Our final book this term will be Harryette Mullen's latest volume, Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary (Graywolf, 2014). Mullen's poetic career has been a long and diverse one, starting with the Steinian meditations of her earliest books (as collected in 2006's Recyclopedia), to the Oulipian experiments of Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. In Urban Tumbleweed, we find Mullen changing tack once again, exploring the possibilities of tanka, a traditional Japanese form of thirty-one syllables usually broken into five lines (5-7-5-7-7), making it a sort of super-sized haiku. She explains:
While embracing the notational spirit of this tradition, I depart from established convention in both languages, choosing instead a flexible three-line form with a variable number of syllables per line. I try to adhere to the thirty-one-syllable limit, although I am aware that the number of syllables in a given word can vary, depending on the speaker and the circumstances. "California," for example, sometimes has four syllables, at other times, five.
While this cross-cultural channeling of forms — an African-American poet employing an Asian form — seems startlingly new, Mullen's quick to point out that there are precedents to this: in her end notes to the volume, she discusses the inspiration of seeing haikus by Richard Wright in a collection by Camille T. Dungy. Moreover, she cites Dungy's questioning "the boundaries of nature poetry as well as African American poetry," including "typical assumptions that 'green' is white and 'urban' is black."
Much of the book, which covers the span of a year's worth of daily entries, takes place in Mullen's hometown of Los Angeles, which is, itself, a nexus of cross-cultural interactions, and her travels (to Marfa, TX and elsewhere) over the course of that year reinforce the place-centric nature of Urban Tumbleweed.
Here's our reading breakdown for the book:
- Tues. November 25th: pgs. 1–61
- Tues. December 2nd: pgs. 62–122
And here are some supplemental resources:
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