Harryette Mullen: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo of Harryette Mullen by Hank Lazer, Venice, CA, 2007

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We Are Not Responsible

We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives.

We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions.

We do not endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts.

We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.

 

Your ticket does not guarantee that we will honor your reservations.

In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on.

Before taking off, please extinguish all smoldering resentments.

 

If you cannot understand English, you will be moved out of the way.

In the event of a loss, you’d better look out for yourself.

Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle

your frightful claims. Our handlers lost your luggage and we

are unable to find the key to your legal case.

 

You were detained for interrogation because you fit the profile.

You are not presumed to be innocent if the police

have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet.

It’s not our fault you were born wearing a gang color.

 It is not our obligation to inform you of your rights.

 

Step aside, please, while our officer inspects your bad attitude.

You have no rights that we are bound to respect.

Please remain calm, or we can’t be held responsible

for what happens to you.

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Harryette Mullen’s books include Recyclopedia (Graywolf, 2006), winner of a PEN

Beyond Margins Award, and Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California,

2002), a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and

Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A collection of essays and interviews, The Cracks

Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be, was published in 2012 by

University of Alabama. Graywolf published Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka

Diary in 2013. She teaches courses in American poetry, African American literature,

and creative writing at UCLA. [See this link for more poems and information.]

________________________________________________________________________________

         Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Club Scene), 2013; acrylic and glitter on unstretched canvas.

Comments

[Diane Ward]

Thank you, Harryette and Terence. Such an exquisitely crafted poem, confronting the contradictions among cause & effect, sentiment and obstinance. The on-high voice slips from its defended spot. Beautiful photo and artwork as well!

[Howard Bass]

An excellent choice, Terence, appropriate the tenor (or even the bass) of our turbulent times, our potential descent into an authoritarian police state. Many thanks to you and to Harryette Mullen.

[lally]

BAM! perfectly structured and potent

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Diane. Glad you like it.

[Terence Winch]

Howard---thanks for the comment.

[Bernard Welt]

Thank you very much for this poem, Harryette Mullen. It can be tricky these days to write about where we really are now in a way that invites the reader to recognize what we all know but don't always say. It's the rueful familiarity that's going to send me off to see more of your work.
In other words: Your poem is important to us, even when we are experiencing a particularly high volume of poetry. Please continue to write poems and we will read them at our earliest opportunity, and act accordingly.

[Amy Gerstler]

Harryette Mullen: her wit, dart-sharp, hits the bull's eye... lampooning our rules, our excuses, our regulatory mumbo jumbo, our disclaimers, the contradictions in the ways we treat each other. Her critiques are always made with great intelligence and heart.

[Barbara Henning]

Thanks again Harryette for your witty, politically unravelling poem, especially important today with the tangling webs of lies. I remember talking about it when I was interviewing you for our book: Looking up Harryette Mullen (Belladonna 2011). I thought this might be of interest to others so here's a little transcript of our phone discussion in 2009 :

BH: Lorenzo writes that in “We Are Not Responsible,” you exploit the language employed by bureaucracies, corporations, to issue disclaimers and liabilities limiting self-serving lies and safety instructions. I thought it did that, but even more. Did you take this language from somewhere else?

HM: In a general way it’s about the social contract. The borrowed language in the poem runs the gamut from airline safety instructions and corporate disclaimers to the Supreme Court’s ruling against Dred Scott. This was written before 9/11, when profiling was widely accepted as necessary for security. But even before that terrorist attack, racial profiling targeted people of color as potential criminals, as in the police shooting of Amadou Diallo. We who consider ourselves to be law-abiding citizens have surrendered a lot of our freedom in order to feel safe. The poem plays back the language of authority in what seemed to me a logical movement from the rules and regulations we must obey as airline travelers to the whole system of laws derived from original documents proclaiming rights of white male property owners. What might be unnerving when I read this poem to an audience is that I keep repeating the word “we.” Instead of “us and them,” it’s “we and you,” so it’s a bit skewed when I speak in the voice of the authoritative “we” versus “you” whose rights are threatened or violated.

[alison saar]

to Harryette our powerful wordsmith who wroughts their words into our weapons

Gratitude

[Peter Kearney]

Each line a surprise, starting with a familiar demurral, than exploding into something witty and wicked.

[Dr. Earle Hitchner]

In this poem of incisively executed, antipodal twists and turns by Harryette Mullen, these two lines jumped out at me: "You are not presumed to be innocent if the police / have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet." I immediately flashed back to Amadou Diallo, killed on February 4, 1999, by four NYC police officers when he pulled out a wallet from his jacket in an apparent effort to prove his identity. The police fired 41 shots, 19 of which hit Diallo, who was unarmed. The incident inspired Bruce Springsteen to compose the song "American Skin (41 Shots),” as pertinent today as it was in June 2000 when I heard him perform it with the E Street Band in Madison Square Garden. It was a powerful moment of anguish and defiance. A poet as skilled, engaged, and necessary as Mullen keeps that same tendrilous flame lit. She knows historical amnesia is a choice, not a condition.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Earle. Let it never be said that you don't leave great comments.