On S*PeRM**K*T
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.
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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). Read 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.
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[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). Read 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). Read the entire interview.
Deborah Mix
Like clothing, food is usually considered the province of women, and Mullen’s attention to the feminine spaces of consumption is similar to Stein’s project of reappropriating traditionally feminine domestic spaces. S*PeRM**K*T is Mullen’s investigation of the supermarket as a site where commodification, desire, and identity are rigidly interpolated. The title, with its asterisks in lieu of the letters u, a, r, and e, refers to both a supermarket and sexual violation (‘‘spermkit’’ recalls the rape kit used to take evidence after a sexual assault). S*PeRM**K*T thus points to the conflation of material and sexual desires and to the interlacing of pleasure and pain.
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S*PeRM**K*T’s cover as well as several inside pages feature black-and-white photographs of supermarket items—steaks in a meat case, items in a dessert case, and shelves of baby food. In these photographs, items that are supposed to look juicy, decadent, or wholesome instead seem stark and flat, washed out, a quality emphasized by the contrast between the photographs and the bright orange type of the title and Mullen’s name. Moreover, the close-up shots have a clinical feeling—the products in the photographs march across the page in a dull sameness. Consumer culture teaches us to desire this kind of sameness as a resolution of economic, social, geographic, and racial distances. The shelves of household products, marketing suggests, are equally available and desirable to all of us. Through the consumption of the right goods, advertisements promise, we can achieve the satisfaction and material success of the people they depict. This glossy promise is, of course, a fantasy promulgated on Madison Avenue. The steaks in the meat case, for instance, might be available to anyone who can afford to purchase them (economic distance), but their very existence is predicated on the reality of the factory farms that drove out the family farmer (social distance), the expansion of ranching operations that continue to destroy the environment (geographic distance), and the labor of almost exclusively nonwhite slaughterhouse employees (racial distance) who perform the dirty work that most consumers don’t want to contemplate, much less see.... Mullen’s attention to the marketplace in S*PeRM**K*T—whether the grocery store, the street corner, or the publishing world—makes visible again the realities of consumption, particularly its racialized and gendered implications.
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About a third of the way into S*PeRM**K*T, the tops of two facing pages contain photographs of cellophane-wrapped boxes of baby cereal that point to these realities, as do the poems that examine the marketing not just of baby food but also of babies (and, by extension, of the maternal body as the site of the babies’ production). Adorning the cereal boxes are large photographs of happy babies, and printed beneath their faces are phrases like ‘‘no refined sugar, ’’ ‘‘iron fortified,’’ and ‘‘real fruit flakes.’’ While these phrases are surely meant to refer to the food contained inside the boxes, the photographs suggest that these phrases are also part of a marketing campaign designed to create the ‘‘perfect baby, ’’ one made with ‘‘no artificial ingredients.’’ This baby, until recently, was always ‘‘pure white,’’ like the decades old Gerber baby.
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Mullen deals with the policing of boundaries throughout
S*PeRM**K*T, drawing readers’ attention to their permeability. As
she demonstrates, women’s bodies in Western culture have been figured
as the uncontainable, the hysterical, the dirty, and thus subjected
to conflicting pressures to reveal and conceal. Like the trays of meat
in the supermarket coolers, women must be both lusciously inviting
and hygienically sealed, lubricious and virginal at once:
It must be white, a picture of health, the spongy napkin made to
blot blood. Dainty paper soaks up leaks that steaks splayed on trays
are oozing. Lights replace the blush red flesh is losing. Cutlets leak.
Tenderloins bleed pink light. Plastic wrap bandages marbled slabs
in sanitary packaging made to be stained. A three-hanky picture of
feminine hygiene.
Again Mullen is building a bridge between varieties of consumption and the tricks of the trade that keep them operating. In this case, two kinds of meat markets are connected: the grocery store and a patriarchal system that turns women into commodities. The white ‘‘spongy napkin’’ lying beneath the cut of meat is metonymically linked to the ‘‘[d]ainty paper’’ sanitary napkins used by menstruating women. In both cases, a prudish desire for distance from the reality of bodily functions results in the prissy insistence on white products to absorb blood. Meanwhile, ‘‘lights replace the flush,’’ artificial enhancements are brought in to supply a kind of false juiciness, and the evidence of the body’s messiness is neatly wrapped up and thrown away.
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Mullen reminds us time and again that the costs of consumption are structured by race as well as by gender. Because the United States’ history of consumption includes the consumption of human bodies under slavery, there is almost always a racialized resonance to the exhortations to buy and consume, even as this operation is presented as outside of (or beyond) issues of race. Mullen addresses this complexity in a poem that considers sexual desire as another culturally constructed form of market forces: ‘‘Past perfect food sticks in the craw. Curdles the pulse. Coops up otherwise free ranging birds whose plucked wings beat hearts over easy. Flapping aerobically, cocks walk on brittle zeros. They make and break and scramble to get ahead. Whisk the yokels into shape. Use their pecker order to separate the whites.’’ One could read this poem through a historical lens (the ‘‘past perfect’’ tense is as far into the past as we can travel linguistically), interpreting the ‘‘cocks’’ as the white planter aristocracy in the antebellum South, anxiously protecting its ‘‘assets’’ by indoctrinating the poorer whites in the ideology that racial differences are more significant than class differences. White solidarity became the primary force in the South, suturing fault lines drawn by class and gender and ensuring the familiar ‘‘pecker order. ’’ Within this order, ‘‘otherwise free ranging birds’’ are ‘‘cooped up’’; ‘‘cocks walk’’ on the bodies of ‘‘brittle zeros,’’ raping the slave women as a means to demonstrate their control and to indulge in what was positioned as a more ‘‘primitive’’ sexual experience. In these forced encounters, bodies, lives, and minds were broken and scrambled, as were genealogical, communal, and moral ties. Also resonating in the final references to separating the ‘‘yokels’’ from the ‘‘whites’’ are other kinds of segregationist efforts, rendered particularly pointed through the centrality of chickens to this poem (since fried chicken is frequently labeled a black food). And as the double entendres ‘‘cocks’’ and ‘‘peckers’’ suggest, these operations of power are heavily gendered—the lines of division between groups have been controlled primarily by men, and frequently by particular constructions of male sexuality. These lines of division are constituted primarily to buttress a socioeconomic order that maintains a hierarchy of white over black and male over female.
From "Tender Revisions: Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T," American Literature, Volume 77, Number 1 (March 2005): 65-92.
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