Color Coded

Marowitz continuedfrom previous page and the examples (drawn sometimes from obscure sources) emerge relevant to the issues under discussion . It is something of a miracle to have been lodged for many years in both Yale and Harvard and still emerge sounding like a "mensch"—i.e., pertinent and accessible. In 1965, Brustein was approached by the New York Times to become its lead drama critic. "Flattered as I was by the proposal," writes Brustein, "daily reviewing was clearly not in my future. In those days, theatre notices had to be completed between the falling of the curtain and the rising of the sun, and I was technically unable to write a review in two hours." Stanley Kaufman was given the job, and Brustein went off to greener fields. I often conjecture what kind of American theatre we might have had if, in those palmy days of the swinging 60s, Brustein had become the omnipotentNew York Times theatre critic. What glories were trampled, innovations squelched, opportunities squandered because he took a pass? Charles Marowitz is a stage-director, playwright, and critic whose latestplay Silent Partners, based on Eric Bentley's The Brecht Memoir (1985), recently premiered in Washington, D. C. in 2006. His latest book is How to Stage a Play, Make a Fortune, Win a Tony, & Become a Theatrical Icon (Amadeus, 2005). Color Coded Fred Muratori reoyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge Harryette Mullen Graywolf Press http://www.graywolfpress.org 176 pages; paper, $15.00 In the introduction to Blue Studios (2006), her collection ofessays on the cultural work undertaken by experimental women poets and by feminist readings of their poetry, Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues for the practice of sociopoesis, which she defines as "the analysis ofpoetry by helixed social and aesthetic concerns." Grounded in the writings of Theodor Adorno, particularly the thesis of his seminal essay "On Lyric Poetry and Society," DuPlessis recognizes poetry as "a theorizing practice, a practice of thinking, and as a commitment to the thought that emerges in the subtle concreteness of segmented, saturated language." Given her emphasis on poetry's symbiotic (ifsometimes unconscious) relationship to social dynamics—its binary function as vehicle for theory and praxis—and her concern for feminism in particular, it comes as a surprise that one will not find "Mullen, Harryette" listed among the names referenced in the book's index. The three collections gathered in Mullen's Recyclopedia—Trimmings (1991), S*PeRM**K*T (1992), and Muse & Drudge (1995)—directly engage , in Adorno's words, "the social nature of lyric poetry" by triggering the transformative effects of "saturated" language within the public contexts of gender, race, consumerism, and popular media. They channel vocabularies from multiple cultural streams, histories, economies, and wisdoms: synthesizing , catalyzing, even skewing once-familiar expressions into new propositions for reassessing what we're reading almost simultaneously with the reading of it. Having acknowledged the problematic nature of subjectivity in an interview conducted after the publication ofMuse & Drudge (Callaloo, 19.3), Mullen seems to heed Adorno's admonition in "Subject and Object" that the subject too easily forgets "how much it is an object itself." Her poems for the most part allow language to assemble a lyric "I," which, though diffused through a dense, associative range oflinguistic possibilities, is reconstituted in the readers 's recognition ofthe singularhuman consciousness (Adorno's "precisely specifying cast of thought") governing their meticulous construction. Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T were intended as reactions to (or "interactions" with) the first two sections of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons (1914) ("Objects" and "Food"), and as Mullen wrote in her original afterword to Trimmings (not reprinted in Recyclopedia), "I thought about language as clothing and clothing as language." "Trimmings" might apply to objects that are added to a whole, or else pruned from it, and even abstract elements—such as color—may be extracted and reified, as Mullen's prose poem on a red dress demonstrates: When a dress is red, is there a happy ending. Is there murmur and satisfaction. Silence or a warning. It talks the talk, but who can walk the walk. Distress is red. It sells, shouts, an urge turned inside out. Sight for sore eyes, the...