Sat up sleepless in the Long Night Long, love
Stood me up. Stayed away though its
Doing so stirred me. Wine on my shirtsleeve,
Wind on my neck. (36)Again, love standing the poet up, again that ugly word “neck” in ¤nal posi-
tion. But here in Mackey’s jazz-inspired lyric, rhy thm is quite other—an al-
lusion to the Dogon my th of the Andoumboulou fusing with the “attempt
to sing the blues,” as in the drumbeat of:
Tilted sky, turned earth. Bent wheel, burnt
we.
Bound I. Insubordinate
uswhere “we” is what’s left when the wheel is bent and “I,” bound to the wheel,
becomes part of that “we” or “Insubordinate / us.”
Nathaniel Mackey’s poem serves as a reminder that even as women poets
associated with post-structuralist experimentation were gaining recogni-
tion, persons of color had rarely been included. And here we come to a major
shift in the nineties, when what could loosely be called a Language poetics
has come into contact with one of color. A signal example is the poetry of
Harryette Mullen, to which I now turn.
Musing & Drudging
In a 1997 interview for Combo #1, Harryette Mullen recalls her own initiation
into poetry:
I had come from Texas to Northern California. I was in graduate school
at Santa Cruz. I was reading all of this theory as a student in Literature
at UC–Santa Cruz. So, at that point when I would... be taken to these
talks and readings... I had a context for it.... although of course no
one at the university was dealing with the work of the [Language] po-
ets. But [they] read the same theory that my professors did—in fact
they probably read twice as much, and had read the same theory ear-
lier than a lot of my professors had, and they were highly intellectual
poets.... and they were saying interesting things.... for instance the
idea of problematizing the subject.^20166 Chapter 8