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Bursting at the seams exploding the Confines of reification with Creative Constraints in Sleeping with the Dictionary Carrie Conners Harryette Mullen’s poems in Sleeping with the Dictionary are playful, yet mysterious . They seem to toy with the reader: More than a woman’s name. Her traditional shape. rapidly spread and rubbed with a wedge. straight drunk with a crooked lick. a brief suck on time. diminutive. promptly popular still on the border. as one version of stamina went. a great show of suffering in order to arouse. There were sweet ones. Frozen ones and fruity ones. Her little resemblance to the original. shake her one key part. Control her ice. shake her poor stem. Her rim rubbed. slice juice and pour control out with dusty salt. or to taste if desired. (Sleeping with the Dictionary 18) The opening line of “daisy pearl” above reads like a riddle, challenging the reader to look closer for clues to figure it all out. By the time one reaches “Frozen / ones and fruity ones,” the reader will most likely think of margaritas . as it turns out, “margarita” is a woman’s name, the Latin word for “pearl,” and the spanish word for “daisy.” as soon as the poem’s subject and organizing principle are discovered, puns abound. For example, “diminutive ” is punning on the spanish suffix -ita, which can indicate that something is small; “stamina” puns on the stamen of a flower, in this case a daisy, as well as the effect that one too many margaritas can have on sexual stamina ; the reference to “on the border” puns on the border between the United states and Mexico. at some point in the ludic reverie, the reader will probably wonder why Mullen is playing games with her audience. one answer to that question, i suggest, may be found in yet another game: the crossword puzzle. The crossword puzzle, according to The Oxford Guide to Word Games, 112 Conners “developed from the acrostic and the word square, but gained its popularity by combining elements of these games with cryptic clues which are similar to riddles” (57). The cryptic clues often rely upon word games and linguistic structures, such as anagrams, puns, and homophones (augarde 67-9). These characteristics of crosswords can also be found in Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary. The poems employ creative constraints based upon the same chuckle- and/or groan-worthy word games, and the cryptic nature of the constraints invites, if not challenges, the reader to discover the structural principle with investigative skills not unlike those used to solve a clue’s riddle. The parallels between crosswords and Mullen’s poems do not end with these shared linguistic features, though. When describing the types of clues commonly found in cryptic crosswords, tony augarde claims: “[p]erhaps the best clues in cryptic crosswords are those that ingeniously use lateral thinking to devise new ways of looking at familiar words and phrases” (69). Mullen’s poems, then, are similar to the best clues because, through the investigative process engendered by linguistic humor and covert creative constraints , words and phrases are relearned (and sometimes unlearned), and thus provoke in the reader a more complex understanding of the language that constructs his or her world. readers learn to “avoid taking clues” and language “at face value,” and they are able to explore socio-political ramifications of american english. However, significant differences emerge between crosswords and Mullen’s poetry. a crossword puzzle has a strict, determined structure and one fixed solution. although each poem in Sleeping with the Dictionary has a creative constraint that helps to determine the poem’s form, Mullen frequently bends rules, as her prose poem “sonnets” and flexible employment of oulipian techniques demonstrate. (oulipo or Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, is a group formed in 1960 by writers, mathematicians, and other intellectuals dedicated to researching and inventing literary forms.) in addition, the poems do not have a singular or neat solution. While discovering a poem’s covert constraint can provide the reader with a richer understanding of that text, the discovery often leads to multiple, complicated readings; this explodes the arbitrary constraint’s confines and thus demonstrates the impossibility of containing language and the possibility of transcending imposed limits through innovation , both at the level of the word and the world. Mullen’s poems, though undoubtedly—at times indulgently—ludic, are staunchly socially engaged. They repeatedly invoke, enact, and lament the struggles of those who are oppressed in U...

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