Between the News and the Dews
A Review of Harryette Mullen’s Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary
Harryette Mullen frames this first poem in her latest book with a rhyme between culture and nature, “morning news” and “morning dews,” with the former “protected” from the latter by a refined product, plastic, that itself has an organic origin. That product is invoked in the book’s very title, slang for the “discarded plastic bag we see in every city / blown down the street with vagrant wind,” like the poet. Urban(e) tumbleweed herself, a walker in and around the city of Los Angeles, Mullen uses the deceptive casualness of her “notes” to produce a compelling book-length ecopoetic meditation on the meaning of such categories as the “human,” the “natural,” the “native.” Urban Tumbleweed (Graywolf, 2013) comprises three tanka per page, making for 366 three-line poems, one for each day of a leap year. Though somewhat less grid-like (two poems per page are left-justified; one is centered), the visual appearance recalls the four-quatrains-per-page layout of Mullen’s Muse & Drudge (Singing Horse, 1995). And just as those quatrains played on the structure and relative interchangeability of the blues stanza, so Urban Tumbleweed varies the traditional Japanese thirtyone-syllable, single-line form by adapting the syllable count into tercets. The scale of the 7" x 5" page—reminiscent of the eponymous portable diary/notebook—is well adapted simultaneously to isolate and connect its three tercets. For all the appearance of natural ease in the writing, form here is Oulipian as much as organic. Mullen’s prefatory short essay, “On Starting a Tanka Diary,” and the closing acknowledgements help to situate the work. Mullen writes of “using tanka to explore the question ‘What is natural about being human?’” or “the human being’s place in the natural world, an idea I wanted to explore in my own nontraditional way,” and the inseparable relationship between nature and culture—evident everywhere the speaker turns—is the central one in the book. The “notes” and “diary” of the title propose a poetry of “ephemera” and “fleeting impres-
The morning news landed in the driveway, folded, rolled, and rubber-banded, wrapped in plastic for protection from the morning dews.