Supermarket With Some Letters example essay topic

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 "Sperm kit", 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). Harryette Mullen [B] as ically 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. 323.