AL FILREIS:
I'm Al Filreis, and this is Poem Talk at the Writers House where I have the pleasure of convening three friends in the world of poetry and poetics to collaborate on a close, but not too close reading of some poems. We'll talk, maybe even disagree a bit, and perhaps open up the verse to a few new possibilities, and, we hope, gain for a poem that interests us some new readers and listeners. And I say listeners because Poem Talk poems are available in recordings made by the poets themselves as part of our PennSound archive writing.upenn.edu/pennsound. Today I'm joined here in Philadelphia at the Kelly Writers House in our Arts Cafe by Julia Bloch, poet, editor, critic, teacher, author of books of poems including The Sacramento of Desire and Valley Fever, among others, editor of Jacket2 magazine, whose current critical project is about Innovative North American, long poem, lo-long poem looking at issues of gender, ideology, and the place of the lyric and who I'm always, always, always, Julia, glad to say, is the director of the Creative Writing Program here at the University of Pennsylvania.

And by Maxe Crandall, poet, playwright, director whose book about AIDS archives and intergenerational memory, The Nancy Reagan Collective, has won tons of accolades and was finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in transgender poetry who is the... Still interim Maxe?

MAXE CRANDALL:
Not anymore.

AL FILREIS:
Let's just call your associate director without interim status of the Feminist Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Stanford University, and whose project 'Bacchae Before' is a dance theatre adaptation of Anne Carson's Bakkhai for ODC theater in collaboration with Hope Mohr Dance and trans puppeteer and classic scholar C Michael Chin. 

And by Larissa Lai, who does not today get the prize for coming the greatest distance. I think Stanford is further away in miles I want to say, author of eight books at last count, including most recently Iron Goddess of Mercy. And for those listening, only listening, you can't see me holding up, blocking my face, holding up this wonderful, wonderful book, a long poem inspired in part by the tumultuous history of Hong Kong and Tiger Flu, also a Lambda Award-winning novel of 2019 who has been deeply involved for years in Canada and elsewhere with experimental poetry and speculative fiction communities since the late 1980s, not to age you, who holds a Canada Research Chair at the University of Calgary on Treaty 7 territory where she directs the Insurgent Architects House for Creative Writing.

Larissa does that awesome name for the house that you built, that you created, is that an invitation to the cool people and a warning to the not-cool people? I mean, imagine entering voluntarily The Insurgent Architects' House.

LARISSA LAI:
It transforms everyone who steps through its doors. (LAUGHTER)

AL FILREIS:
Do you have a one-sentence blurb about what that is?

LARISSA LAI:
Sure. It's a house for creative writing, where we do a whole bunch of different kinds of events and podcasts...

AL FILREIS:
Like Writers House a little bit.

LARISSA LAI:
Yeah, not so. One like Kelly Writers much smaller scale, focused on social justice and contemporary form.

AL FILREIS:
Great. And it is, I should say, make it clear in Calgary.

LARISSA LAI:
It's in Calgary. You have to come to Calgary.

AL FILREIS:
You have to go to Calgary. Great. Well, who is gonna say why? I've been waiting for a year for this poem talk and this day, who wants what to... How did it come about Julia Bloch? Do you remember?

JULIA BLOCH:
We were in a Zoom room together almost one year ago to talk about the great Sarah Dowling's book.

AL FILREIS:
Right? So we did a poem talk.

JULIA BLOCH:
We did a poem talk on 'Entering Sappho', and we decided to reconvene face-to-face a year from that date.

AL FILREIS:
It was so good that we thought, OK, what damn the expense and damn the pandemic, which is not such a hard thing to do. Damn the pandemic. We calculated a year later and here we are. And you made it on airplanes, and it's good.

JULIA BLOCH:
Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
What do you think, Maxe? Is this a cool thing to have done?

MAXE CRANDALL:
Yes. I'm just so thrilled to be back here. You know, I lived in Philly for two and a half years. And yeah, that poem talk we did on Sarah Dowling's book took me by surprise when we recorded that because I had, you know, we were in lockdown and I had been sitting in front of my computer doing everything. And I just I felt like we made this space or this time where I fell down into deep conversation in a way that I hadn't for much time at that point. So it's so nice to be here in person.

AL FILREIS:
It was so good. And I'm glad that you guys made the trip. I realize it's a long way. And let me just stipulate that later today, by the time this comes out, this thing that's gonna happen in the near future. A reading featuring the three of you. I'm doing my tense pretty well.

JULIA BLOCH:
It's a lot of tenses in that.

AL FILREIS:
In the near future, but when this comes out, it will be the recent past. And there will be a recording of a three-person poetry reading that will take place, that will have taken place in this room. Well, today, how did I do? Oh, my gosh. I'm tired. I can't do poetry. We four have gathered here in person to talk about two prose poems in Harryette Mullen's collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, a book I'm also holding up. For those of you watching the video, watch the video, not just listen to the audio. We all have one. It's a beautiful book. Published by California, University of California Press called Sleeping with the Dictionary in 2002. And the poems we'll talk about are 'Dim Lady' and the title poem 'Sleeping with the Dictionary'. Our recording of Mullen's performance of these two pieces comes from episode 92, in the year 2005 of Leonard Schwartz's radio show, Cross-Cultural Poetics, in which Schwartz and Mullen talking to each other over the phone between Evergreen, Oregon, I think, and Los Angeles, I imagine, devoted the whole poem to a discussion of and readings from 'Sleeping with the Dictionary'.

So here now we will all listen to Harryette Mullen reading 'Dim Lady' and 'Sleeping with the Dictionary'. (AUDIO PLAYS)

HARRYETTE MULLEN:
'Sleeping with the Dictionary'. I beg to dicker with my silver-tongued companion whose lips are ready to read my shining gloss. A versatile partner conversant and well-versed in the verbal art, the dictionary is not averse to the solitary habits of the curiously wide-awake reader. In the dark night's insomnia, the book is a stimulating sedative, awakening my tired imagination to the hypnagogic trance of language. Retiring to the canopy of the bedroom, turning on the bedside light, taking the big dictionary to bed, clutching the unabridged bulk, heavy with the weight of all the meanings between these covers, smoothing the thin sheets, thick with accented syllables—all are exercises in the conscious regimen of dreamers, who toss words on their tongues while turning illuminated pages. To go through all these motions and procedures, groping in the dark for an alluring word, is the poet's nocturnal mission. Aroused by myriad possibilities, we try out the most perverse positions in the practice of our nightly act, the penetration of the denotative body of the work. Any exit from the logic of language might be an entry in a symptomatic dictionary. The alphabetical order of this ample block of knowledge might render a dense lexicon of lucid hallucinations. Beside the bed, a pad lies open to record the meandering of migratory words. In the rapid eye movement of the poet's night vision, this dictum can be decoded like the secret acrostic of a lover's name.

LEONARD SCHWARTZ:
You've been listening to Harryette Mullen reading 'Sleeping with a Dictionary' from the book by that same title. Could I ask you to read one more piece from the book I was thinking of 'Dim Lady'?

HARRYETTE MULLEN:
Great. Great. 'Dim Lady', My honey bunch's peepers are nothing like neon. Today's special at Red Lobster is redder than her kisser. If Liquid Paper is white, her racks are institutional beige. If her mop were Slinkys, dishwater Slinkys would grow on her noggin. I have seen tablecloths in Shakey's Pizza Parlors, red and white, but no such picnic colors do I see in her mug. And in some minty-fresh mouthwashes there is more sweetness than in the garlic breeze my main squeeze wheezes. I love to hear her rap, yet I'm aware that Muzak has a hipper beat. I don't know any Marilyn Monroes. 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. (AUDIO STOPS)

AL FILREIS:
So you heard the voice of Harryette Mullen reading over the phone. And I was wrong in suggesting that on Leonard Schwartz's side, he was in Oregon. He's, in fact at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. It was Maxe who came the furthest. So you get to decide which one we should talk about first.

MAXE CRANDALL:
Oh, wow. OK. Well, I think we have to go with 'Sleeping with the Dictionary.'

AL FILREIS:
OK, great. It is the title poem, and it also kind of sets out themes. So why don't we do a lightning round and have all four of us just toss out onto the table in a phrase or a word, some of the themes that are happening here? Maxe, you start.

MAXE CRANDALL:
For me, this is such a luscious poem. In the joining, the hybridizing, the simultaneity of the languages of sex and sleep and silent thought.

AL FILREIS:
Cool. Sex, sleep, silent thought. Larissa, toss out another topic that gets raised by this, please.

LARISSA LAI:
Well, I too, like Maxe, I'm sort of intrigued by all of the sexual language, that sense of intimacy with the dictionary at work in the poem. But as I began to think about it, I find myself also really interested in the larger metaphor of poetry as an act of cross-fertilization or something, a collaboration, an intimate collaboration with the firmed-up lexicon of the dictionary where the other partner, presumably female is not so much attached to the lexicon, the tightness of the lexicon, but in a space of opening up. So there's gender stuff happening in here that's really curious and power-related.

AL FILREIS:
Great. We'll totally get back to that. Julia, do you want to toss out? Is there something different and additive?

JULIA BLOCH:
Yeah, I feel like reading this again, I noticed that there's almost like a dictionary within the dictionary. So Larissa is saying there's something meta-poetic going on here, and I feel like there's something meta-dictionary going on here. There's a lexicon within the lexicon and there's a stimulating sedative. There are all these interesting contradictions. The idea that a dictionary is about rules and following those rules. But here the dictionary is about this weird transitional space between waking and sleep. So it's a different kind of dictionary within the dictionary.

AL FILREIS:
So I won't add a new one. I'll just join a couple of them by saying that the creative play shall we call it, of positions in bed, gets amplified and made even more generative by the fact that the sexual partner either analogously or literally is a dictionary. So migratory words are only... A meandering of migratory words is only made possible by this amazing analogy. Anyway. OK, so Maxe, back to you. Go anywhere with this. Can we say... We can say clever, but can we also say fun? Is that the wrong word? When you realize how marvelous this analogy, this comparison is being made? Is that wrong?

MAXE CRANDALL:
No, it's fun because it's love. It's a love poem for me. And I'm excited to dig into both of these reads. Larissa and Julia's reads. Part of me think, you know, I think this, the meta-ness of this poem is a lure for poets who love language so that the intimacy that's being discussed here is in a way, a tactile description of what it's like to live with language, what it's like to live in love with language on a daily basis and to hold that in the body.

AL FILREIS:
And nightly too. Yes, to go to bed. I mean, Julie, don't we begin in a sort of sophomoric way with this book? And by the way, sophomores literally, I mean, this is a sign to classrooms. I imagine this is well-adapted and adopted in classes. So I'm thinking of like someone new to something like this would say, oh my God, she's playing with the idea of actually going to bed with the dictionary. Can you go a little ways into that?

JULIA BLOCH:
Yeah, it's literally about sleeping and intercourse with the dictionary. So it's this beautiful conflation of this conscious, the state of consciousness, this hypnagogic trance of language, and how language is very seductive and can literally change one's consciousness in much the way that good sex can change your consciousness, can have you experience everything differently. And it's both denotative in the way that the dictionary is, denotative body of the work. And then there's this other generation of language, generating of language happening. There's a pad lying open to record the meandering of migratory words. So it's unmoored at the same time that it's beautifully like sourced in this book.

AL FILREIS:
There's a sexual lexicon that gets drawn out of the dictionary. "Tongues groping, aroused, perverse positions, body." And of course, it begins with "I beg to dicker with my silver-tongued companion." There's a tongue.

LARISSA LAI:
Mhm. I'm really interested in what Julia is saying about how in sex, if it's good sex, it can transform you when you enter into another space. I think that's really cool. I also think there's actually something procreative happening here. It's kind of heterosexual. It's pretty straight in a way. But if, yeah, with between the dickering and the silver tongue and the shining gloss, the shining gloss actually is interesting because dictionaries do also gloss. But she's glossing in a different kind of way from the way...

JULIA BLOCH:
I thought of the glossiness of an aroused body, there's all sorts of gloss happening.

LARISSA LAI:
Or it could be lip gloss.

JULIA BLOCH:
Lip gloss.

LARISSA LAI:
Yeah. So but what also... It's sort of hovering, though, there's no actual child that comes out of the poem. And yet the poem, in a sense, is kind of a child.

JULIA BLOCH:
Well, there's a nocturnal mission. There's kind of a nocturnal emission which is not necessarily procreative, in terms of creating another human. But it's...

LARISSA LAI:
But there are myriad possibilities. Yeah. Proliferating of possible progeny that emerge from these perverse positions. Right. By mixing things up in ways that you're not supposed to, which is exactly what poets do.

JULIA BLOCH:
Yeah, It's that's the definition of perversity. And perversity is a word that appears in the poem.

AL FILREIS:
Is the alphabetical order, which in so much avant-garde writing is a bad thing. Let's get out of that. Right. I've been working with Caroline Bergvall's work and she will often talk about alphabetism as a limitation. But in this case, I think the speaker is in love with alphabetical order, thinks it's great. Is it ironic? The alphabetical order of this ample block of knowledge might render a dense lexicon of lucid hallucinations.

LARISSA LAI:
Well, I think without the restraint of the alphabet and its order, the dictionary and its order, it's harder to be creative if you're not perversely pushing against something. Right? Then how do you know what to make? How do you know what's perverse if there isn't something there that's already in order?

JULIA BLOCH:
Or the perversity is messing with the order, using the order not in the way it was intended, using the dictionary in ways that were not originally intended.

LARISSA LAI:
That's what I mean. There has to be a...

JULIA BLOCH:
You're not supposed to just sleep with a dictionary. You're supposed to put it on a desk or a bookshelf. You're not supposed to take it to bed.

LARISSA LAI:
That's right. Yeah, that's right. So what I'm saying is...

AL FILREIS:
Wait, wait. What do you mean you're not supposed to. Is that a rule from your upbringing or something?

JULIA BLOCH:
It's a rule that I just verbalized it for the first time in this moment. But, yeah, dictionary is not appropriate bedtime, pleasurable reading. But it is for poets, of course.

AL FILREIS:
Taking the dictionary to bed. I mean, generally, we don't, in the age of tablets, I guess it's so easy not to do this, but, generally, Maxe, we're not supposed to take a big giant book to bed because you'll be asleep in five minutes and you could hurt yourself. (LAUGHTER)

MAXE CRANDALL:
But it's such a great text for a dreamscape. And I think I read that Harryette Mullen loves the dictionary, but also loves dictionaries of slang and kind of has collections of different. And I as a writer love those too. Do we all maybe?

JULIA BLOCH:
I think we all do.

MAXE CRANDALL:
But there's like that presentation of alphabetical order. And then of course, it's so easily disrupted because you can flip to any page and there's a blankness in the dictionary where of course the meanings look stable when you read the dictionary, but of course, we know they're not. And that's what Mullen's a master of, is clashing these contexts together in order to produce. And I don't know what she produces. To me, I wouldn't say she produces a new language that's too simple, you know, But it's a new form.

JULIA BLOCH:
Yeah. Or maybe reading a new form of reading because. Yeah, as you say, she's a master of illusion and puns and neologisms, but always coming back to this source text, which she shows us, makes all those things possible, like it was there all along, in a way, if you just read it.

LARISSA LAI:
And the source text like the beloved could be anything. It's really the act and performing, the negotiations, which I wanna hear you talk about power more. The other thing that's striking me as you're speaking, Maxe, and sort of thinking about alphabetical order is even though the words in the dictionary are placed in alphabetical order, once you get into the dictionary definitions of things, it shows you the instability of language, the layers of meaning in any single word, the range of possible meanings, the usages, the misusages, the historical terms. It does tell you all those things. And so there's a way in which it kind of shows you how you can play with it also, which so the possibility is already there. Speaking of power, that there's that kind of feminine, you know, in so far as we're sort of thinking in terms of Western metaphysics, that feminine possibility for the slipping away, for the turn, for the instability of language is already there embedded (CHUCKLES) embedded in the dictionary.

AL FILREIS:
You can't help but...

LARISSA LAI:
Can't help it. Can't stop, won't stop.

AL FILREIS:
Let's riff more on power. This is a power couple in some ways. Because, there is a kind of difference between the two. One is a person who can write a poem and gets into bed and turns the light off and so forth. And the other is a book. But they're mutual. It's a good relationship. Does the language and the tone and the punning affirm what I just said? That it's a good relationship. It seems like a relationship of mutuality that's successful.

JULIA BLOCH:
Well, it begins with this huge joke, "I beg to dicker with my silver-tongued companion." So it's a pun, I guess on I beg to differ, but dicker means engage in petty argument and the poem is nothing petty. There's nothing petty about the poem. So we're really being toyed with just in that opening phrase, and it stops me at in this really exciting way. And then we get, "Whose lips are ready to read my shining gloss." We talked earlier about all those meanings of gloss that get raised. Sure, there's a power couple here. It's a relation of mutuality, but intense playfulness.

AL FILREIS:
It may be that because we're gonna talk about 'Dim Lady' also. I'm affected by that in thinking of this whole collection as partly in conversation with the long love poem tradition in which typically a male poet is talking about wanting physical sex, but pretending to want someone who's good at speaking and using language. I'd like to have a really good conversation with you. Not really. In that tradition...

JULIA BLOCH:
I read Playboy for the stories.

AL FILREIS:
Right. I read Playboy for the stories. Thank you. So there is an arousal here. This is a defiant. In that tradition, this is defiant, saying, you know, I have a partner who's very versatile, and who is good at perverse positions in this nightly act. This is good sex and it's really derived from that silver-tongued conversation that we can have. That's what arouses me.

MAXE CRANDALL:
But there's also a solitude in this poem, I think, where it's about sex and the well, it's about sex, but it's also about this nightly ritual where we turn down the sheets and we... What did you say?

JULIA BLOCH:
Self-love. It could be about, yeah.

MAXE CRANDALL:
Yes. Yes. But also just a non-eroticized ritual of getting into bed and the thoughts that run through your head. And where do they come from? How is sleep? We're heading toward this thing of sleep where language might still exist, but where we might have less control.

LARISSA LAI:
Or we fall into our own unconscious. We fall asleep. We fall literally unconscious. And then the relationship with language. We have less control of it, but it's still us. It's just not our sort of active, willful, agented thinking, poetry-writing self. But that's where poetry gets written to. I mean, that's part of the joy of poetry, is, you know, discovering the possibility of those layers of meaning that can kind of rupture up even as one is not necessarily intending the fullness of the rupture when one is writing. So isn't that also, that's also sex and sleep.

AL FILREIS:
This poem is produced from this activity. Is there any sign in the writing of this prose poem itself that a poem is being written as a result of this sleepy time engagement with the dictionary? You're all looking at me. You better...

JULIA BLOCH:
Well, "There's a pad lying open to record the meandering of migratory words."

AL FILREIS:
We have another text.

JULIA BLOCH:
Migratory words being a pun on migratory birds. There's...

AL FILREIS:
But also the migration from the dictionary to this poem, and this probably this one.

JULIA BLOCH:
And so, yeah, if I think about a pad lying open next to my bed, that's because I'm reaching over to scribble maybe half asleep, maybe the light's not on. I'm writing semi-consciously through some kind of dream state. You know, we are probably all advised at some point in our lives to keep a journal by the bed for those ideas that bubble up in the half-awake states. And then when we get to... I mean, what do people think about this dictum? What is the dictum? What's being written on the pad? This "Dictum can be decoded."

LARISSA LAI:
She just can't resist the dick and dictum. (LAUGHTER) It's like listed. It's always part of it though.

AL FILREIS:
But Larissa, this is pretty strong there. This dictum. Which one? I mean, that's basically what Julie is asking. Like, which dictum is it?

LARISSA LAI:
"In the rapid eye movement of the poet's night vision." So the poet's eyes closed. They're seeing. They're dreaming. And in the dream, the dictionaries dictum can be decoded. Like the Sikhs. There's something in the dictionary beyond the dictionary. The secret acrostic of a lover's name, right? That if the dictionary could be decoded or reordered.

JULIA BLOCH:
And when you write a secret acrostic, it's because you are trying to seduce someone. You're writing a love poem that doesn't announce itself immediately as a love poem. But then your beloved realizes, Oh, this is for me.

AL FILREIS:
It kind of makes you go back and try to find where the acrostic is. But you can't. I mean, I haven't. Is there some code of the name of this dictionary in here?

JULIA BLOCH:
Yeah, exactly.

AL FILREIS:
I have one more question about this. Then we should switch to 'Dim Lady' and we can come back. What kind of title poem is this? What kind of productive relationship does this poem have? Is it first in the book?

JULIA BLOCH:
No.

AL FILREIS:
It's not. But it is. It really feels titular. So it...

JULIA BLOCH:
And it has to appear here because it begins with an S and all of the poems are alphabetized by title.

AL FILREIS:
Good. So it's a preface that's buried alphabetically. But my question is, does this feel like the kind of poem... Like we chose two poems instead of three or four or one, and we had to choose this one as well as another because Maxe, in what way does it serve as a statement of the poetics of this particular project?

MAXE CRANDALL:
Yeah, we have to do this one. It's the title track. It's an Ars Poetica.

AL FILREIS:
It is really.

MAXE CRANDALL:
I think so, yeah.

AL FILREIS:
If it is, what are the dicta of that Ars Poetica? What are some of the rules?

MAXE CRANDALL:
Loosen up. (LAUGHTER)

AL FILREIS:
Loosen up. Right. You know...

MAXE CRANDALL:
To read me. Loosen up. And also as a writer, loosen up with language.

AL FILREIS:
OK, let's promulgate some more dicta.

JULIA BLOCH:
Have fun.

AL FILREIS:
Have fun, get aroused by language. It can make you...

JULIA BLOCH:
Break rules. And play with alphabetic rules and denotative rules.

LARISSA LAI:
And throw your body into it. You know, throw your body into it.

MAXE CRANDALL:
Yeah, the body is there. Throw your body into the tumble of meaning.

LARISSA LAI:
Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
And keep a notebook.

JULIA BLOCH:
Keep a notebook. Write every day.

AL FILREIS:
Let's go to 'Dim Lady'. So there is a source text. We all figured that out separately. Larissa, what's the source text?

LARISSA LAI:
Oh, it's Shakespeare's 'Sonnet 130'. "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun."

AL FILREIS:
Do you mind reading it? When's the last time you read this sonnet aloud?

LARISSA LAI:
(SIGHS) I don't know.

AL FILREIS:
Grade school?

LARISSA LAI:
Probably if. 

"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked red and white,
But no such roses see I 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, 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.0
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare."

AL FILREIS:
So let's play a game. Each of us will pick a sentence or a line from the Shakespeare and then compare it with what Harryette Mullen does to it. And that will put into the record the sort of density of the way she's applying a process. Starting with Julia Bloch. You wanna pick one?

JULIA BLOCH:
Yeah, I'll just start with the first line. So "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun."

AL FILREIS:
A classic, a famous line because they believe it's purely iambic. Is it? "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun." Pretty iambic.

JULIA BLOCH:
Yeah. And it's often misread and people don't often realize until they get really into it that the Shakespeare's poem is saying something about beauty that you might not expect. So then we get Harryette's line, "My honeybunch's peepers are nothing like neon." Again, strictly iambic. Is neon like the sun? Well, kind of, but I guess not as quote-unquote good. We think of neon as kind of harsh and glaring and cheesy and cheap. And also honeybunch's peepers is idiomatic slang and affectionate, but kind of, you know, it's definitely a different kind of vocabulary than my mistress'...

AL FILREIS:
It's both modern and archaic. Peepers.

JULIA BLOCH:
Peepers? Yeah.

LARISSA LAI:
Jeepers creepers. Where'd you get those peepers?

AL FILREIS:
Where did you get those peepers from, like, maybe the 1920s? (LAUGHTER)

JULIA BLOCH:
So in both lines, the eyes do not sound super appealing, but Harryette just turns up the volume.

AL FILREIS:
(LAUGHS) Is she just substituting for fun? Is she using some kind of method? Maybe a dictionary of slang?

JULIA BLOCH:
Yeah. So in terms of method, you know, it feels a little bit like something like N+7 where you look up words in the dictionary and you count entries and you can do a little fudging depending on...

AL FILREIS:
It's not because it's synonymous.

JULIA BLOCH:
But it's not, yeah. So there's something else going on there. I don't know what the source text is, if it's an actual text, or if it's like a world of vocabulary that's being taken from.

AL FILREIS:
OK. Let's go to Maxe and see if we can add more to this process.

MAXE CRANDALL:
Ooh. OK. I can't wait to talk about the mouthwash, but before we talk about the mouthwash...

AL FILREIS:
You can do the mouthwash one.

MAXE CRANDALL:
Before we do that, we have to talk about Red Lobster I think.

AL FILREIS:
OK. Alright.

MAXE CRANDALL:
And so you want me to do a comparative read?

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. Would you?

MAXE CRANDALL:
So, and I'm just following Julia's first line. The second line is "Coral is far more red than her lips' red." So in Mullen's adaptation, you know, even in that line, there's two reds being compared. There's the comparative. But then when Mullen comes in with this adaptation, then the red becomes like literal, the brand, you know, the brandedness of Red Lobster and how almost the banal ideas of coral is far more red than her lips' red. Coral is from the sea, so that gets Mullen to Red Lobster. Coral and the nouns in 130 are flat nouns, generic nouns, and Mullen turns them in some of these lines, too. Well, the line is "Today's special at Red Lobster is redder than her kisser." (LAUGHTER)

AL FILREIS:
That's so brilliant.

MAXE CRANDALL:
And the noun becomes a brand. You know, the flatness of the brand or the corporation in this case, which is engineered from maybe the poetics of the sea. (LAUGHTER)

AL FILREIS:
I don't believe that, Maxe, that was... You came all the way across the country. If you did only that, it would have been worth airfare.

MAXE CRANDALL:
I'm gonna thank my parents because when I would get a good report card, you know where they would take me?

AL FILREIS:
Seriously?

MAXE CRANDALL:
To Red Lobster.

AL FILREIS:
Oh, my God. I don't know. Let's not go there. But Maxe, if a student heard you riff so brilliantly in teaching this poem, let's say, and raise their hand and said, Wait a minute, is she criticizing Shakespeare? What would your answer be? I'm thinking of the use of the commercial stuff.

MAXE CRANDALL:
No, I decided that I would read this as an adaptation, specifically as taking up an original and adapting it into contemporary time.

AL FILREIS:
Wow. OK. I didn't know you were gonna go there. Is there...

MAXE CRANDALL:
I don't know if I'm right, but I felt that if I wanted to label it, I would call it an adaptation.

AL FILREIS:
Who wants to add?

JULIA BLOCH:
I think there... Sorry, Larissa.

LARISSA LAI:
Oh, that's OK. Go ahead. You're responding.

JULIA BLOCH:
Yeah. I mean, I think it is an adaptation. I think there also is a little bit of puncturing of Shakespeare going on. Like if you look at the Shakespeare, "If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head."

AL FILREIS:
Which is a weird line.

JULIA BLOCH:
So there's a weird racist line in here as though black, wiry hair didn't stand up to the standards of beauty that are being parodied here. And so Harryette's doing two things at adapting the poem in the super playful way, but also having, I think, a critique of the Shakespeare.

AL FILREIS:
And what is Harryette's line? I'm sorry, Larissa, what is Harryette's line in response to that?

JULIA BLOCH:
"If her mop were Slinkys, dishwater Slinkys would grow on her noggin," which makes no sense.

AL FILREIS:
It's like those scrubby pads. Well, Slinkys are...

JULIA BLOCH:
Slinkys are those toys...

AL FILREIS:
They're wire.

JULIA BLOCH:
Those toys made out of wire.

LARISSA LAI:
You know, I was gonna say, in relation to the problem of adaptation, I would agree with Maxe that it is. And I wonder if some of that is caught up in the title 'Dim Lady'. I mean, 'Dim Lady' is also, you know, because her eyes are nothing like the sun or nothing like neon for Mullen. But this set of thoughts makes me wonder who the dim lady of the title is, whether it's the lover or the poet who is not swift enough, but also is self-referentially kind of querying her own gesture, wondering why she doesn't throw Shakespeare further out the window.

AL FILREIS:
Exactly. Who was the dark? I don't know. I'm not up on my Shakespeare. Who was the dark lady? Do we know? I don't mean like the person, but what's the...

JULIA BLOCH:
Yeah, I just know that 130 is part of the Dark Lady Sonnets. But I don't know who the dark lady is.

AL FILREIS:
But what does dark mean?

JULIA BLOCH:
But dark in the Shakespeare context means unlovely, means unappealing.

AL FILREIS:
Right? So there's that sort of racist trope of darkness equals unbeautiful. And this is a poem, maybe one of the most famous poems in the love poem tradition of simile making. Right? So she's having... She's... I mean back to Maxe, you were very kind to Shakespeare. Can we be less kind?

MAXE CRANDALL:
Well, I mean, I'll start out with a sort of minimal kindness, which is to say that, you know, a feminist reading of the poem is, hey, look, the gap between the feminine ideal and women or people who call themselves woman is a violent gap. And, you know, in 'Sonnet 130', Shakespeare is pointing out, right, the kind of like emptiness of these poetic comparisons, right? The kind of are objectifying, you know, for example, or are not about a person at all, but are really more about the speaker and about hierarchies of taste and beauty. But in that mechanism, you know, the line is about, you know, her, you know, the feminine ideal is alabaster, is white. And so when you start getting language like done or you know, "If snow be white," let me look, "her breasts are dun." Oh, that's where that comes from. And so, yeah, I definitely think...

AL FILREIS:
D-U-N, what a weird word there.

MAXE CRANDALL:
Yeah. Yeah. And then, of course, the mythologizing of the dark lady. Right. And sort of the I think when it comes to this text. Right, as a black woman then and as a black presumably speaker or writer, then, you know, then I think there's something pedagogical here that's saying, hey, this is not just about gender. This is also always already about race.

AL FILREIS:
"I love to hear her rap, yet I'm aware that Muzak has a hipper beat." Does anybody wanna... I mean following from what Maxe just said, does anybody wanna read that line?

MAXE CRANDALL:
Can I say something, though, before we get to listening?

AL FILREIS:
Sure.

MAXE CRANDALL:
Because I think part of the problem of the dimness is in order to make the critique, one has to still look at the woman. So it's still a scrutiny of the woman's body, Right? Even if it's to make the recognition that her body is not ideal. I'm still, like staring you down in order to say I love you, which is so twisted. So that's so interesting then to sort of think about, "I love to hear her rap, I'm aware Muzak has a hipper beat'" because Shakespeare does that too. He talks about her voice, right? "I love to hear her speak, yet well I know that music hath a far more pleasing sound."

AL FILREIS:
There you go. But they're distinction being made in Shakespeare between speaking and music making. The rejoinder to that is a kind of speaking that is musical. Rap. And a music that is awfully not musical. Muzak. And hipper is just a great word to throw in there 'cause it really confuses the value.

JULIA BLOCH:
It's super confusing. Like Muzak is anti-hip music. Muzak is not hip at all.

LARISSA LAI:
Well, Mullen is also really thinking about like, you know, contemporary 20th century consumption. Like with all of the brand names Red Lobster, Liquid Paper, Shakey's Pizza Parlor, and then Muzak, of course, belongs to the elevator in any of these places. And the Twinkie, too.

AL FILREIS:
And minty-fresh mouthwash isn't technically a capitalizable product, but it is ad language. It's ad lingo. So we add that to it.

LARISSA LAI:
Which in Shakespeare's moment, that sort of hyper capitalization is not really a thing yet. And so she's taking that up and sort of seeing how the things that he observed are extended even more deeply into the present moment with really not that much of a shift except for that it requires in terms of the logic, I mean, but it requires a language that ramps it, right? So we can see it for the present.

MAXE CRANDALL:
That makes sense to me, Larissa, Especially in the last line. And it's tied back to advertising.

AL FILREIS:
It's time for us to offer final thoughts. This is for those of you who had long flights and thought many thoughts that haven't been expressed yet. So I give a chance for you to add one. So who wants to start? Maxe, I know you have lots more to say. What one thing would you like to add?

MAXE CRANDALL:
I was thinking about Muse and Drudge, Mullen's prior book, thinking about the poems we read today and sort of just speculating about how the muse is something she's interested in. And, as I was thinking, it made me interested in the muse as a construction and as a place of inspiration. And it made me think about the artist Mickalene Thomas' work, who is someone else I think of who works from Muse. And specifically with Thomas, I think the Muse is a queer space, is a space where we can work on intimacy, where for Thomas, it's about working on aesthetics. But I think, you know, for Mullen, it makes me wanna keep thinking with Mullen about the muse.

AL FILREIS:
Great. I'm glad you brought that up, because we didn't talk specifically about the muse in our conversations, but, Julia Bloch, final thought.

JULIA BLOCH:
I keep going back to the migratory words in 'Sleeping with the Dictionary' and migratory birds, and I was googling like, what? Why do we have migratory birds? I mean, I know kind of like generally, but and I found out that they are driven not just by mental maps but also by celestial ones and that they aid in the movement of other species. And so it made me think about how these poems are driven by mental maps and possibly celestial maps as well. And I loved that element of mysticism. To be clear, the birds is my word. It's not Harryette Mullen's bird. I'm just assuming there's a pun here, but it's in there.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. Doesn't alphabetism in earlier centuries prior to the enlightenment particularly, or in cultures like Eastern Hasidic Jewry, where mysticism is associated with alphabetism and we think of alphabetism as a very ordered, rational thing. But actually it's very celestial, very mystical, very crazy.

JULIA BLOCH:
Yes, absolutely.

AL FILREIS:
And that's sort of, you know, and the migratory birds are that mystical. Larissa Lai, final thought?

LARISSA LAI:
Oh, my pressure's on. Yeah. I think what I would say about reading these two poems and thinking about them with the three of you is, I really learned from Mullen a complex, loving and interesting way of talking back to Cannon, which in this historical moment, the one in which we're having where, you know, so many not just I was gonna say some of the kids, but really so many of us, there's so much enraging going on around us, it's really hard to go back to Shakespeare or to go back to the dictionary with love and take up the engagement, take an engagement with those things in their specificity to continue to dream with them. And I think that's really important in this present moment. And she shows us how to do it in a really beautiful kind of way.

AL FILREIS:
Thank you. My final thought is just autobiographical. I didn't sleep with a dictionary, but I slept with the World Book Encyclopedia and I never got past C. A is a pretty big volume. B not so much for some reason, but C is a pretty big volume and it's heavy, and I kept hitting my nose. I think one of the reasons my nose is so schnozzola-like is because I get hit by the C, the binding of the C. Anyway, that experience was as a young person. I had my own room, so I was alone. It was kind of scary. And the C, which I never got to D, the C taught me all kinds of C words and also became my buddy. And I'm sure that if anybody did a transcription of what I said that year, I think I was fifth grade or something, I would have used a lot of words that began with the letter C and I just this 'Sleeping with the Dictionary' in a funny way, brought me back to the enormous pleasure, self-made pleasure of escaping into some weird alphabetism. Well, we like to end poem talk with a minute or two of gathering paradise, which is a chance for several of us or all of you, all of us, if we're quick to hail, commend someone or something going on in the poetry world or the art world or any world, really, Who's ready?

Julia, did you come prepared?

JULIA BLOCH:
Yes.

AL FILREIS:
You always do.

JULIA BLOCH:
I did, in a sense. So, yeah, I was looking through Harryette Mullen's book of essays and interviews called The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be. And what I'm about to say just follows really nicely from what Larissa just said about Cannon. There's this line in this essay that Harryette Mullen has about Gertrude Stein, and she's writing about the problematic race politics of Gertrude Stein's work. And then she writes, "I feel free to claim Gertrude as a literary fore parent, even though I am not so sure she would want to claim me as an heir. And although I claim her as an ancestor, I cannot say that I am a devout ancestor worshipper." So I just really appreciate it whenever poets acknowledge the vexed nature of omage and indebtedness and we see that certainly in all the work that we've been talking about today.

AL FILREIS:
Perfect. And a really great way to end our conversation about the rejoinder to Shakespeare, which is complicated. Maxe, gather some paradise.

MAXE CRANDALL:
OK, I brought my copy of the Sawako Nakayasu's Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From. This is out from Wave Books, 2020. And this book knocked my socks off. It's such an amazing performance based experimental work. Like, Oh gosh, what can I say about it? That is about translation. It's about trying new ways, new forms for anything. And it's just it's so big, it's so dense, and I love it.

AL FILREIS:
And there are so many rewritings and writings through. Did your copy have that little index?

MAXE CRANDALL:
Yes. And..

AL FILREIS:
So the index you read and it tells you some of the sources. I mean, the one poem is a rewriting or a response to Bob Dylan's nuclear annihilation poem or 'The Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall'. Another is a rewriting of a Robert Frost sonnet. There's some great stuff going on.

MAXE CRANDALL:
And I heard her on Zoom read this poem called 'Board Game' that I hope everyone will go find. And it was so powerful and amazing. It was like nothing I've ever heard.

AL FILREIS:
Fantastic. For Poem Talk listeners two episodes from now will have been... There's my tense again a recording of a poem talk episode including Caroline Bergvall and Caroline and I have co-curated that poem talk and it's gonna be about four or five poems from that book. Yay. So stay tuned. Larissa Lai, gather some paradise.

LARISSA LAI:
Oh, I think I'll do a little shout out for an interview that's coming up on the Tea House website soon of Karina Vernon talking about her book, The Black Prairie Archive. So it's this wonderful compendium that this Black Albertan scholar has just gathered of a long standing black poetic presence in Alberta, like over the last couple of centuries. A pretty amazing book, and I'm looking forward to hearing the interview myself. It's been put together by a couple of my grad students, so I'll shout out. I'll shout that out.

AL FILREIS:
Fantastic. OK, we'll look for that. My gathering paradise for me is Larissa Lai's ‘Iron Goddess of Mercy', a poem, and I wonder if I could cede over my gathering paradise time, to ask you to read one of the sections. One of the dear freedom of speech sections. This is 66 to 67. Would you?

LARISSA LAI:
OK. Yeah, sure.

AL FILREIS:
OK. Thanks.

LARISSA LAI:
OK, so this is fragment 23. Dear freedom of speech. You leech grinding undercover as democratic process. I saw you on the counter at Montana's wiping beef grease from your beard. Weird or feared your furies dreary trolling beneath the bridge of birds webbing our digital sky. You swing the pubic of public opinion, spinning the rotten onion one fart at a time, lining your pockets with the proceeds of Wall Street greed, feeding at the trough of rough gulf and grim bills passed by bullies in the gamer's chambers disingenuous corridors of power. You were beautiful once. A bunch of daisies. A bed of posies. Loaning your armor to all and sundry as part of the parcel colonialism stressed as democracy. I'm not too shy to wear that dress. Battered and tattered, ill fitting in the hip and crotch and screaming. Gotcha. Mad as a crow on the hatters wire every time the wrong body steps out of line. It's fine. I bide my time dreaming signs and pigeons passing on the truth of the park stark as cop cars patrolling my neighbor's hood.

Gratitude says, Be good. We thought you'd be nice, expedient, obedient. Take the blunt force of Maxwell's pilfered hammer sold down the shiver or horse traded down by the tracks where hackers anonymous and raced up only posthumously, so some young guy can make a career. Drink beer paid by your fear. Clarity. Charity. The mock of democracy is that you're only meant to adore it. Adore the white man's exploration. The habit of inhabitation is the straitjacket of race. And know your place. Face it, the encounter is only for the Chinaman if she wipes it down herself.

AL FILREIS:
Wonderful. Thank you. People are tempted to snap or something. That's ‘Iron Goddess of Mercy', a poem by Larissa Lai. Well, that's all the specials at Red Lobster. We have time for our poem Talk today. Poem Talk at the Writers House is a collaboration of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing CPCW and the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania and the Poetry Foundation, poetryfoundation.org. Thanks so much to my guest Julia Bloch, Maxe Crandall and Larissa Lai. What a great reunion. Oh, my gosh. And thanks so much, Julia, Maxe, Larissa and to Poem Talk's Director and Engineer behind the audio and behind two cameras. Don't know how he does it by himself. There's three of him, I think Zach Carduner and to Poem Talk's editor, the same amazing Zach Carduner and a shout out to Nathan and Elizabeth Light for their very generous support of Poem Talk. Next time on Poem Talk, I'll be talking... Two days from now, actually, I'll be talking with Timothy Yu coming in from Wisconsin and Joe Park and Lindsey Warren, who's coming up from Delaware about several poems from Divya Victor's new book, Curb.

This is Al Filreis, and I hope you'll join us next month for that or another episode of Poem Talk.