Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

der to construct a cultural and material history of African-America’s

embrace and transformation of writing technologies one might ask

how writing and text functioned in a folk milieu that valued a script

for its cryptographic incomprehensibility and uniqueness rather than

its legibility or reproducibility.(36)

Here is a theoretical project that has very real poetic implications, involving,
as it does, the struggle against the received idea that one is either “black or
innovative.” “Muse & Drudge,” Mullen explains, “really was my attempt to
show that I can do both at the same time.”
Muse & Drudge was written, seemingly against the “Language” grain, in
irregularly rhyming and heavily syncopated ballad quatrains. Its eighty pages
have four quatrains per page, with no stops or indeed any punctuation except
for the capitalization of proper nouns and apostrophes marking the posses-
sive, as in “galleys upstart crow’s nest.” Each page, as Kate Pearcy points out
in an excellent essay on the book, seems to be a discrete unit, unbroken dur-
ing oral performance.^24 Accordingly, the lines of contiguity—that is, the net-
work of metonymic associations—are offset by an oral paradigm that insures
temporal reception of a given four-quatrain unit. Consider the following:

Sapphire’s lyre styles

plucked eyebrows

bow lips and legs

whose lives are lonely too

my last nerve’s lucid music

sure chewed up the juicy fruit

you must don’t like my peaches

there’s some left on the tree

you’ve had my thrills

a reefer a tub of gin

don’t mess with me I’m evil

I’m in your sin

clipped bird eclipsed moon

soon no memory of you

no drive or desire survives

you ®utter invisible still^25

Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents 169