could harm you through the food. There was also an experience I had with a Nigerian when I was an undergraduate. He was a graduate student in computer engineering. He was completely technologically adept, a totally modern contemporary person who also believed in all sorts of ghosts and spirits and magical practices at the same time. It was perfectly compatible. These are some of the things that made me think in more complicated ways about black identity or just human capacity for holding contradictory thoughts. I began to think about the meaning of the whole world of spirits. What do they actually do for people?

 

As an artist, it’s a whole set of metaphors. It’s a system of metaphors that allows people to think in certain ways. The fact is that people can think in these metaphoric ways and then they can shift into completely scientific ways of thinking. To me, that is fascinating, and it’s one of the things that black people and people of color have to offer, that tolerance of the dichotomy between the material and the spiritual or scientific ways of thinking versus ways of thinking that are thought to be superstitious or primitive. Some of the excesses of the twentieth century have to do with devotion to the scientific or mechanical and actually, in a way, worshipping that. Actually, we are closing off a part of ourselves, the metaphoric, the intuitive, the poetic aspects of our thinking process in order to enhance the other part. For instance, there is a great book by the anthropologist Karen McCarthy Brown. She studied women who practice Haitian voodoo. They have emigrated from Haiti to New York City; they live in Brooklyn and they are keeping their community together through these practices. One of the things that was interesting is that they have many loa or spirits. Everyone can pick the loa with which they are most compatible, and there are certain qualities that respond to human attributes that people want to feed or enhance and when you are feeding the loa, you are feeding these qualities in yourself. By bringing these offerings, you are giving yourself permission to express these qualities, these human qualities that are part of yourself. One of the things that she suggested as a feminist scholar is that there are as many female deities as there are male. This gives many opportunities for expression of female being in the world because there are so many goddesses that you can worship. If you are a woman who is very feminine and coquettish, and very much involved with enhancing your erotic powers, there is a deity for that. If you are really into being a mother, there is a deity for that. If you are out there being a career woman, there is a deity that will support that aspect of your being. That’s one way I understand certain spiritual practices. It was kind of mystifying, to have the sense that it really has to do with your life, here and now, on earth and that these are modes of expression of human aspiration, and that these gods are so humanlike. They have favorite foods, favorite liquor that they prefer. Some of them like beer and some like rum and some like whiskey. Some like cigars and some like a certain brand of perfume and they are very specific in their likes and dislikes and I am fascinated by the idea of indulging the preferences of these spirits. The people probably also feel that it reinforces their sense of themselves as being very particular and having very specific likes and dislikes and that you indulge yourself the way you indulge the loa.

 

CH: You had mentioned that in your forthcoming study Gender, Subjectivity, and Slave Narratives, gender and the subjugated body have influenced your poetry. Can you discuss at a bit more length some of the ways that the two languages were mutually influential, perhaps, or have you found that your critical, theoretical work influenced your poetry?

 

HM: When you go into graduate school and you learn how to do critical writing, in a sense, what you are learning is an alternative aesthetic for writing. I remember when I first thought that a lot of critical writing is awkward and ugly. It is densely compacted. The kind of critical writing that I aspired to seemed to cram a lot of information into a sentence. There were incredibly complicated sentences, and you had to really keep your wits about you, especially when writing on a computer screen. I’d think, “Could I diagram this sentence?” In a way it’s kind of the opposite of the paratactic sentence, the hypotactic sentence. It has many connectors, many clauses, subordinate and coordinate clauses and you have to know where you are in the sentence to keep it all together. Then you have to have many of these sentences adding up and accumulating. The academic training altered my sense of what in writing is pleasurable. The pleasure that I got from writing before I went to graduate school had a lot to do with rhythm, musicality, the usual poetic qualities that we think of when we think of literature. It was an aesthetics of beauty. Critical writing gave me an aesthetics of intellectual engagement, of complexity of thought and a corresponding complexity of syntax and structure, the complexity of argument as opposed to metaphor. Metaphor is complex in its own way; argument has another way of creating complexity. It was significant that I learned to enjoy and to love this writing that at first struck me as so ugly, so lacking in rhythm, so lacking in beauty and harmony, and also, so demanding. You don’t sit down and read critical theory for escape or for the kind of pleasure that people get when they read Wordsworth. You are in a different zone. I think that my poetry after graduate school is drawing on this different connection to writing, this critical connection to writing. In these more recent books, the writing engages both with what I think of as the pleasure centers–those things that really have to do with the heartbeat and with the singing quality of language, the voice, song, the rhythmic speech–and something that is happening from your eye to your brain, where your voice is not even necessarily involved. I try to combine those two qualities together in the poetry. I think it was very important; I could not write the poetry I am now, without having gone through that academic experience.

 

But in some ways I think I’m ruined, because the kind of poetry I was writing before has much more of a mass appeal. Recently, I was reading in the LA Book Festival and because I realized there would be very few people there, since I was reading at nine in the morning, I chose to read from Tree Tall Woman. I talked with one man there who complained, “Poetry is so hard to understand. I feel like they are really trying to trick me and I don’t know what they are talking about.” But he loved those poems and I thought, “Boy, if I had read other stuff, he wouldn’t have felt this way.” My mother used to say, “You can sling that lingo but can you write it so that anybody’s grandma can understand?” To her way of thinking, that was the great writer. The great writer is the person who can write in a language that is accessible to anyone who is literate. So I’m always feeling a certain tension because poetry “should” be accessible, simple in certain ways. Plain speech. An American style really is a plain speech style. That is what we think of as American as opposed to European.

 

CH: As Marianne Moore said, “A language dogs and cats can read.”

 

HM: Yes, but on the other hand, there is the dazzle of the intellect and there is the complexity of the thought or the kinds of connections that can be made when you are working on different levels of signification or different rhetorical levels. I hope that this is a productive tension or conflict. I think that I don’t lose sight of the fact that everyone didn’t go to graduate school and some people just want to read something and feel a very direct and uncomplicated pleasure. I want some aspect of that kind of pleasure in my work and when I am revising my work, I am thinking about the people I am leaving out and I’m thinking about how I can bring them back in. I want the work I do to be intellectually complex, but at some level, the form is open to allow people to enter wherever they are. Especially with Muse and Drudge, I thought a lot about what is going to exclude readers and what is going to include readers. At various times, people will feel very strongly their exclusion and that will trouble them and be uncomfortable. There are other aspects of the book that will allow them to stick with it, to persist through the rough passages. There will be moments of insight and moments of familiarity and connection with the text as opposed to those moments of alienation, estrangement and feeling left out. I wanted there to be enough of those moments of inclusion for everyone so that they can tolerate the moments of feeling their exclusion. In some ways, the experience of the reader parallels my experience in the world and perhaps everyone’s experience in the world. In some conversations, I feel right at home. In other conversations I know I’d better sit quiet and listen for awhile because they are talking about things I really know little of and maybe at some point later, I can speak in this conversation, but at the moment, I’m better off just listening and understanding where they begin. I think more and more, as the world becomes a global village, it doesn’t mean that we have the simplicity of the village. It means that we are interacting with a lot of people we really don’t understand.

 

CH: We may even think we understand and discover later that we missed some key codes.

 

HM: It happens more and more often, but I’ve noticed as black codes are entering the mainstream, they are altered once they get there. The process of entering the mainstream alters them and that is partly what I am thinking about with Muse and Drudge. What happens when you take these codes and use them in a context, in a way that they are actually fractured and collaged with other materials so that they don’t mean what they would mean in a coherent system because they are now in an incoherent system. This book is really about what creates coherence and what is felt as incoherent. The quatrains and the use of rhyme are things that help people, things that make a poem look orderly, make the poem seem familiar, that give it elements of convention that people can deal with while they are reeling from the unfamiliar and incoherent.

 

CH: Who have been your major influences?

 

HM: Definitely Stein is an influence on Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T. Gwendolyn Brooks is such a deep influence on me that sometimes I don’t even know that it’s there, but it’s there and it has been pointed out by a couple of people, like Stacey Hubbard in her review of Trimmings. I think Langston Hughes as well, for what he was trying to do–you know, the things that we now take for granted about using a culturally marked, black language and bringing this colloquial speech and blues and jazz elements into poetry, and also for being political, trying not just to entertain people with poetry, but also to get them to think. People like Bob Kaufman and Amiri Baraka have been very useful to me. I would say Lucille Clifton. She was at Santa Cruz when I was there. Nate Mackey, Lucille Clifton, and Al Young were all teaching there, at least part of the time that I was there. I think that all three of them were in different ways very important to me. They did different things but in different ways. They all suggested to me that there is a subtlety in the African American contribution to poetry. I came kind of late to reading Melvin Tolson’s work, but Melvin Tolson was a revelation. And Jean Toomer.

 

There is a canon that is constructed now and there are certain people who are marginal to the canon or who get left out of the canon or else they are not taught as often as other writers. There are certain works that are at the center and other works that are more at the periphery and so one of the things I really started to do as a graduate student was to recover this tradition of innovation within African American poetry. The poetic practice that Jean Toomer was doing was very experimental work. I knew of Cane. I had found Cane in a used book store when I was an undergraduate. I used to scour the used book stores looking for those black books that I was otherwise not going to read in the classroom and I had my own library. I was on a mission to find this literature. I can’t understand when my students say, “I’m trying to get into your class. I haven’t been able to take your class yet so I can read this book that you are teaching.” If I waited until a class was offered, there would be a whole bunch of books I never would have gotten around to reading. I was free to form my own opinion about a lot of these works because there was nothing in the classroom about them. Then, as a graduate student, it was a question of recovering those things that were really at the margin of what was considered Black Literature, so I became interested in people like Bob Kaufman. I just taught a course that included Stephen Jonas. I haven’t seen a single black critic discussing his work at all. Bob Kaufman tends to get marginalized. Melvin Tolson tends to get marginalized. There are different stages of the recovery project. We all try to connect to something but because this information is missing, people don’t know that there is a tradition, so each time someone is doing work that is considered innovative, it seems to come out of nowhere or as if all of the interesting innovation comes from the white people that the black writers were hanging around with. Innovative black poets don’t seem to have any black antecedents. I’m constructing retrospectively a tradition that I can say is a black tradition. On the other hand, as Nate Mackey points out, there are actually connections that are made through these boundaries of race. A lot of the poets who really did influence my thinking about my work in a different way were white poets, the language poets. For example, people would say to me, “Oh, do you know Erica [Hunt]? Have you met Erica? You must know Erica.” Erica Hunt had been in California, but she had moved to New York by the time I got to California. So, no, I didn’t know Erica. I later met her, but people assumed that she and I must know each other but we didn’t. We had white friends in common.

 

Eventually we read together in Detroit and I got to know her and I’m writing about her book, Arcade, and about Will Alexander for the first European MELUS conference in Germany. Will is here in Los Angeles and Will and I have a connection because of Nate Mackey and Hambone. It’s as if now there is beginning to be a quorum. Cecil Giscombe, who edited the special issue of American Book Review on so-called black postmodernists, was poetry editor for Epoch magazine at Cornell when I was there. I taught his book in my course this year. It was he and Nate and Erica and Will, plus Bob Kaufman, Stephen Jonas, Ed Roberson. Amiri Baraka and Ntozake Shange, along with Marlene Philip and Kamau Brathwaite. We also have had to ask, What are the qualities that are considered to be “black” in literature? If Erica Hunt is writing in Standard English, about an urban experience and a female experience with very few markers of blackness in the work, then is this not to be read as a black text? Will Alexander is writing in the tradition of Surrealism. There is Jayne Cortez, who also has connections to surrealism, but is seen as being really engaged with a black political consciousness in a way that moves her work in another direction. Those are some issues that we have had to think about now that we have an established canon with the Norton Anthology [of African-American Literature]. Nate Mackey is in it. Baraka is in it, but some other poets I taught just recently at UCLA in my graduate seminar are not in it.

 

CH: In your opinion does that narrow the voices of black writers?

 

HM: The Norton Anthology does not include people who are atypical, although it’s a fairly exhaustive anthology. It’s not just a poetry anthology; it’s got all the genres in it. It is trying very hard to include a lot of things, but the nature of anthologies is that they can’t include everything; they are supposed to be selective and there are particular criteria. Henry Louis Gates, the chief editor of this anthology, has a particular theory that privileges orality in the text, what I call mimesis of orality in the text. So what if a work does not do that and does not allude to African American culture or Diaspora culture? Or does it in ways that seem strange, unfamiliar, or difficult? There are certain things you have to do in order to be visible as a black writer. That necessity does eventually become constraining. I don’t think we have completely run out of things we can do within those constraints but we will find them eventually more constraining and I think that, for the future, I’d want to encourage as wide and as inclusive as possible a view of what black poetry, black literature, black language can be. When I am writing I’m sometimes thinking about that.

 

CH: You mentioned earlier that language and poetry can be liberatory. I wondered how you position your work in terms of a politics of poetics or a poetics of politics. It’s so clear with a poet like June Jordan or Adrienne Rich, for that matter, and it’s that subject-driven element, if you will, that has become very controversial with the poets who are writing with a transformative politics in mind, a very impassioned and committed poetry that engages in formal experiment. How do you position your work? What are you trying to do?

 

HM: These are questions that I think about a lot both as a writer and as a teacher and as a reader also. I think that political discourse and the rhetoric that accompanies it really can be in a productive tension with the aesthetic qualities of poetry and literature. I think that there are different intentions that are political that have to do with political discourse and rhetoric that assume that the audience is in your own time and space, that you are addressing living human beings who are capable of performing a particular action that will change political reality. I think that that is a good thing to do and a necessary thing to do and something that we really are compelled to do about our political circumstance. To my way of thinking, literature can do those things but literature also has other things that it wants to do that go beyond the address to the people who are my contemporaries. Partly I am writing for unborn readers in my most optimistic view that the world will still exist, that we will still have literature, that people will be literate, that people will want to read, and that my work will last beyond my lifetime. These are all very optimistic assumptions but if all of that should come to pass, then I am not just addressing the situation that exists in my lifetime. I’m addressing human beings who don’t exist yet and so, to me, that means that literature has a larger horizon than political discourse. Political discourse is very important, very necessary, and can be compatible with some but not all of the intentions of literature. When I’m writing, I am usually thinking more about the unborn than those people who are my contemporaries, and my approach to writing really is influenced by this belief, this hope, this optimistic aspiration on my part that my work will continue. In a way, for me, that is a spiritual belief and to the extent that literature has a spiritual intention, then the language operates differently. Language is not so instrumental. Language is not so intently focused on reality. Language is not so much a tool of persuasion to move people to think, act, behave, in a particular way, to focus their energy on a problem that exists now.

 

Because I live now and I don’t live in the future, my framework is my own political reality, my social reality, my cultural reality, so that aspect is there already as far as I am concerned. Literature, art, is ideological even when it has no political agenda. There is a certain implicit politics that is inherent in any work that engages with reality in any sense. Who I am is a political question, but who I can be is a question that literature can help me to answer. I think that art involves a struggle between all of the things that engage us now and all of the things that we can’t even imagine because they don’t exist yet. For me, for literature to be powerful beyond its present moment, the conditions of its making, there has to be some space or acknowledgment of the possibility of this future, which politics cannot really encompass. Maybe that is the naive position of someone who is an artist, who would like to believe that literature has this power beyond politics, although a visionary politics can be part of literature just because how we live is determined to some extent by these circumstances that both confine us and allow us expression at the same time.

 

Acknowledgements

 

I wish to thank Myrna Treston and Shannon Doyne for their invaluable help in transcribing and editing the transcript of this interview. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Frost for sharing the manuscript of her then-forthcoming article on Mullen’s poetry, and to Harryette Mullen herself, who generously spent several afternoons with me in preparation for taping this interview.