And Mullen jokes about her fellow minority graduate students at Santa Cruz,
who used the argument that it was all very well for white male poets to re-
nounce “voice” but that “We need our subjectivity.” Either extreme, she de-
cided, seemed unsatisfactory. In her drive to problematize her own subjec-
tivity, she began to incorporate into the Language poetics that animated
Trimmings, her book of prose poems based on Stein’s Tender Buttons, the
actual verbal games of her own culture—the childhood jump-rope rhymes
and “pseudo-courtship, formulaic exchanges” of preadolescence, like the
male “What’s cookin’ good lookin’?” with its female response, “Ain’t nothin’
cookin’ but the beans in the pot, and they wouldn’t be if the water wasn’t
hot.”
Trimmings is a wonderful example of the new fusion of Language poetics
and a renewed “Personism,” to use Frank O’Hara’s phrase. In an interview
with Barbara Henning, Mullen remarks that “Tender Buttons appeals to me
because it so thoroughly defamiliarizes the domestic, making familiar ‘ob-
jects, rooms, food’ seem strange and new, as does the simple, everyday lan-
guage used to describe common things.”^21 But Mullen’s own version of Te n -
der Buttons also becomes, as she puts it, “a re®ection on the feminization and
marginalization of poetry: a whole poem composed of a list of women’s gar-
ments, undergarments, & accessories certainly seems marginal & minor, per-
haps even frivolous & trivial” (Henning, Interview). Consider the following:
Tender white kid, off-white tan. Snug black leather, second skin. Fits
like a love, an utter other uttered. Bag of tricks, slight hand preserved,
a dainty. A solid color covers while rubber is protection. Tight is tender,
softness cured. Alive and warm, some animal hides. Ghosts wear ¤n-
gers, delicate wrists.^22This glove poem takes its inspiration from Stein but is really quite differ-
ent. Mullen keeps her eye more ¤rmly on the object than does Stein, whose
cushions, umbrellas, and hats quickly give way to other related items, often
quite abstract. Mullen’s poem immediately raises the issue of color with the
punning of “Tender white kid,” and “off-white tan.” For the poet, the “Snug
black leather” is in fact “second skin,” and so it “Fits like a love” even as it is
“utter other,” with its play on “udder”—the female body—and the need to
speak, to give poetic voice to what has been voiceless. Further, the emphasis
on “utter other” leads to classi¤cation: rubber gloves, leather gloves, gloves
that are too tight, gloves that ¤t. But also an unease as to the source of leather
gloves that is quite un-Steinian: “Alive and warm, some animal hides,” where
Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents 167