H.Mull

Harryette Mullen’s “Trimmings” is a very unique and interesting collection and style of poetry. She uses well thought out alliteration, and many plays on words. A perfect example of her plays on words is this poem. “Menswear, the britches. Rosie flies off the handle. Jeans so tight, she pants. Wants to cool out, slacks off.” Many of her poems are short in this book, but this two line poem is a little under average for the book. This is the style that she uses in about half of her poems in this book. By starting a sentence with ‘jeans’ we obviously know she’s talking about pants, then she uses an alternate meaning of the work ‘pants’. Nearly every poem with a human subject is always a woman, and about her clothes. Many times she is wearing extravagantly frilly and laced clothes or sexy skirts, but as in this poem it is about a girl in average clothes, yet there is almost always the correlation between the woman subject and the clothes she is wearing. The poems are all individual but are very similar in style. Here is another poem nearly identical in style:

            “Dress shields, armed guard at breastwork, a hard mail covering. Brazen privates, testing their mettle. Bolder soldiers make advances, breasting hills. Whose armor is brassier.”

This obviously speaks about soldiers and their armor, but there are so many gender allusions that Mullen had made. The first word ‘dress’ has the two meanings of a womans dress, or the fancy intricate armor of the medieval times (or a time period with similar military traits.) “armed guard at breastwork” refers to breast being the breast plate of armor, but is again correlated with a woman’s breast. “a hard mail covering” is literal being plate mail, but it also could be “a hard male covering” because men were the only ones who were knights. “Testing their mettle” has the double meaning of testing their courage and their literal metal swords and armor. “Breasting hills” is another female allusion, and “Whose armor is brassier” can be taken as brass-ier, like whose armor is the most brass and strongest metal, but also brassiere as in a woman bra, which is correlated with ‘breastwork’, ’hard mail’, and ‘breasting hills.’

Mullen’s poems seem to be sporadic to the reader because you never really know which direction she will go in. The sentence structure is broken up in strange ways, so for you grammar lovers it may seem strange. The poems don’t seem to have easy flow, by that I mean a steady rhythm, to them. Unlike the song “Hickory Dickory Dock” where the rhythm never changes, there is not usually an establishment of rhythm, and if there is it is broken very quickly. Many of these poems I have read multiple times over just to try and get the gist of what Mullen is saying.

The reason why I love this book, and what I try to do a lot for my writings, is emulate the world play that she uses, like the line “jeans so tight, she pants”. This can add a lot to a poem by using one word multiple different ways in the same poem or even line. Her rhythm being very broken is something that a lot of people struggle with because you almost want that rhythm so you can read it with ease. I would defiantly suggest that people take a look at her book “Trimmings” because it is very different from the other Harryette Mullen poems we have read in class and it has all sorts of cool and interesting techniques that everyone can incorporate into their writings. Plus all the poems of this book are pretty short so for ADD people like me it is easy to read, because the poems are too short for you to become distracted from. I have two of her other books and will begin reading them shortly, although they are both in two completely different styles. Overall I love this book and absolutely recommend it.