Harryette Mullen Bugs the New York School

Harryette Mullen’s 1992 poetry collection S*PeRM**K*T (pronounced Spermkit/Supermarket) was inspired most directly not by the New York School, but an earlier avant-garde; the book is a tribute/variation/response to the food section of Gertrude Stein’s maddening prose poem Tender Buttons. In her introduction to Graywolf’s reprint of the volume, Mullen says she was fascinated by Stein’s “meditation on the interior lives of women and the material culture of domesticity.” She adds that she’s departed from Stein’s “cryptic code” in order to “recycle and reconfigure language from a public sphere that includes mass media and political discourse.”

Mullen has acknowledged the New York School as an influence, and she’s no doubt aware that the appropriation of the jargon of the public sphere bumps her out of modernism and into post modernism—from the bafflingly intricate structures of Joyce or Pound to the pop-art of Andy Warhol, and the fractured Popeyes and improbable aviatrix’s of John Ashbery. Mullen retains some of Stein’s hermeticism, but it’s a very public private language, like a secret message spelled out in supermarket packaging.

Kills bugs dead. Redundancy is syntactical overkill. A pin-prick of peace at the end of the tunnel of a nightmare night in a roach motel. Their noise infects the dream. In black kitchens they foul the food, walk on our bodies as we sleep over oceans of pirate flags. Skull and crossbones, they crunch like candy. When we die they will eat us, unless we kill them first. Invest in better mousetraps. Take no prisoners on board ship, to rock the boat, to violate our beds with pestilence. We dream the dream of extirpation. Wipe out a species, with God at our side. Annihilate the insects. Sterilize the filthy vermin.

The prose poem “Kill bugs dead” is a good example of Mullen’s allusively telegraphic and self-referential style—or of her “syntactical overkill.” Starting with the Raid bug spray slogan, the poem skitters around concepts and phrases associated with roaches and other pests. The roach motel in which bugs are caught morphs into the roach-infested hotels and apartments in which “they foul the food.” From there we’re transferred to the deck of a pirate ship suggested by the symbols on flags and bug killer: “Skull and crossbones, they crunch like candy.”

Mullen’s macabre leaps, and her surreal juxtapositions of clichéd balderdash (“the end of the tunnel of a nightmare night in a roach”) is a very individual rejiggering of O’Hara, Koch, and the gang. In addition to the skewed stew of linguistic levels, though, I think the New York school offered Mullen a way to approach identity as a surface rhetoric, or a rhetoric of surface, rather than as confession.

Mullen doesn’t offer anecdotes about or biographical details of her experience as a Black woman in “Kills bugs dead” (or in her work in general). But the poem is nonetheless a squirming, uncomfortable meditation on race and racism. We find the roaches “In black kitchens”—which refers to darkened spaces at night, but which also means kitchens in the homes of Black people, who via segregation, job discrimination, and racism are often relegated to substandard housing.

The roaches that “walk on our bodies as we sleep over oceans of pirate flags” are walking in particular on Black people’s bodies. But in this context, oceans and piracy recall the Middle Passage, and the slave trade in which white people stole Black people’s most precious property: their own body, labor, and lives.

The roaches are suddenly crawling around a slaver’s hold, at which point (like a reverse Gregor Samsa) they may not exactly be roaches, but a metaphor for white people’s battening on the people they enslaved. “When we die they will eat us, unless we kill them first” is about insects. But it’s also potentially about the exploiters, who crunch up souls like candy, and continue to eat through children and children’s children—“to violate our beds with pestilence.”

White people are roaches for a line or two. But then Mullen shuffles terms again; vermin and the vermin-consumed, are, in a mirror of fascist logic, reversed, and the poem shifts to the language of genocidal violence. “Wipe out a species, with God at our side… Sterilize the filthy vermin.” The advertising jargon of pest control is also the jargon of mass murder, because marginalized people are linguistically pinned to the parasites who victimize them.

New York School poetry is rarely so politically pointed. But there’s a parallel in Mullen to James Schuyler’s assurance that “Words' meanings count, aside from what they weigh.” Words and language aren’t just important for their depths, but for their surfaces—identity isn’t just the intense inner experience of self, but also the labels through which people are casually, and even callously, placed on this grocery shelf rather than that one.

For Schuyler (and many of the New York School) the labels in the poem are a mercurial queer identity which slyly acknowledges a self by demurely not acknowledging the self. (“What is, is by its nature, on display” as Schuyler says.)

In contrast, Mullens isn’t playing with the open secrets of the closet. Instead, her poem is about the playful and innocuous language of marketing molts and shudders and gives birth out of multiple eggs to the language of hate and extermination. As critic David Caplan says of a different Mullen poem, her work is “teasing and unnerving”—and I think unnerving in part because it’s teasing. “Kill bugs dead” is fun… and then it’s not so fun after all. Identity is built out of jokes, history, a rhetoric of metaphor, disgust, and panic. Mullen constructs the puzzle box maze of the poem, but those words also snap shut on her and hold her. (“Invest in better mousetraps.”) We are the words that say what we are (“The noise affects the dream”). That can be freeing as a poet, since poets write words, not the other way around. Unless, Mullen suggests, they don’t.

This isn’t to say that Mullen is a New York School poet solely, or even primarily. She reads widely and has myriad influences—the Language school, Black arts, surrealism. The fact that the New York School is among those is in part a sign of its ubiquity; much of the best contemporary poetry today takes for granted the New York School’s scrambling of sources, fondness of collage, embrace of silliness, and sideways approach to self. The New York School is gone, but its many children and their many limbs continue to crawl across the page.