Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang and Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge

Abstract

Chapter 6 considers Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge (1995), based in part on Clarence Major’s Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang and the American Heritage Dictionary, in the context of the OuLiPo and Mullen’s other poetic engagements with the dictionary. Through a careful attention to her specific dictionary borrowings and the cryptic play of anagram, palindrome, and paragram in Muse & Drudge, the chapter explicates the poem’s argument for and enactment of miscegenation. Drawing on Michael Riffaterre’s theory of the hypogram and Jacques Derrida’s theory of the signature, the chapter uncovers the motivating poetic force of the proper name in Mullen’s poem. Together, these readings complicate the received critical accounts of Mullen’s sources and the very ways in which we imagine the relation between source-text and poem.