sleeping with the dictionary blog

Bi lingual instructions/ Harryette Mullen review

Sleeping with the dictionary is a collection of poems, many of them fairly odd. The one I’m going to talk about is the weird instructions one, called “Bilingual Instructions”.

If I had to guess the poems purpose it’d probably be that this was meant to be some political satire about Americans not knowing how speak other languages other than English, or even caring/ and also a look into stereotypes. From the discussion in class, it seems that this was a common thought, and I assume most others who read it would kind of get the same thing as well.

           

This poem is broken up into two parts, the bilingual instructions (literally written bilingual instructions, English than Spanish the line below) describing what I can assume to be gardening, and the first part, starting with “Californians say” and the line below saying to what. Essentially, the poem says Californians don’t want bilingual ballots or schools, but do want bilingual instructions on trashcans, and then it goes to the instructions about how to use a trashcan. To be perfectly honest, there is nothing spectacular about the actual writing of the poem, it seems to be literally stuff that it was copy and pasted from other stuff. However, the idea around the poem is something that is thought provoking and interesting for the very least.

           

This poem attempts to look at how Americans look at the bilingual community (by that I mean those who don’t speak English, or speak it as a first language, specifically Mexicans), as lesser. There is a common stereotype that Mexicans are gardeners, and that Americans only see Mexicans as such; This poem is essentially making a statement, “we don’t want them to do anything other than the lawn”. 

I find that it’s odd that the first part of the poem starts with what appears to be polling statistics, and the second just seems to be an instruction manual. This is how the poem is made, and with it being the way it is done, even something that is hardly literate can understand what is going on.

This poem is very short, and for once that’s a good thing, because it is easy to read and understand.  The Spanish part is a translation of the English, and part of me wonders if there are grammar errors put in as a joke. The style is very exact 2, 2, 2, style which I liked.  In addition, there are dabbles of humor I sensed, with the poem ending “yard trimmings only”, making me feel 

I'm not a poem guy, so I'm not going to say this was the greatest thing I've ever read, however I can appreciate it's purpose.