On S*PeRM**K*T Essay, Research Paper
Harryette Mullen
[S*PeRM**K*T] is the word "supermarket" with some letters missing and
asterisks replace the missing letters. The missing letters just happen to be U-A-R-E, so
it’s like "you are what you eat." This is a book about food, you know, and
everything that’s in the supermarket. This is…Trimmings is a kind of list poem about
clothing and accessories, and each one of those poems is also about woman or the idea or
representation of woman. And "Spermkit," or "Supermarket," is sort of
like your shopping list when you go to the supermarket. So, each one of the aisles that
you would find and the things that you would find in the supermarket, that’s how this book
is organized. And it also has some nice black and white pictures that Gil Ott took himself
in his local supermarket of the meat wrapped in plastic and the baked goods in that kind
of plastic that I don’t think they even can recycle.
. . . .
The baby food poem . . . actually refers back to my childhood when you would walk down
the baby food aisle and every baby was pink and blonde and blue-eyed, as if this is what a
baby looks like all over the world, or all over this country, that’s what a baby looks
like. At least that has changed. A lot of these poems have to do with commercials that I
saw when I was a child.
From Farah Griffen, Michael Magee, and Kristen Gallagher, "A Conversation with
Harryette Mullen" (1997). Click here
for the text of the entire interview.
Harryette Mullen
[I]t’s about the lines at the supermarket and about the lines on a page and, well, the
supermarket as an environment of language. There is so much writing in a supermarket.
There are signs everywhere, labels on products, and I liked the idea of the supermarket as
a linguistic realm where there are certain genres of writing. Instructions as a genre of
writing. Every trip to the supermarket became research and a possible excursion into
language. . . .The supermarket becomes the reference point, the metonymic reservoir of
ways that we see the world and ourselves in it. We are consumers; that’s how we are
constructed as citizens. People consume more than they vote. It’s more important what you
buy than what candidates you vote for. That has overtaken our sense of ourselves as
citizens in a civic society.
. . . .
[I]t’s the woman with her shopping list in the supermarket, because women are still
constructed through advertising as the consumers who bring these objects into the
household. S*PeRM**K*T was about my recollections of jingles that have embedded
themselves in my brain. We used to have to memorize poetry, the nuns made us do that in
Catholic school, and we had to do that also for church programs. It’s harder for me to
recall some of that poetry than these ads, partly because the ads are just so quick, but
twenty-year-old jingles are embedded in my brain and I thought about the power of those
jingles, that mnemonic efficiency of poetry, of the quick line that is economical and
concise and compressed. Even more than Trimmings S*PeRM**K*T is trying to think
about the language in which we are immersed, bombarded with language that is commercial,
that is a debased language. Those jingles are based in something that is very traditional,
which is the proverb, the aphorism. Those are the models, so I try to think back through
the commercial and the advertising jingle, through the political slogan, back to the
proverb and the aphorism to that little nugget of collected wisdom, and to think about the
language that is so commercialized, debased, and I try to recycle it. The idea of
recycling is very much a part of S*PeRM**K*T, to take this detritus and to turn
it into art. I was definitely thinking about visual artists who do that, collage artists
and environmental artists, and things like the Heidelberg House in Detroit, where people
take actual trash and turn it into a work of art.
From Cynthia Hogue, "Interview with Harryette Mullen." Postmodern Culture
(1999). Click here for the text of the entire interview.
Harryette Mullen
[B]asically you could say Trimmings is objects and "Supermarket" is
food. . . . I was thinking about domestication, about the role of women, women as
consumers, women having . . . a supposed power as consumers but also being disempowered in
other ways — and also disempowered in some ways as consumers even as they’re being
appealed to — because of the limited images that are available in the marketplace. You
know, you can’t necessarily buy who you really want to be. You have to buy the available
images.
From Farah Griffen, Michael Magee, and Kristen Gallagher, "A Conversation with
Harryette Mullen" (1997). Click here
for the text of the entire interview.
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