Well, first of all, I love Harryette Mullen. Her work is oftentimes engaged in what I think of as like a super serious kind of play, whether she’s using tons of puns or a lot of signifying techniques. Harryette Mullen goes in and addresses language, as language is a tool for power, and because it’s a tool for power it can be a tool for oppression. So Harryette Mullen oftentimes engages language as a kind of a plaything, but is always aware that it’s volatile, like somebody juggling nitroglycerin.

For me, one of the things that I really love about this poem is how it takes official language, or officious language—you know, the first line, “We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives,” riffs off of “We are not responsible for your lost or stolen items.” Which is, when you think about it as a sign that might be placed in a place of business, or a parking lot or something like that, is kind of an audacious thing to say: that even though you are here, under our auspices, it is not our responsibility if something bad happens to you. And there’s something about that that just strikes me, and it’s always stricken me as, well, a kind of passing on of the need to care for each other. “I am not responsible for what happens to you.” And, of course, Harryette Mullen amplifies that by overlapping that language that’s oftentimes about property—you know, your lost and stolen items—with humans. Relatives. Now, of course, the history of the United States of America includes several dark centuries in which a number of people’s relatives were someone else’s items. And so, in that moment, we have this collision between these two languages: the language of a kind of passing off of responsibility and, subtly, a language that is pointing at responsibility in that same line.

From there, the poem moves from a more kind of passed off hostility to these constant threats—“We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions” —all the way to “Please remain calm, or we can’t be held responsible for what happens to you.” It reminds me about what happens when, say, a person is shot by an officer, and that officer is not guilty of murder. It’s sort of like, well, apparently this person didn’t die, or wasn’t killed? Or something happened…because a kind of official language, a state language, protects itself. And because this is also the same language that creates laws and authorizes power, that protection is sort of self-circular, self-serving, or just a kind of a logic that is not airtight, but airless; it doesn’t allow for certain life to happen. And seeing that move between the kind of historical language to the language of “Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle your frightful claims,” really just demonstrates how this same speech in many ways is just extraordinarily banal; you know, it’s like this sort of dull bureaucratic language. But what happens when dull, airless language takes charge of blood and bone, flesh, and peoples’ lives? What happens when, you know, a kind of antipathy, or an unnatural attempt at neutrality, is there to weigh in on actual human suffering?

So what the poem does, in my estimation, is sort of demonstrates how inhuman that language is, which—when you think about how oftentimes power dehumanizes those it oppresses—to think of that power as inhuman becomes, in that way, a reversal; a kind of radical reversal.

And one of the ways that Harryette Mullen’s work influences me is in how it uses these different registers of language; how it can take language from supermarket advertising (in the case of collections like S*PeRM**K*T, or even Trimmings, or in a collection like Muse and Drudge, where it can range from everything from TV theme song language to old folk songs), and blend them all together into this kind of volatile and oftentimes deeply pleasurable, even, when sometimes it becomes deeply disturbing sort of play with language. And in this way, I mean, in many ways it resembles, I guess we could say, the diversity of American expression. It’s not that the writing is subject to a kind of flow of pop culture that it’s not controlling; like, Harryette Mullen’s definitely holding the remote control and is definitely changing the channels and lingering here and sticking here. She’s turning the dial on her radio station, and occasionally listening to a jingle, and maybe occasionally listening to a verse from an old song. But that kind of volatile mix that doesn’t hold together necessarily—but still, through just this kind of force of personality of it holds together, strikes me in some ways as a very American way of working—a very African American way of working—and, so, a very American way of working in that regard.