A Literary Analysis of the Poems by Harryette Mullen Essay

Harryette MullenTrimmings is a kind of list poem about clothing and accessories, and each oneof those poems is also about woman or the idea or representation of woman.. . . .These poems are all about clothing and accessories that women are worn. And in eachpoem you have the same operation over and over again, is that a metonymical description ofa woman in terms of what she's wearing. So that in that last poem the two ideas comingtogether are the mermaid and the fishnet stockings. From Farah Griffen, Michael Magee, and Kristen Gallagher, "A Conversation with Harryette Mullen" (1997). Click here for the text of the entire interview.Trimmings was in part a reflection on the marginality of women and of"the feminine" in language. (As well as a reflection on the feminization andmarginalization of poetry, and certainly my own marginality as a black woman in relationto the dominant cultural construction of the feminine.) It is a "minor" genre,the prose poem. It's also a list poem which I thought of as a form congenial to women, whoare always making lists. Of course, the catalogues (of heroes, ships, and so forth) inepic poems evoke a masculine tradition, not to mention David Letterman's lists. However, awhole poem composed of a list of women's garments, undergarments, accessoriescertainly seems marginal minor, perhaps even frivolous trivial. Actually itwas an inside joke for me to begin Trimmings with "a belt" since a convention ofepic poetry is to begin "in the middle." So that joke I was having with myselfwas about the epic poem versus the little list poem, which has become a workshop clichein this case a list of feminine apparel. Writing the poem also involved a process of making lists. First, I made a list of wordsreferring to anything worn by women. Each word on that list became the topic of a prosepoem (I started with clothing, then decided to include accessories. There were a fewthings I decided not to...