places where the poem drifts between intentional utterance and improvisa-
tional wordplay.” And she talks of the poem’s amalgam of “topical references
to subculture and mass culture, its shredded, embedded, and buried allu-
sions, its drift between meaning and sound, as well as its abrupt shifts in
tone or emotional affect” (Henning, Interview). Metonymy and pun, already
much in evidence in the earlier Trimmings, are the key tropes, but they func-
tion in a traditional lyric form that ironizes their mode of operation, and is
itself ironized by these ¤gures. In the words of a later stanza:
down there shuf®ing coal
humble materials hold
vestiges of toil
the original cutting tool
(Muse & Drudge 11)where the consonance of “coal”—“hold”—“toil”—“tool” contradicts the bal-
lad account of the miner’s dreary work routine. Lyric and linguistic play
combine to create a vision at once detached and oddly “personal.”
Caveat Lector
I come back now to the question of “innovation.” To call Muse & Drudge
“innovative” is not especially helpful, because it would be just as accurate to
say that as the very title, with its nominal/verbal collocation of inspiration
and hard work, suggests, the book is quite traditional in its respect for the
lyric contract, the emphasis on sound structure, the personal signature, and
the mimetic grounding of experience. What matters more than “innova-
tion,” I think, is that Muse & Drudge is a book that speaks very much to its
own time, that taps into various writings and speech formations in ways that
are compelling. If Mullen’s is a “theoretical” poetry, it is one that has deftly
internalized the theories in question.
But—and this is where the situation has become problematic—such inter-
nalization is hard earned. Like any mode, the production of “text without
walls,” as McCaffery called it, can become a mere tick. And so can the theory
that ostensibly animates it. One of the most problematic manifestations of
what we might call post–Language poetics is that in the wake of the founda-
tional theory that ¤lled the pages of avant-garde little magazines of the
eighties, poets have engaged in a good bit of “soft” theorizing. This has been
especially true of women poets, perhaps because they have felt, quite under-
standably, excluded from the earlier formulations of poetics (a situation that
Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents 171