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4 / Harryette Mullen’s Poetics in Prose: A Return to the Modernist Hybrid “I am curious about the ‘unconscious’ of language . . .” —harryette mullen, “imagining the unimagined reader” In this chapter I examine the ways in which Harryette Mullen’s prose poetry in two of her collections—S*PeRM**K*T (1992) and Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002)—foregrounds and frustrates white desire for consumption of the black body, a desire that runs deep in American literature and history and that has played out in a multitude of ways— aesthetic and material—since well before the dawn of modern poetry. Taking recourse to Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s critical work on African American poetry and his insightful analysis of the trope of cannibalism as it has long functioned in public and literary discourse to incite fear in whites as well as African Americans,1 I build my argument surrounding Mullen’s resistant prose poetics of the body upon a deeper argument for the ways in which this desire to consume can be found in the modern prose poetry of Charles Baudelaire. Considered by many to be the pioneer of the intrinsically hybrid genre of the prose poem, Baudelaire published his better known verse work, Les Fleurs du mal, in 1857, the same year as Flaubert’s controversial Madame Bovary. Like Flaubert’s novel, Les Fleurs constituted an avant-garde breakthrough in form as well as in the way it presented scenes of debased urban life. Yet as Jonathan Monroe has shown in A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre, it is Baudelaire’s prose poetry that more closely aligns with Flaubert ’s work given that the poet turned to prose as a means of reaching a broader audience, in this case one made up of bourgeois consumers of novels and mass media.2 Moreover, just as Flaubert’s formal transgressions and innovations in the language are accompanied by the writer’s harryette mullen’s poetics in prose / 101 deeply regressive representation of the embodied woman,3 so, too, are Baudelaire’s prose and verse poems, which are written to produce a shock of recognition in the reader, reliant upon established cultural biases surrounding gender and race. In what follows I examine the ways in which Mullen’s work replicates and resists such representations, making visible the literary, cultural, and linguistic ways in which black women in particular have been objectified and contained in modern poetry and visual art. At the same time, I chart the ways in which Mullen’s language games revolutionize the prose poem genre. To begin, some history of the prose poem as a genre and its current place in American poetry will serve as a context for my argument surrounding Mullen’s work in the wake of Baudelaire’s and will further locate Mullen’s poetics in the current conversation surrounding hybrid aesthetics. Defined by Margueritte Murphy as “a genre formed in violation of genre, a seeming hybrid, in name a contradiction in terms,”4 the prose poem has taken many forms in modern and postmodern poetry and has retained an aura of subversion or transgression in all of them. Made famous if not entirely invented by Baudelaire,5 the prose poem genre turns up in the modernist Anglo-American poetry of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot (whose prose poem, “Hysteria,” is a study in misogyny), later appearing in the midcentury experimentalist poetry of John Ashbery and taking another form in the work of the Language poets who used its confines as a locus for subversions of normative syntax and literary convention; Lyn Hejinian’s prose poems in My Life are one important example of this. The prose poem is somewhat in vogue in our current moment, appearing in the work of poets who are modifying and compressing the lyric and also in the work of those designated as avant-garde or experimental poets. Surveying this field, one might conclude that the prose poem takes so many different forms in so many different contexts that it is in fact somewhat meaningless as a designation, yet a growing body of scholarship on the genre would seem to suggest otherwise. As Michael Delville argues in The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre and as Stephen Monte details in Invisible Fences: Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature, the prose poem when read in historical context can perhaps best be described as a form that...

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