Sleeping with the Dictionary

Harryette Mullen

October 18, 2002–BERKELEY, CA–The University of California Press is pleased to announce that Sleeping with the Dictionary, by poet Harryette Mullen, has been nominated for a 2002 National Book Award. (Other recent accolades include nominations for both the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award and the L.A. Times Book Prize in Poetry.)

"This nomination recognizes the work of an important poet. It also means a great deal to the Press and to the University as a whole," said UC Press poetry editor Laura Cerruti. "Harryette Mullen’s work is representative of the kind of edgy, experimental, creative work being encouraged by the University of California." Sleeping with the Dictionary is one of five finalists in the competition’s poetry category. The winner will be announced at a ceremony in New York City on November 20.

Mullen, an associate professor of African American Studies and English at the University of California, Los Angeles, said this book, her fifth volume of poetry, is her most experimental and bold. "I think I’ve always played with words, but it’s more pronounced in this book," she said Thursday. Her poems question and delight in how language shapes our lives and "come from the combination of experience and experiment."

Sleeping with the Dictionary is an alphabetically ordered collection of mainly prose poems, rife with word play, innovation and experimentation, humor and grit. The poems have an urban, witty style to them, and are often reminiscent of jazz improvisation. For instance, in her poem, "Mantra for a Classless Society, or Mr. Roget’s Neighborhood," Mullen progresses in 15 lines, mimicking a thesaurus, through synonyms of comfort and security to images of poverty and discomfort:

While writing the poem, Mullen said she was thinking of "the neighborhoods I grew up in...there would be the wealthy houses, all the way down to the shacks, and the words came almost exactly out of that order."

Sleeping with the Dictionary is also the third volume this year in UC Press’s award-winning "New California Poetry Series," edited by poets Robert Hass, Calvin Bedient, and Brenda Hillman. The series includes works by such distinguished poets as Carol Snow, Mark Levine, and Fanny Howe, whose Selected Poems received the first ever Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California in 2001. If given the National Book Award, Sleeping with the Dictionary will become the third University of California Press poetry title to achieve such a high honor. The Aeneid of Virgil, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, received the award in 1973, and in 1979, the Complete Posthumous Poetry of Cesar Vallejo, translated by Clayton Eshleman and Jose Rubin Barcia, also won in the translation category.

Mullen’s poems "have tremendous gusto–‘kick’ in several senses," notes series editor Calvin Bedient, who also teaches poetry at UCLA. "They are born out of sleeping with the dictionary, out of a love of alluring words, as well as out of a mocking but unusually intimate acquaintance with all kinds of cultural categories and lingos–the poet’s ears are sponges."

Her work has also been included in several poetry anthologies, including Trouble the Water , and the Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Poetry , and African-American Literature edited by Al Young and Ishmael Reed. She has worked in the Texas Commission on the Arts' Artists in the Schools program and taught poetry at Cornell University. In addition to Sleeping with the Dictionary, she is the author of Tree Tall Woman (1981), Trimmings (1991), S*PeRM**KT (1992), and Muse & Drudge (1995).