Harryette Mullen
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The Second Person
These are just a few poems that make clever, heartrending, enigmatic, and startling uses of the second person. I am fascinated by you--the second person pronoun--because of its capaciousness and changeability. There is the you that refers just to you, the singular you; but then there's the plural you, the group of you, the masses of all of you; there's the you you that is all of us or all of them at once; there's the you that is actually a part of me. I love second person address because it seems to lay bare the communicative thrust behind all acts of poetry. To invoke you in my poem calls attention to the fact that--whether you are out there and listening or not, whether you are specific or general, living or dead, human or nonhuman--you exist, I remember you, and I am trying to reach you.
View playlistHe do the police in different voices
“He do the police in different voices” That’s how the orphan Sloppy reads the paper to his foster mother in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and that’s what Eliot titled The Wasteland before Pound crossed it out. Have you often resisted the injunction to “find your voice”? Thought that it’s our own unique mission, our racket, our sensitivity as poets, to be able (and allowed) to shift, voice to voice, register to register, sometimes within a single line? Here are polyvocal poems, poems from different tenors, with addressors/addressees that change between the beginning and the end; and works that go from bathos to desperation, science to prayer, strophe to declaration. Because what’s the use of a simple leap? Like the great drag queen Dorian Corey said: “If you shoot an arrow, and it goes real high… Hooray for you.”
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