For my wildcard post, I was interested in how the academic world responded to the publishing of Trimmings by Harryette Mullen. Gertrude Stein, the poet whom Mullen drew much inspiration from, was a controversial figure in her own right, and I expected to find a similar reaction to Trimmings.
A little bit about Trimmings: A collection of “prose poetry” characterized by lists, descriptions of women’s clothing and accessories in such a way that comments on femininity, stereotypes, and the marginality of women. Inspired by Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Mullen chose to use lists because she “thought of as a form congenial to women, who are always making lists.” At surface-level, these poems might seem trivial and straight forward but the multitude of puns and other play on words contain far deeper implications for Mullen’s thoughts on society.
In the article “Tender Revisions: Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings” by Deborah Mix, Mix investigates the influence from both Stein and experimental black poets on Mullen’s writing. Mix says, “Mullen intervenes not only in a feminist literary tradition, but also in an experimental tradition that has often excluded the voices of women and writers of color”(84). She writes that this is, in fact, in opposition to Gertrude Stein, who was mostly concerned with a feminist approach. Outside influence from African American writers, such as Langston Huges and Zora Neale Hurston, encouraged Mullen to be even more radical than Stein in her approach. Mix believes that Mullen “points her readers towards the possibility of moving outside a consumer-driven culture” (88). She writes about consumer goods in order to point out the flaws they bring to society and how they affect our perception of social order. Mix says, “consumer culture teaches us to desire this kind of sameness as a resolution of economic, social, geographic, and racial distances” (77). Mix celebrates Mullen’s ability to push back this sameness, and even the consumer culture that seems to drive us to be this way.