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Keegan Cook Finberg on Harryette Mullen ("Dim Lady")
1.5k Plays10 months ago
What kind of love do we find in comparison? Keegan Cook FInberg joins the podcast to discuss Harryette Mullen's poem "Dim Lady," which is simultaneously a love poem and a (perhaps?) loving tribute to Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 (itself a love poem and parody).
Keegan is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is finishing a book called Poetry in General: Interdisciplinarity and U.S. Public Forms. You can find a sample of the work she's doing in that book in her article in Textual Practice on Frank O'Hara and the Seagram Building. And you can find samples of her new project, on poetry and surveillance, in essays she has written on Claudia Rankine and Solmaz Sharif. Follow Keegan on Twitter.
As ever, please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you're enjoying it. And share an episode with a friend! You can also subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and my other work.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and it's my great pleasure today to have Keegan Cook-Finberg on the podcast. Keegan is a really exciting young scholar who has chosen an awesome, fascinating, provocative, I think, poem for us to discuss today. Poem by the contemporary poet Harriet Mullen,
00:00:28
Speaker
called Dim Lady. And of course, we'll have lots more to say about that poem and about Harriet Mullen in the remainder of the episode. But let me first tell you a little bit about Keegan. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and affiliate faculty in the departments of gender, women's and sexuality studies,
00:00:53
Speaker
Language Literacy and Culture at UMBC. She's finishing a book right now called Poetry in General, which I think is a great title.
00:01:04
Speaker
Its subtitle is Interdisciplinarity and U.S. Public Forms. And that book is concerned with post-1960 poetry and its relation to degradations and changes to the welfare state. And in the book, Keegan argues that the category of poetry itself changes with changing notions of the public.
00:01:29
Speaker
For those interested, you can find an example, and I'll direct you to links to these things. You can find an example of that research in an article she published in the journal Textual Practice, which offers a reading of Franco Harris poems about, or Franco, not about, but Franco Harris poems that, in her words, figure,
00:01:51
Speaker
the Seagram Building, an important mid-century architectural work building in midtown New York City.
Exploring Frank O'Hara's Cityscape
00:02:03
Speaker
And that re-situates O'Hara's well-known, I do this, I do that poems. You listeners to the podcast might remember that we began
00:02:14
Speaker
the podcast with an episode with Brian Glavy on one such poem, Frank O'Hara's Having a Coke with You. Keegan's work re-situates those poems. Those poems for her don't just chronicle the city as I think
00:02:33
Speaker
on the surface we might be inclined to say that they do work, or they don't just chronicle sort of O'Hara's flaner like wandering through the city or his experience of the city, but according to Keegan, they remake the city. And they do that in some sense in the present tense of reading as well. The poems, she says,
00:02:55
Speaker
We should think of them as being like scores or happenings. And she writes this sentence, which I think is just great towards the end of that article. Each poem asks us to participate in an event in the places that we know in order to transform these very places.
00:03:15
Speaker
That's a really exciting insight to offer, and it's an important one, I think.
Poetry, Surveillance, and Political Culture
00:03:20
Speaker
Keegan's also been working on a new project about poetry and surveillance, and has published two essays that draw from that project on poets who are near and dear to me, poets that I've written about as well, and I really admire and have learned from Keegan's writing about them. Those poets are Claudia Rankin, whose book Citizen is something Keegan has written about, and Solmaus Girif,
00:03:45
Speaker
whose first book, Look, is an important text for Keegan in this project. In general, as a scholar, Keegan Cook-Finberg takes poetry seriously, and she takes its situatedness in culture and politics seriously.
00:04:01
Speaker
which I think is not an evasion of whatever we might or someone might mean by a phrase like the poem itself or the sort of project that's announced or implied by the existence of this podcast where we look just at a poem. You can think of that as a clearly, the podcast project, my podcast project is indebted in many ways to
00:04:27
Speaker
a critical regime like the New Criticism or something that developed out of that. But Keegan, I think, is giving us a really lovely and important example of the way to consider a poem situatedness and interrelatedness to culture and politics doesn't just evade the poem, but rather revalues the work that poems do, whether we attend to that work or not.
00:04:56
Speaker
And I'm grateful to say that she does. And she's a critic and a scholar from whom I've learned a lot. She's also published reviews of new books of poetry and sort of public facing journals and is a poet herself. So for all kinds of reasons, I'm really excited to have Keegan Cook-Finberg on the podcast today.
Harriet Mullen's Influence and 'Dim Lady' Selection
00:05:17
Speaker
Keegan joining us from Baltimore. Yeah. How are you doing today? Great. Thank you so much for that amazing
00:05:24
Speaker
introduction, you can't see it. Our listeners can't see it, but I feel like I'm blushing. That was so kind. Thank you. I've been a fan of the show and a long time reader of your scholarship. So I'm just totally thrilled to be here.
00:05:44
Speaker
Well, it's a treat for me. I'm really happy to have you here. And I was really happy that, you know, when I invited you on, I think there was some deliberation about a poem that you might want to choose. But pretty early on in that process, you settled on the poet Harriet Mullen, in which I was
00:06:02
Speaker
I'm excited about. I don't like to take for granted that our audience knows who every poet that we discuss here is, and I think some kind of context setting might be useful. Can you tell us a little bit about how you came to be a reader of Harriet Mullen and where that fit into your education or life in poetry?
00:06:28
Speaker
Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah, you mentioned one of the things actually I love about this about this podcast is that you ask folks to choose a poem that they love. And Harriet Mullen is this sort of amazing
00:06:45
Speaker
intersection for me of, I mean, she's so difficult and scholarly, you know, sort of productive for me as a scholar. And I also just, I love her work. And I first, I first came across it, I did my PhD at UC Santa Cruz in the literature department, where she also did her PhD, like 30 years before I did. But there was this sort of legacy, I think, of Mullen as
00:07:14
Speaker
um this like exemplary poet critic um and she really embodied like a lot of the values that I as I was um you know studying for my PhD were really important she was like this amazing kind of experimentalist
00:07:30
Speaker
She was very interested in the philosophy of language. She was someone who was innovative in her work, but had these very clear politics and principles to what she was doing. So that's where I first discovered her. And then her work became part of my teaching toolkit, one of the things that I really love.
00:07:57
Speaker
about a lot of Mullen's work is that it's deceptively, it seems simple but right like when you first read it you think that there's something sort of easy and it really draws you in and I think that is important there's this like very
00:08:12
Speaker
like important layer of accessibility and of play and of joy that's really important to the work. But it also just sort of unfolds to these really like crucial questions about the intersection of poetry and politics, you know, the philosophy of language and race and kind of the dreamscape of the way that we speak and use language without thinking. So this is all part of, I mean, Mola in herself, you know, calls this serious play.
00:08:41
Speaker
And it came to be like a really important part of the way that I, you know, conceived of, you know, poetry when I first, you know, started studying it and it still is.
00:08:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's such a useful introduction. I love the idea also just the kind of institutional history you've given us where you sort of get to a place and just so listeners understand I think what you said,
00:09:12
Speaker
She wasn't still at Santa Cruz. She had moved on. But in some sense, your sense of it, having arrived at your doctoral program, was that her legacy was alive and well. And of course, we've spoken a lot about Mullen already in the past tense. She is herself a living poet, which is a lovely thing, an important thing to note. But for you at Santa Cruz, it wasn't that she was around all the time or that you were seeing her.
00:09:42
Speaker
she was within the sort of living memory of the place or informed it in some sense. Is that right, Keegan? Yes, absolutely. And thank you for letting me sort of clarify a little bit. Yeah, she is a professor at UCLA and she's an important critic as well as a poet and continues to write books.
00:10:04
Speaker
And I should also say before she came to UC Santa Cruz for her, you know, for her PhD, I think she did her, finished her PhD in 1990, she was already a published poet. So she had written Tree Tall Woman before that, which is, you know, a really sort of interesting, important collection that is, you know, very much kind of inspired and in the style of the Black Arts Movement.
00:10:33
Speaker
But one thing I think that happened like in terms of her poetry and maybe her career trajectory at UC Santa Cruz, which I think sort of comes to kind of how maybe she left an imprint on the literature department in this way that I felt.
00:10:51
Speaker
is that her works after she was there really started to experiment with multiple discourses at
Mullen's Books and Interdisciplinary Themes
00:10:59
Speaker
once. She became really interested in doing procedure
00:11:05
Speaker
For example, on previously written texts, on playing with examples of the Western canon, mixing that with some of her other really important influences, such as the Black Arts Movement and jazz.
00:11:22
Speaker
And and that's actually that's one of the reasons why it was so hard when you asked me to choose a poem I sort of I waffled a lot because You're not alone this by the way, like almost everyone waffles. Yeah a lot and I was really wriggly like I didn't want to be pinned I do actually finally sent the confirmation that this only would do a few days ago, but She wrote these books that
00:11:49
Speaker
are just incredible that wouldn't, I think, be a good fit for the podcast. But I thought maybe it would be helpful to mention because there's this sort of through line in her work. So this book, Trimmings, which in 1991, and this was sort of shortly after her PhD, and it's a rewriting of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons.
00:12:15
Speaker
And it's amazing, it's this sort of critical work. She really draws out anti-blackness in Gertrude Stein's text, which critics have struggled to write about really clearly, like in a scholarly way.
00:12:34
Speaker
But also at the same time, it's like this sort of like incredible unfolding and homage to what Stein is doing with the domestic sphere and the way she constructs femininity and sexuality. But there isn't, because it's prose poetry and it really, the different parts are dependent on each other, wasn't a good fit. But then the other one that I was sort of looking at and thinking about for this cast,
00:12:59
Speaker
This podcast was Sperm Kit, which she wrote not too long after that one.
00:13:07
Speaker
Um, and that's that's the way that I am saying the title and um listeners can't see it, but it's um, it's uh, um the word orthographically challenging, right? Yes Yes, thank you. Um, yeah, it's it's so it's capital letters um of um supermarket but with um asterisks over some of the letters um in it as though you were looking at like a
00:13:36
Speaker
like a neon sign, um, that had some of the letters blown out or, um, you know, that some of the letters, um, had fallen off, you know, of a, a sign or something like that of a supermarket. Um, and you know, importantly, the letters that are not there are, you are. Um, so there's, this is like another example, I think of, um, like some of this, and this is a long, it's a full length long,
00:14:03
Speaker
a book length long prose poem that's in these parts where she's looking at consumerism. And she's really thinking about kind of the politics of eating, this notion like you are what you eat or you are the supermarket, right? Like right there in the title. But also the kind of the frenzied kind of
00:14:28
Speaker
you know, racial capitalism behind the way stuff is sold to us, you know, throughout the book. And the kind of this like sexual connotations of the, of sperm kit as a title, I think talks about sort of gets to that notion too. Because although sperm kit itself is like your, at least I, when I first hear it, it's totally,
00:14:53
Speaker
almost nonsensical to me, you assume like, okay, is this something to measure fertility? Or is it something to help fertility? Like, what exactly is it? It's not
Procedural Poetry and 'Dim Lady'
00:15:02
Speaker
totally clear. There's something that's like, it's clear that it's a mass market kind of consumer good getting to, you know, some aspect of sexuality, and that that is like a preoccupation kind of
00:15:15
Speaker
throughout her work and the way that these constructs of sexuality and consumerism are erased and racialized. So anyway, there's a couple more works between those books and Sleeping with the Dictionary, which is where Dim Lady comes from. But in choosing this book for the cast, I mean, it's a good length, as we talked about.
00:15:44
Speaker
But it also comes from this really cool collection that itself is, the whole collection is a, you know, either constraint-based or procedural, you know, depending on sort of how you talk about those words. And it's an abecedarian or, you know, it's alphabetical each.
00:16:06
Speaker
Poem is in alphabetical order and dim lady is under D, right? So that would be sort of the only other important thing to know. We'll talk more, I'm sure, about procedure. But in terms of kind of situating this one, yeah. No, that's super helpful. I love your invoking of her phrase, serious play, that seems.
00:16:35
Speaker
important here and throughout her career. You've also done a really generous thing for our listeners in giving them people who become interested in Mullen after hearing us talk about this one poem. We'll have lots of other books to look for and ways of thinking about her
00:16:52
Speaker
I also love what you said earlier about how her poems can seem sort of easy at first, and then that can open a door into having other kinds of experience with a poem that we wouldn't, I think, call easy. And I think
00:17:12
Speaker
I mean, you don't need to hear me say this, but maybe it's useful for listeners to hear something like this out loud, that the notion that a poem can be difficult or easy, I don't think it's ever really adequate.
00:17:30
Speaker
certainly not the most interesting way of thinking of those terms, which are meaningful, which we can attach to certain poems, I think would not be on like a slider, on like a two-dimensional slider from easy to difficult, and you're somewhere on that.
00:17:47
Speaker
line, you know, instead poems and our experiences of poems sort of unfold in time. And we can be having one kind of experience with a poem at first and a different kind by the end. And I can think of poems that seem easy at first and get quite difficult. And then I can think of poems that are quite difficult and, you know, forbidding at first. But once you unlock something about them, they suddenly resolve into some other kind of experience.
00:18:15
Speaker
And so I think you've given us a really rich way of thinking not just about, you know, Mullen's work, but about that whole sort of question of difficulty in general. If I could just follow up with one more question about a couple of the terms that you used before we get to this poem and why you chose this poem and so forth in particular.
00:18:35
Speaker
You talk about Mullen's use of procedural techniques and of constraint. And for people who aren't sort of immersed in poetry world, those are words that have ordinary everyday meanings, but they have, I think, special meanings within poetry that are not like altogether unrelated from the ordinary meanings.
00:19:02
Speaker
means something in particular, I think, to the way poetry has been practiced, and I would say in particular in the contemporary period. So maybe just unpack those terms a bit for us if you don't mind, Keegan.
00:19:16
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, well, and it's, this is interesting. So, and Mullen herself has like an interesting relationship with those terms too. When we talk about procedures, often we think, you know, in the poetry landscape, often in the poetry world, often we think about
00:19:41
Speaker
this group of French men, it began I think 1960 and it was a bunch of folks who got together and were coming up with mathematical principles by which to generate poetry. So these are generative processes or procedures
00:20:05
Speaker
Some of them are really complicated math and some of them are not. And this oolipo is an abbreviation, by the way. So this is ouvois du literature potential or a workshop for potential literature. And that was like a big part of this group's sort of ideas that they weren't
00:20:29
Speaker
like it wasn't that they were creating these beautiful objects like it was the process itself that was really interesting to them. And so one way to think about this type of work procedural work is process oriented.
Combining Techniques and Artistic Influences
00:20:41
Speaker
And a really famous one that I think
00:20:43
Speaker
you know, is important also to think about for this poem that's also very simple, is N plus seven, or, you know, S plus seven, you know, from the French. And so this is sub sentif, which, you know, is noun and French plus seven. So the idea is you take a previously written text, and it can be anything, you know, poets have done this with all kinds of things, and you take
00:21:09
Speaker
every noun in that text and replace it with the seventh noun following it in a dictionary. And so you end up with something
00:21:20
Speaker
you know, often kind of mad libsy that sometimes, you know, has a certain nonsense quality about it. But the idea is that it also may be through this process, like unravels something actually, you know, quite truthful about the language itself. So so that's, you know, process based or procedure, that's, you know, often what we're thinking about. Right.
00:21:49
Speaker
which is kind of complicated because Mullen herself, she gets asked a lot if she's an oolipian or if she, like what her relationship is to Oolipo. And my favorite answer that she says, my only like relationship to Oolipo is that Harry Matthews and I have the same initials. And Harry Matthews is like- Which is a kind of procedural answer to that. Exactly, exactly. So that's what I love about it, right? It's like super tricky.
00:22:18
Speaker
And Harry Matthews is the, he's like the only American, or he was the only American, uh, Ulypian. I don't know if that's true anymore, but I'm sort of famous, um, Ulypian. And she, she goes on to say, you know, their practices are far-reaching, and I'm interested in some of them and stuff, but she often talks about her own, like, inspiration and her allegiances is very different from that tradition. And so she is working with some of these
00:22:48
Speaker
ideas about math and exacting ways of doctoring texts in order to expose something about them. But she's also working with these other experimental traditions from the Black Arts Movement that's really interested in radical politics as experimentalism. So for her, it's interesting because it's a mix.
00:23:14
Speaker
But I love that her answer that you said that her answer was procedural, because that's exactly when we think about this sort of experimentalism, that's the type of thing that we're looking for and that she's often doing like her in some of her work, like her
00:23:31
Speaker
Craig Dworkin has a great chapter about this. Like she actually writes her signature, like her initials within the text. There's like anagrams and puns, and she's interested in sort of the way that language itself is generative. And so that's when we think about procedure, it's often sort of, you know, coming down to either something like visualizing a pun or
00:23:55
Speaker
creating language out of language itself in order to expose something about that language to begin with. The premise, it sounds like, is that
00:24:08
Speaker
you know, in a kind of romantic idea of poetry, and I mean this in like the English romantic sense or whatever kind of German romantic sense perhaps, you know, that the idea might be that the self contains these sort of wells into which the poet can lower their bucket to draw out the thing that becomes the poem. And in this way of thinking of things, it sort of depersonalizes that, at least in some ways, or has the potential of doing so because it's
00:24:37
Speaker
language itself, whatever we might mean by that, and that might mean a dictionary, or that might mean other kinds of aspects or ways of imagining what the language is, that it knows things
Poetic Constraints and Creativity
00:24:49
Speaker
that the poet can access without knowing
00:24:53
Speaker
beforehand or something and bring into the poem that results. That's really fascinating. Oh, go on, please. Yeah. No, I love that. And I just wanted to say it's almost that the poets
00:25:10
Speaker
I don't know, like romantic or sort of bourgeois consciousness actually gets in the way. I think for these poets of exposing something more interesting or political or true,
00:25:24
Speaker
that like is at the bottom of that well that you were talking about. That's great. And before people think like, oh, this sounds so crazy, you know, bringing math into poetry or whatever, you know, working with the dictionary, whatever it is.
00:25:42
Speaker
You know, just a reminder that take whatever kind of very traditional or down the line, the most traditional kind of down the line picture of poetry that you might have in mind, say in the English, in the Anglophone tradition, you know, we'll be talking today about the sonnet, for instance. That too is a
00:26:00
Speaker
is a form that obeys certain rules, and some of them depend on the poet's understanding of numbers and counting. And so I don't want to say, oh, that's all this is. It's just more of the same. It's clearly a different kind of way of thinking about poetry, but there are continuities between it and more sort of, quote unquote, traditional
00:26:27
Speaker
ways of imagining what the poets work or what the poets procedure might look like. I had also asked you about constraint, but in a way, I think you've sort of given us an answer to that question along the way, unless you had more that you wanted to say about that term specifically right now. I mean, I love what you said. Constraint is just rules. And there is a line of thinking that the more rules you have, that actually the more creativity
00:26:56
Speaker
is afforded, you know, if you add more rules that you can sort of do more interesting things. And so, you know, when people work with constraint based processes, like, you know, maybe even thinking, not just about the number of lines or syllables in a line, but, you know, which particular vowels, you know, you're allowed to use or, or something like that. So just kind of layering those on for many of the same kind of philosophical reasons that you discussed.
00:27:27
Speaker
Terrific. So I was going to ask you why you chose this poem in particular, but it also seems to me that you've sort of given us an answer. I mean, it evinces so many of these aspects of Mullen that are clearly of interest to you. But is there anything else you'd want to say about how you landed on this poem in particular before we, I think, listen to it is probably what we should do next?
00:27:55
Speaker
Yeah. No, I think I'll allow for that element of surprise. I think we're ready for a listen. Good. Good. Yeah. Okay. So we'll listen to a recording of Harriet Mullen reading Dim Lady. I think some of you... Well, I'm not going to say more about it than that. We'll do our context setting and so forth after we've heard it. But here is Harriet Mullen.
00:28:25
Speaker
This one I read often because I enjoyed the process of writing this along with my students. We all took a particular text. This was to just get across the idea that you don't always have to face the blank page.
Reading and Analyzing 'Dim Lady'
00:28:40
Speaker
You can start with something already written and just alter it. So this is Dim Lady. My honey bunch's peepers are nothing like neon. Today's special and red lobster is redder than her kisser.
00:28:54
Speaker
If liquid paper is white, her racks are institutional beige. If her mop were slinkies, dish water slinkies would grow on her noggin. I have seen tablecloths and Shaky's pizza parlors red and white. But no such picnic colors do I see in her mug. And in some minty fresh mouth washes, there is more sweetness than in the garlic breeze, my main squeeze wheezes.
00:29:20
Speaker
I love to hear her rap, yet I'm aware that Muzak has a hip or beat. I don't know any Marilyn Monroe's. My ball and chain is plain from head to toe. And yet by gosh, my scrumptious Twinkie has as much sex appeal for me as any lanky model or platinum movie idol who's hyped beyond belief.
00:29:46
Speaker
So that's Harriet Mullen reading Dim Lady. Keegan, what do you find yourself thinking about as you listen to her voice? I mean, I found myself hearing sort of curious about the tone of her reading. And I wonder if that might be like a generative word for you here, but also just curious in a kind of open-ended way about what you found yourself thinking about as you were listening to her voice just now.
00:30:15
Speaker
Yeah. The tone in this poem is so hard to print down. It's all over the place. And that's like one of the, I mean, it's, you know, even just, you know, honey bunches, peepers, like this isn't, it's, you know, it's maybe it's slang, it's not slang we use, not necessarily a contemporary slang, is what I mean.
00:30:39
Speaker
But there is a lot of contemporary, you know, there is some contemporary slang in it. So the, you know, the diction kind of drives us like in a number of places, which like, you know, I think makes you curious about some of the things that we were talking about before about language and procedure right away, like where these words are coming from.
00:31:08
Speaker
and why exactly they're sort of strung together in this way. Right, right. So she describes, one thing I liked about this recording is that she introduces it a little bit by giving a very kind of abbreviated account of its origins, of how she generated it, how she wrote it.
00:31:32
Speaker
And for her, that's a story that involves pedagogy, and that seemed interesting to me. The few words she said about it before she read it also, I think, obviously resonated with the kind of bio sketch that you gave of her, that kind of overview of her career and of the kind of poet that you take her to be. But tell us, Keegan, you know,
00:32:01
Speaker
So you've described Mullen as a scholar and as a poet, right? And as an important model for you of what the sort of twinning of those identities might look like. So, you know, is there a sort of a particular version of that question that obtains for you here in the way she sets up the poem?
00:32:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's so unassuming. I mean, this is this is like the play part, right? Like she says, like, you can I showed my students, you know, that you can start with you don't have to start with an empty page and you can always start with something. Right. Which it sounds so fun, you know, and easy and
00:32:51
Speaker
you know, we'll talk about the source text in a second. From kind of looking at what she's doing, I think it's pretty complicated, but I think, what I mean is sort of procedurally, but I think there's this notion in her writing and in the way that she talks and she thinks about writing that it's communal,
00:33:17
Speaker
And it's playful, like just the way that she was talking about, like we're never, you know, I guess this gets back to like the sort of, I don't know, romantic bourgeois imagination or whatever, but we're not just like by ourselves, you know, boiling.
00:33:33
Speaker
over our work of original genius, but that there's, there's like something, you know, we're always in dialogue and that, you know, that I think the way that she practiced the poem, like both as being generated with students and generated, you know, with something already on the page kind of shows that pretty clearly.
Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 and 'Dim Lady'
00:33:54
Speaker
Right. I love the word unassuming. I think it's really like spot on about her tone here in that intro. I mean, the more kind of like radical version of what she said might be not, you don't have to start with, what did she say? The blank page or the blank page?
00:34:14
Speaker
But rather, you can't start with the blank page. There's no such thing as a blank page. Or you might fool yourself into thinking that that's what you're doing, but you'd be wrong if you thought so or something. But you're right. She says it in a much more unassuming way than that.
00:34:34
Speaker
And also this idea, as you also just drew out for us, but I just want to emphasize it, of the person who's the teacher trying to explain something to the students, but then making that part of like, well, I'll do the assignment too. Which is, I have to say, as someone who is myself a teacher, not of poetry writing, but of
00:34:57
Speaker
literary criticism or whatever, you know, whatever it is that we do, Keegan. I mean, I hear colleagues of mine say like, oh, yeah, when I give an assignment, I do it too. And I think, God, that sounds really noble of you, like who has the time? But I get the value of it. So I want to be clear that I don't do that. But maybe I should. This makes me think, oh, there would be value in that. And there's a kind of admirable sort of spirit that's
00:35:24
Speaker
embodied in that. But so she says, you know, I wanted to show them that you can work with an earlier text or something to that effect. She doesn't make explicit for her audience what we are about to make explicit for ours. And I guess part of the reason for that is that she sort of trusts them to know or
00:35:45
Speaker
you know, what the poem is. It's a famous one. But Keegan, let's do the reveal. Like, what is the poem that, for people who didn't hear it, that Mullen is working with here? And say something about that, please.
00:36:03
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. No, and I will say just before I do, I also think this poem kind of stands alone, too, right? Like, I think there is, it's not like, if you don't, if you don't know what the sort of the source text is that, you know, there's nothing here, too, right? I think,
00:36:24
Speaker
there, and that might be another reason, right, in addition to the one that you said, you know, about sort of like the echo of this really famous poem in many people's minds, but I think that there's also, she wants you to kind of be seduced by this language and immersed in this language, you know, as well, like there's something sort of to be said for that too.
00:36:47
Speaker
But, so this is for folks who maybe recognized or had like a tickle of a recognition or something. So this is Shakespeare's fawn at 130, which begins by mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun. And this is, I mean, it's like, so, I think maybe middle school reading or something. I mean, it's like very, you know, widely taught and, you know, canonized and thought about. And I think maybe misread, but also read well. I mean, it's just, it's sort of so,
00:37:16
Speaker
ubiquitous. And so when once you sort of recognize that even if you didn't, you know, at first or in the recording or something like that, you know, it's hard to kind of unsee it as there.
00:37:29
Speaker
And I think it would be helpful to read the whole thing. So please do that in just a moment. But one thing I might suggest to listeners before Keegan reads the Shakespeare to you here.
00:37:46
Speaker
might be to be looking at the text of the Mullen as Keegan reads the Shakespeare because I think, and sort of tracking it, I think you'll start to get a sense, not just that this is a poem that is sort of in some kind of homage or ironic relation or whatever, and we'll get into all of that obviously with this earlier text, but exactly sort of how it's,
00:38:10
Speaker
mapping itself onto that text. I think it might be illuminating to do that. So there should be a link in the episode notes that'll take you to an image or the text of Mullen's poem. So maybe read along as Keegan reads the text that it seems to be written in relation to. Fabulous. Okay. My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun.
00:38:39
Speaker
Coral is far more red than her lips red. If snow be white, why then her breasts are done. If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses demasmed red and white, but no such roses see eye in her cheeks. And in some perfumes there is more delight than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak.
00:39:07
Speaker
Yet well I know that music hath a far more pleasing sound. I grant I never saw a goddess go. My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. And yet by heaven I think my love is rare as any sheep allied with false compare.
00:39:25
Speaker
Great. Thanks, Keegan. So neither of us, neither you nor I, is a Shakespeare scholar or works in that period. But maybe there are a couple of things we could say just to help people feel comfortable with the sonnet for people who don't know it inside and out already. I mean, do you want to get into any of that, Keegan? Or how would you introduce this poem? What would you tell a classroom of undergrads about this poem if you had it in front of you?
00:39:55
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's right. So that so Shakespeare is already I think, well, this poem is already playful, maybe is one thing to point out, like, that would be relevant here. So it's already playing with a previously existing, you know, form, which is, you know, something, you know, the the sonnet, but also the the love sonnet, the sort of almost like a
00:40:24
Speaker
a mock blazon, which is like a particular sort of love poem that goes through in Chronicles.
00:40:31
Speaker
like particular parts of a beloved. And so- Right, it sort of enumerate like the body parts, you know, right? Just like this poem does, but in a kind of loving and ever more exalted sort of way. And this is in part a tradition that would come from like poets like Petrarch and the Italian tradition.
Prose Form and Poetic Experimentation
00:40:53
Speaker
All right, go on, Keegan, yeah, that's great. Yes, yeah, no, exactly. And then also that there's a particular sort of
00:41:01
Speaker
like, standard of beauty that goes with that tradition as well. So the Petrarchan, like, beloved and, you know, is fair, is, you know, blonde, is angelic, is goddess-like. Sort of all of these things that this beloved is not are kind of like the tropes of that type of poem.
00:41:31
Speaker
So this is sort of already like an undoing or a mock kind of version of that type of work. Totally. Yeah.
00:41:43
Speaker
Yeah, like a negation of it step by step, but that invokes it all along the way. Like all the Petrarchan words are here, in other words. It's just that they're negated. That's so interesting. And so we should, and also maybe just say that the kind of like,
00:42:03
Speaker
an incredibly obvious thing, so it's a sonnet. It's the kind of sonnet that Shakespeare writes, which funny that Shakespeare would write the Shakespearean sonnet, but the Elizabethan sonnet, the English sonnet, so there are these quatrains that have a kind of
00:42:21
Speaker
rhyme scheme, so four-line groupings, and then a couplet at the end, which is a rhyming couplet at the end, which is a kind of turn or ironic kind of summation often of the preceding 12 lines, but we have 14 lines. Mullen's poem is not a sonnet, right? Maybe just take that as a way of
00:42:45
Speaker
opening up the question about, okay, so Mullen is working with this poem. There are obvious resonances here. We can track them sort of one by one to the extent that you want to do that today, Keegan. But clearly there's some distance that she's also opening up between her text and the source text that she's working with. And I would just say, I guess is one way to kind of pry our foot into that door.
00:43:12
Speaker
she could have done it as a sonnet and she didn't. So what's interesting about that to you, if anything? Yeah, that's fascinating. So this poem's in prose. Mullen's poem is in prose. And what I mean by that is that it's a block of text on the page. And I like that you said that she could have done it as a sonnet, because many of these lines are like,
00:43:41
Speaker
iambic or almost iambic and so many of Mullen's lines and so it's funny like instead of ending you know instead of having the first line be my honey bunches peepers are nothing like neon and then there's a period that would be like a very nice sort of end stop she ends that line with today's and then this special you know you find in the next line at Red Lobster and goes on so it is it's
00:44:09
Speaker
it's highly constructed in a different way. Like it's highly constructed in the way that prose texts are. And her whole, this, all of sleeping with the dictionary is not like this. Like some of the poems are in couplets. There are sonnets. There's actually, there's another version of this sonnet, of Sonnet 130 in this text.
00:44:33
Speaker
Um, and that one is also not a sonnet. Um, so, so she, she, I think she wants to, she wants to kind of blow that apart and make it, um, contemporary and make it evocative of something else, which is, you know, the, the, the codex, the book, you know, the book that we're reading, um, which is often when we think of, you know, this type of text prose.
00:44:58
Speaker
And then there's an awkwardness about it. I mean, these, the line breaks often in the middle of a word. There are no, there's only one, well, there's one end stopped line, one line with a period at the end, or I guess two because the concluding line. Yeah. Which gives a, I mean, it's, I noticed when she read it, she read it pretty quickly. There's this sort of overflowing,
00:45:27
Speaker
you know, aspect, um, to the lines. And then the really important thing, and I, I was, I knew this would come up and that I don't have a great answer to it, but the really important thing about this is it's 12 lines and it's not 14. Um, so there's something, I mean, she really wants to like mess with, um,
00:45:50
Speaker
you know, what we think of as the sonic form, like she's not going to give us even one thing, even the number of lines that it's supposed to be, which I think is interesting.
00:46:02
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I don't know that I have a reading of the 12 rather than 14 either, but there's something I found that I hadn't thought of this until you were just giving us that really lucid overview of what she's doing with form here, or one of the things she's doing with form. Of course, there are many others besides. But
00:46:24
Speaker
You said it's prose, which, yeah, right. So what do we mean by a prose poem? Ordinarily, I might say, and maybe I'd be wrong about this. I don't know. One of the things about a prose poem is that the line breaks are no longer significant. They're a kind of function of typesetting rather than of artistic choice.
00:46:52
Speaker
you know, when I write a paragraph of prose, I don't know, maybe if I'm being super duper precious about it, I care a little bit what that paragraph looks like on the page, but I don't really, or I'm not supposed to, like that's not the way prose organizes itself. And so you might think that if this really were, you know, if this, if
00:47:18
Speaker
If we could say and then be done with it that this is just printed as pros, then you wouldn't expect it to be like a perfect
00:47:33
Speaker
I don't know, I want to get a ruler out and measure it. Is it a perfect square? Certainly you wouldn't expect the last line of a prose paragraph to perfectly reach the right-hand margin, but this one does.
00:47:50
Speaker
And so I think what must have determined, I'm just going to make this assumption, but I can't imagine any alternative to it really, what must have determined something like that first line break in the middle of the word special.
00:48:06
Speaker
is, well, that's how she needed to play with the margins in order to get the last line of the poem to be all the way flush right at the end.
Racial and Gender Implications in 'Dim Lady'
00:48:17
Speaker
Now I guess, you know, and maybe for the poem to have a particular shape that it does. So I guess what I'm saying, long story short, is that, yeah, she's taking it out of the kind of conventional lineation of a poem like The Sonnet.
00:48:32
Speaker
but she's not simply putting it into like everyday prose that you and I write, or I guess you when you're not being a poet, Keegan. But instead, she's putting it into something that's prose-like, but quite sort of formally disciplined in other ways, you know? Square, you know? Yeah, I love that. It's like uber prose, because I think one of the things that we, that you do notice about prose is it's
00:49:02
Speaker
It's shapeliness in a book, right? I mean not when we're when we're writing, you know in a word document or something like that, but um and the This yeah, this book has that um, these sort of these perfect, you know margins, um For all of the poems that kind of look like this. Um So so yeah, so so I think formally, um
00:49:26
Speaker
Yeah, I like what you said about still attentive to form and shape, but maybe in a way that has more to do with contemporary printed poetry collection or non-poetry book, something like that.
00:49:46
Speaker
The poem also has a title which is interesting and which maybe opens up for us into some still more interesting sort of thematic or you know other kinds of questions having to do with race or gender. The poem is called Dim Lady and so one thing I
00:50:02
Speaker
in my kind of amateurish Shakespearean sort of knowledge kind of way, I would say is that I think this sonnet would be one of the sonnets that is whose sort of object of adoration or of attention is the so-called dark lady, I'm often called, of Shakespeare's sonnets. So I'm sure this gets into a whole kind of history of criticism that I am just not
00:50:29
Speaker
very familiar with but I can say that that much of it with with confidence that some of Shakespeare's son it seemed to be addressed not to the quote unquote fair youth but instead to this dark lady who defies these the kind of very conventional sort of markers of beauty that that Keegan was that you were
00:50:47
Speaker
enumerating for us before. So this takes that phrase dark lady and makes it dim lady. Do you have thoughts about the title that Mullen has chosen here, Keegan? And what questions does that open up into for you? Yeah, you know the, and I will say with the dark
00:51:07
Speaker
the dark lady of this sonnet, of Sonnet 130, you know, we have this, we see this darkness like in the similes or in the negated similes, you know, a couple of times, you know, black wires, you know, grow on her head, like the actual sort of physical darkness in this poem, which we don't, you know, in all of the,
00:51:33
Speaker
the dark lady, you know, sequence of the sonnets. So there's something interesting about that, I think, I mean, to Mullen, you know, I think there's something really important about that to Mullen and she plays on that in Dim Lady in a few places. I think the finding the exact line about the
00:52:00
Speaker
the dishwater, institutional beige and dishwater. There's a lot of red and white. If her mop were slinkies, dishwater slinkies would grow on her noggin, right? That's the version of the line that you've just given us. Well, maybe this is an occasion for us to just like get into some of the lines of the poem too, which, you know, like track pretty one to one. I mean, it's not as simple as that, I guess, but you could, if you wanted to,
00:52:27
Speaker
easily identify for each sentence of Mullen's poem, which lines does it correspond to? Now, we haven't said how it corresponds to them, right? But I don't know, pick your favorite early example and give us a sense, Keegan, of what's going on in that kind of use of the source material. Yeah.
00:52:53
Speaker
Oh my gosh, there's so much to say. Okay, I'll start with it like an exact an actual example. So I think, yeah, even just something like sun becoming neon is really important, right? So there's these sort of a string of what you might think of like as natural images, like we have sun and coral and snow and roses and that become like
00:53:18
Speaker
kind of these obviously constructed man-made things like sun becomes neon, coral becomes the red lobster ad, snow is a white out brand, like not even white out itself, but like the brand liquid paper. So I think there's a lot to say about that. I mean, one of the things that this does is it sort of
00:53:48
Speaker
it shows us the way that maybe in the Shakespeare sonnet that these aren't necessarily as natural as we might think, right? That there's already something very constructed about these notions of beauty within the Shakespeare sonnet. And so Mullen sort of doubles down on that logic, I think in this interesting way of like, you know, sun, we think of, I mean, sun is like,
00:54:17
Speaker
you know, the source of all life and warmth and beauty in
Language Play and Cultural Critique
00:54:21
Speaker
the world. But in this poem, it's neon, which is like, you know, garish and, you know, like this sort of constructed, you know, advertising, you know, element. And I think, you know, one of the things that that does is it kind of it points even further to some of the logic that we were talking about initially with
00:54:46
Speaker
the way that the, you know, Sonnet 130 itself is kind of already poking fun at something. It's like Mullen's poem is sort of in on this joke and doubling down on it, like to the extreme. And then the other thing, I mean, I will say, and I would love to get into more specific examples, which is like, you know, the most sort of fun thing to do, but because you asked about sort of like how she might arrive here,
00:55:14
Speaker
We talked a little bit, you know, previously about the n plus seven technique, which is replacing nouns with, you know, the seventh following it in the dictionary. And this, it's sort of almost tempting to say that this is something, that this is that, right? Because there is... How do you mean? Well, there's this element where she takes Shakespeare Shakespeare's mistress and turns it to Honeybunch, right?
00:55:42
Speaker
translating many of these nouns from Shakespeare's poems into other nouns. But what I think is really different here and really exciting, and I have kind of a couple theories about where this comes from, is that these words are not similar. Like, mistress isn't just similar to honeybunch in terms of the way that it's spelled, right? So it wouldn't be something that you find near
00:56:07
Speaker
in the dictionary. But it is working within this logic of, of synonym, or of historicists. And so, Mullen herself, I mean, she talks about this with her other works, and she's sort of obsessed with reference books. And so, there's clearly some sort of procedure going on where she's replacing nouns with synonyms, right? And not just any synonyms, but we talked about the sort of oddness of this,
00:56:37
Speaker
or this tone, but these slang synonyms. And so one of the books that she, you know, that she loves and that she talks about, like for her collection Muse and Drudge that she uses, is Clarence Major's Juba to Drive, a dictionary of African-American slang. And so she's really interested in slang and black vernacular.
00:57:04
Speaker
And a lot of these terms, you know, are in that text and sort of were potentially derived from that text. So you can see perhaps that a process here is really interested in not the definitional aspect of these nouns, but like their similitude, right? Like that there's a logic of the thesaurus.
00:57:29
Speaker
um working like throughout the poem and that that's one of the reasons why we get this sort of um jumpy jumpy tone um and
00:57:41
Speaker
In terms of where that, that's a procedure that was not, you know, Uli Poe didn't talk about the thesaurus. That's not like a new lithium procedure or anything like that. So there's, you know, it could have, you know, she could have made this up and she doesn't, she doesn't let on like in her writing sort of how she did this or anything like that. But she does talk about slang dictionaries. But one of the, she's a, she's a scholar,
00:58:09
Speaker
you know, in addition to a poet. And one of the things that she has done is bring like out of print African-American novels like back into circulation and back into print. And I feel like something that's sort of cool to think about in relation to this poem is there's this book called Oreo, which is a novel from the early 70s by Fran Ross, or I think
00:58:38
Speaker
Yeah, I think maybe mid 1974 or something like that. The protagonist is African American, but she has this like Jewish father who speaks Yiddish and it's like a journey, a sort of satirical novel. It's like a journey of her finding her roots.
00:58:56
Speaker
And there's all these puns and language play like in the novel. And one of the things the protagonist does is she crumbs up with a procedure where she replaces, she uses a source text and then replaces every noun in it with a noun from Roger's the stories. So I have this, like, you know, there's sort of this idea, you know, that, um,
00:59:21
Speaker
you know, that these procedures are out there, people are doing them, or this could be a place that, you know, Mullen thought of it. And this goes back to this thing that she said, you know, in that clip that you played, like, oh, you don't have to start with a blank page or start with nothing. Like, not only is she sort of working with this poem as a source text, but there's like a ton of different ideas in source text and processes and histories, you know, that she's working with, like in order
00:59:50
Speaker
to change this text into something else. And I think that logic of the thesaurus is clear throughout
01:00:03
Speaker
throughout the poem and throughout like some of those examples that we mentioned. Yeah, that's great. I love that. So, you know, I'm sleeping with the thesaurus as a kind of subtitle for this for this poem or something. You know, I think one of the things about the thesaurus or about the idea of synonyms is that, you know, like the question it raises. You know, I think we would say to say a student who is writing an essay and wanted
01:00:34
Speaker
didn't want that word and just wanted a synonym, that the thesaurus sort of, the words are not in fact interchangeable, right? That we have, that those semantically, maybe their definitions are closely related, we would have other and I would say broadly speaking like contextual reasons for preferring one word over another in a given circumstance, right? And that might have to do with
01:01:05
Speaker
you know, the register or the tone of the thing we're writing, where one word might seem more formal than another, or it might have to do with sort of culturally defined contexts in other ways. This might get into sort of questions in another way of speaking like code switching or something like that, right?
01:01:24
Speaker
But it's interesting to think about, okay, so if she's sort of substituting by some principle or procedure of synonymity, I don't know if that's the word, maybe, okay, sort of what is guiding her for choosing the kinds of synonyms she chooses. You've already given us one answer, which is that she's sort of like replacing
01:01:51
Speaker
things that might seem natural even in the Shakespeare, even like the Sun, even though in another way of thinking Shakespeare himself seems to well understand that kind of artifice that goes into the selection of those things. Nevertheless, they seem natural and she's making them
01:02:11
Speaker
I don't know, modern, quote unquote, but also like highly artificial and manmade or something. So sun to neon, as you said before, or snow and commercial snow, as you pointed out, to liquid paper, a brand name for white out.
01:02:31
Speaker
One thing I was thinking about, Keegan, is you said this to go back to something we were talking about a bit ago, was suddenly it seemed to me, oh, the way she reads the poem, it's almost like there's this sly, I can't believe I have to read this poem. I may be turning the dial too much in that direction to
01:02:51
Speaker
identify the affect that I'm hearing, so dial it back a bit and then maybe that's more accurate. But that kind of thing, it's like she's being made to read something that she finds silly or something like I'm hearing that in her voice.
01:03:07
Speaker
Or like, this is a groaner, but here we go, here's the joke I'm going to tell you, you know? So, I don't know, we need to talk more about places in the poem, lines in the poem, sentences in the poem that you find interesting.
01:03:22
Speaker
But yeah, so I don't know, Keegan, pick a couple of your favorite early-ish moments here where Mullen is doing something interesting in your view with the source material, or where just forgetting about the Shakespeare, if you want to do that too, you think there's a kind of interesting play going on here. Yeah, no, I will. But just to pick up on something that you said that sort of excited me.
01:03:51
Speaker
I think it's irony. Um, no, I think I think that, you know, and I think cause you identify it so well, but I think that, I mean, we can really, and maybe that is a good answer for sort of the tonal question that you asked too. Right. And people have written about, I mean, Anthony Reed talks about like in Mullen's work, there's like a blues irony, right? Like throughout her work. Um, and I think that that's a really brilliant way to read it.
01:04:18
Speaker
But I think that notion of this sort of a groaner has to do with the sort of the way that some of this slang doesn't quite fit together and yet linguistically is brought together through Black speech, through African diaspora or something like that. But then also the fact that this is bringing out this
01:04:44
Speaker
the sort of, I don't know what you want to call it, but like the dreamscape of the original Sonnet, like this notion that there is this like, you know, hyper constructed thing, like, right, based on race and racialization within, you know, Sonnet 130, right? That, you know, beauty is, is whiteness, right? That, you know, like needs to be
01:05:10
Speaker
like, brought further, you know, to the surface or kind of, like, really exploded, like, within Mullen's poem, which she does, like, really beautifully, you know, but that is also, like, within, you know, Shakespeare's, you know, Sonnet 130 itself, like, very clearly. So there's this sort of, it's doing this extra work that we kind of know about and that we see and yet is, like, so important, right? And so that, I think, has to do with that tone, too. Yeah.
01:05:39
Speaker
I like the way you called it a groaner. Yeah. Well, you know, but it's like a groaner that, you know what I mean? It's like, um, it's, it's different from saying like to somebody, Oh, that joke you told me is such a groaner. It's like, here's a groaner. I'm going to tell you, you know? Yeah.
01:05:56
Speaker
I like what you said earlier about the doubling down or tripling down that she does.
Irony, Humor, and Beauty in 'Dim Lady'
01:06:02
Speaker
So I think we're not going to keep talking about the first line, but my honeybunches peepers, just take that phrase. And I'm thinking of how the poem might feel different if it were something more like my honeybunches eyes are nothing like
01:06:16
Speaker
or nothing like neon, but it's like she takes every noun and replaces it so that the effect of the slang is, I think, not as slang often might function in a kind of literary context to sort of naturalize the language and make it sound colloquial. Nobody talks like this, right? Nobody would use all of that in one sentence, I don't think, or it just doesn't sound natural to me, right?
01:06:43
Speaker
um so that's an interesting thing going on right or like or if her mop were slinkies you know what if it were if her hair were slinkies that might that wouldn't do the doubling or tripling down thing but her poem seems to insist on doing over and over again yeah no it's almost it's like it's frankenstein you know there's this sense it's really really over the top um and the red and white um which is already in
01:07:13
Speaker
you know, the, um, in Sonnet 130 with, you know, roses and coral and snow and things like that, like become, um, you know, pizza parlor, like the, you know, checkered, um,
01:07:29
Speaker
you know, tablecloths and red lobster. And the whiteness, I mean, one of the twinkie moment, the scrumptious twinkie, which doesn't have a sort of clear correlation in Sonnet 130 is a moment I really love, because it takes that whiteness like to the extreme. You know, this sort of this like, you know, very white snack. The whitest snack you can imagine.
01:08:00
Speaker
Yes, that is very sweet, right? But that is, I mean, in this context is totally estranged and disgusting.
01:08:08
Speaker
I guess the correlate for that is the word love in the Shakespeare, right? My love, my scrumptious twinkie. Yeah. All right. Sorry, you were making a more interesting point than that. No, just on this notion of the tripling down, that's an example that I love or something like the garlic breeze, my main squeeze, wheezes,
01:08:38
Speaker
um that there's like this you know sort of extraordinary um you know constructed aspect and almost you know gross grossness um you know quality um so the Moen song you know so the Moen poem um which I think really does I mean it you know highlights like something interesting um in Sonnet 130 and it also plays with to go back to what you said about like you know we teach our students like don't try to
01:09:08
Speaker
you know, sound fancy in your paper by just replacing one word with another because you're going to lose the, you know, connotation and get further away from what you mean or something like that. But the logic of Sonnet 130, I mean, it's already like, it's similes. I mean, it's negating similes, like this idea that the beloved is like beyond compare.
01:09:35
Speaker
So she can't be like anything. So there's something really cool about Mullen saying, I'm going to take that logic. What if this word is like this other word? What if I sort of use this notion of semblance?
01:09:52
Speaker
what if I am the worst student? What if I use this notion of semblance and make it between definitions, right? And make it kind of go haywire, like what does it expose kind of about that logic of comparison or about that kind of like idea of something being like, you know, something else to begin with. Because then you end up with this example, like,
01:10:22
Speaker
you pointed like that love is the scrumptious twinkie. And what does that say? What does that say about sort of our our contemporary culture, our dating scene? What does it say? This moment that that Moen, you know, is trying to capture, right? I think it's important that this has so many brand names in it. We talked about
01:10:51
Speaker
liquid paper and slinky. Right. Yeah. Um, and so that there's this, this sort of like, you know, commodity, um, or commodity fetishism liked the way that we think about beauty, um, that is not, I think in sonnet one 30, but isn't too far away, maybe from some of these,
01:11:19
Speaker
similes that are in Sonnet 130. It brings out the absurdity of that logic.
01:11:30
Speaker
Right. Right. Oh, that's that's really interesting. Right. So to take a line like and I realize we're sort of skipping all around, but I feel like one of the advantages of a short poem is that you don't have to do the laborious thing of doing line after line after line. You can just sort of move around a bit. I grant I never saw a goddess go becomes I don't know any Marilyn Monroe's. Right. So the goddess becomes a woman with a name.
01:11:59
Speaker
Although it occurs to me, even as I say that, that wasn't actually her name. Marilyn Monroe is sort of like a stage name and a really kind of
01:12:14
Speaker
commercialized product in some very real way. Or if you take the line in the Shakespeare, I'd love to hear her speak, yet while I know that music hath a far more pleasing sound,
01:12:33
Speaker
You know, that's an interesting line in the Shakespeare. So the kind of, the thing it's playing with is like, oh, you think I'm about to say, if this were some other poem, I might be saying that when my, you know, love speaks, it's like music comes out of her mouth. But here, no, I know that music sounds better than she does, even though I do like to hear her speak. So for Mullen, I love to hear her rap.
01:13:02
Speaker
which could be slang for talk, I guess, right? Or it could be a kind of music that's like talk, right? And that has its own, obviously, racialized history to it.
Perspectives on Love and Recognition
01:13:19
Speaker
yet I'm aware that music has a hip or beat. Music, which is like what you hear in an elevator or a hotel lobby or something like that, which is the least hip kind of music that there is, right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, and in both poems, I mean, the like humanity of the beloved, I think, is clear, right? Like, I think that there's
01:13:51
Speaker
it's, you know, that, um, the beloved has as much sex appeal for me as any lanky model or platinum movie idol who's hyped beyond belief. Um, that, that that one, it's really, it's the, um, the sentiment there is, is to me strikes me as very similar to this notion of, of beyond compare so that this is kind of fighting against, you know,
01:14:21
Speaker
commodification of white beauty standards, like within the poem, like actually quite sincerely, even as it's doing all of this playful work of making that type of beauty sort of monstrous and poking fun at the beloved a little bit. Like I think music has a hip or a beat. I mean, it's not,
01:14:52
Speaker
It's not mean. It's sort of sweet. It's kind of mean. I don't know. I can imagine putting the Shakespeare, and I've never taught this on it, the Shakespeare. But I could imagine putting it in front of students and asking a kind of ordinary question. How would you feel if your boyfriend gave this to you on Valentine's Day, wrote this for you, whatever? Would you feel good?
01:15:21
Speaker
Or would you feel made fun of? Or would you feel both? So that would be an interesting question we could take on directly, I guess, if the Shakespeare poem or the poem under consideration here, we could ask the commensurate question about dim lady, how should the beloved of that poem feel about being addressed in this way?
01:15:49
Speaker
But it occurs to me that we could also ask the question like, what is implied?
01:15:55
Speaker
about how Mullen would answer the first question. Like, what does she think is happening in the Shakespeare poem? Does she think that the quote-unquote speaker of that poem, the sonneteer, whatever, Shakespeare, that he, that it's loving, in fact, you know, and that it's sending up the kind of Petrarchan conceit
01:16:20
Speaker
but that it actually exists in a kind of loving form of regard to the flesh and blood woman or person who's the object of that poem. But sort of like, what does Mullen think about that? And yeah, so I don't know. Do you have a thought about that, Keegan? Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's it's I love the question, but I think I think of the question like a little bit differently. So the good that because I think her
01:16:50
Speaker
Mullen is really interested in what the process, because this sonnet is sort of working in the gating simile. So what does that process tell us about the Procharkan beloved or something like that? Wait, say that again. Yeah, say more. Yeah.
01:17:11
Speaker
Well, she does these really cool kind of, cause it's not, it's not just synonyms. Like there are these kind of associational aspects, like with what, with what she's doing. Um, cause like, you know, coral, coral is in the sea and she gets red lobster from there. There's, um, the ball and chain, um, comes from the ground, right? Cause the, the, um, in the, in Sonnet 130, the goddess,
01:17:38
Speaker
treads on the ground and so we see kind of these it's clearly there's slang substitution but it's slang substitution kind of working closely with like associations within like the like metaphorical like path or imprint of the of the sonnet um so i think she's trying to sort of even further expose or the the poem is trying to kind of even further expose
01:18:08
Speaker
these metaphors or the way that we think you know what these similes actually do to the beloved like they make them they make the beloved into something else what do they make the beloved into right um and these are the places you know that that we get taken to is this sort of the the gross slinky or sorry the gross twinkie um the ball and chain this sort of this level of absurdity that is inhuman right it is not actually
01:18:38
Speaker
human itself. And so then to end with something that isn't, you know, necessarily an image that is sort of a negation of a possibility of an image or a possibility of a comparison, right. So, you know, beyond belief, like, you know, beyond anything that could be could be compared, I think is the thing, you know, if my
01:19:04
Speaker
if my lover wrote this to me, that I would say makes me feel good about this poem, right? Is that it sort of exposes this whole world of the logic of this type of language. Really clearly this language is raced and this language is constructed and it relies on these, you know,
01:19:28
Speaker
you know, falsified construction, constructions of femininity and stuff. But that's actually not what's happening to me, like at the end of the poem, you know, like I'm, I'm aside from that, me the beloved. Right, right. You the beloved are a person, you know, or a particular person and an actual person whom the lover knows for what you are, not to try to sort of shoehorn you into
01:19:58
Speaker
these absurd kind of normative standards
Concluding Thoughts on 'Dim Lady'
01:20:03
Speaker
of what that person, you know, who that person should love or what that person should love because it feels more like a what than a who, actually.
01:20:16
Speaker
Right, right. So okay, then here's another question I have for you, which is like to take one step further back from the poem maybe, or to add a kind of layer, which is, I mean, not totally, I mean, has been something I think that we've been kind of playing around with, but I want to take it on sort of directly here as we kind of wind.
01:20:36
Speaker
towards a conclusion of this conversation, which is, you said earlier about the Shakespeare that it's sort of related to this, that it's playing with this kind of tradition of the blazon or the, I don't know, maybe Satan. I never know whether to say that word French or not.
01:20:56
Speaker
But anyway, just say it quietly. Don't say it for perpetuity on a podcast. Don't do that, God forbid. We talked about how one thing that kind of trope or maneuver does is to kind of enumerate the parts, right? To sort of take the
01:21:21
Speaker
the beloved and to name one by one the features of her that, and it's always, you know, at least in the kind of, I think, in the kind of standard sort of version of this poetic procedure, you know, the gendered kind of construction, right? So it's the male poet sort of enumerating the features of the woman whom he loves.
01:21:51
Speaker
So clearly Shakespeare is playing with that, clearly Mullen in her own way is playing with that, but also I think in the way that the poem has a kind of
01:22:07
Speaker
Mullen is attending to two things. I mean, maybe Shakespeare is attending to two things, but Mullen has an extra thing. Like she's attending to her lover or within, you know, and I don't know if the poem was given to someone or if she had someone in mind, but it's as though the poem were, right? There's a kind of implied honey bunch, you know, who's the recipient of the poem or something, or the object being described in the poem. But she's also attending to the Shakespeare.
01:22:37
Speaker
right? And she's doing it in a, in a liaison kind of way too. Like she's
01:22:49
Speaker
she's sort of part by part, piece by piece, kind of enumerating the, each line in the Shakespeare gets its correspondent phrase or line in Mullen. It's like a kind of, you know, there's the
01:23:08
Speaker
it's like Coleridge or Wordsworth, that we murder to dissect, right? But that idea of like piece by piece sort of attention to the object here is given not just to the person that the poem is about, but to the poem that the poem is modeled on. And so I guess the one question that we had just been asking was like,
01:23:38
Speaker
how should the, like, what kind of attitude is being performed here with respect to the beloved? You know, maybe another question we could ask is like, what form of attitude, or what attitude is being offered here to the poem that the poem is modeled on? Like, is Mullen being loving to Shakespeare? Or what kind of loving attention is she giving to Shakespeare?
01:24:07
Speaker
That's so interesting. I, you know, I do think that there's this, the intensity of attention is loving, right? Even though the, there's a, you know, a snipping and a revision and a cutting and a, you know, all of these things that might not. Ribbing too. Right. They don't necessarily sound pleasurable. But there's something that,
01:24:38
Speaker
that the results I think is getting, is sort of hewing even closer, right? Sort of exposing, you know, more of a truth, right? More of what's kind of beyond compare through this excess of comparisons and through this process of enumerating the absurdity
01:25:02
Speaker
of the logic of comparison and resemblance, that there is actually this logic at work where we can kind of acknowledge the absurdity of that together, right? And maybe this actually brings this full circle, that there's this sense of readership in the way that she loves this poem.
01:25:31
Speaker
or in the way that she revises this poem that is quite loving. What do you mean by readership? Say more about that term. Yeah. Well, you could think of this as a work of criticism about anti-blackness in Shakespeare's sonnet
01:25:53
Speaker
um or about the sort of formal construction of simile and shakespeare sonnet um and that that's there's critique there i mean there's something you know quite um sharp but also you know so attentive um and captivating like this is clearly a poem that
01:26:18
Speaker
is seductive and captivating. I mean, to us, like Mullen's poem I think is captivating to us, but also she shows that there's something really captivating about Sonnet 130. I see it, you know, after hearing Mullen, you know, read or reading Dim Lady, it's hard to kind of think about Sonnet 130 in the same way. It certainly
01:26:44
Speaker
enlivens it and brings elements of it to the fore that wouldn't be apparent before. In the way that good poetry conversation does, good criticism does, good readership does.
01:27:09
Speaker
There's a way in which the poem is, you know, it's pointing out a certain sort of commodity obsession that's like a love relationship or something like that. And so it's sort of tempting to say that the relationship between the two poems is transactional, you know, that she's sort of using Shakespeare's poem. But I don't think so. Like, I think that there's actually,
01:27:36
Speaker
a kinship or a sweetness, at least, I think, between those two works. Well, in fact, something that I think I'm hearing you say, and it's such an interesting thought and maybe a place for us to sort of end, is
01:27:53
Speaker
I was thinking back to when you were saying, I had offered that kind of hypothetical, if you were given this poem and take either the Shakespeare or the Mullen by a lover, how would you feel? Would you feel loved by it? And you, I mean, not to oversimplify your answer, but you, I think, said something like,
01:28:12
Speaker
Well, yes, basically. And because I think it would make clear to me that my lover was attending to me and not to some kind of, you know, normative form that I could only fail to fulfill and wouldn't be me even if I fulfill, you know, all that.
01:28:39
Speaker
if by analogy we were to take that same kind of logic in your answer there, which feels right to me, and apply it now not to the poem's attitude towards the beloved, but instead Mullen's attitude towards Shakespeare or towards Sonnet 130, then we could say, well, how should Sonnet 130 feel about being addressed in this way? And the kind of analogous answer would be something like,
01:29:09
Speaker
Oh, Mullen. Um.
01:29:15
Speaker
seems to understand and value the Shakespeare for not being a kind of normative poem in some way, but for instead being like a particular poem. So it's part of the reason why I thought of that was we use the word enlivening. It has a kind of enlivening relation to Sonnet 130.
01:29:41
Speaker
And I think if the logic of either Sonnet 130 or Dim Lady works in relation to the lover, the reason the lover feels good is the lover feels enlivened rather than killed by the Petrarchan conceit. And so maybe the same thing is happening in a meta-literary or meta-poetic way here. So that's a thought that
01:30:09
Speaker
just came to me from what you were saying, and it feels right to me. Keegan, this has been so much fun, and I wonder if we can wind up the conversation by my asking you to read, Dim Lady, for our audience. Yes. Yeah, this has been great. Thank you so much.
01:30:38
Speaker
So we'll end with dim lady. My honeybunches peepers are nothing like neon. Today's special red lobster is redder than her kisser. If liquid paper is white, her racks are institutional beige. If her mop were slinkies, dishwater slinkies would grow on her noggin. I have seen tablecloths in Shaky's pizza parlors, red and white.
01:31:06
Speaker
But no such picnic colors do I see in her mug. And in some minty fresh mouthwashes, there is more sweetness in the garlic breeze my main squeeze wheezes. I love to hear her rap, yet I'm aware that Musak has a hip or beat. I don't know any Marilyn Monroe's. My ball and chain is plain from head to toe. And yet, by gosh, my scrumptious Twinkie has as much sex appeal for me
01:31:34
Speaker
as any lanky model or platinum movie idol who's hyped beyond belief. So you've just been listening to Keegan Cook-Finberg reading Harriet Mullen's poem, Dim Lady. And Keegan, again, thank you so much for the conversation. I found it enlivening, just as used that the poem was. So yeah, I want to thank you for that.
01:32:02
Speaker
Thank you. Yeah, of course. And thanks listeners for hanging out with us for the last 90 minutes or so. I hope you've learned things like I have from this conversation. And please do remember to follow the podcast and leave us a rating review, share an episode with a friend, spread the word. We will have more for you soon.
01:32:32
Speaker
Thanks very much, everyone. Be well.