Harryette Mullen stands as one of the most exciting and dynamic voices in poetry today. Her devotion to the opportunities of the poem on the page equally highlights the deliciousness of the song sung. “I hurl a stone no had has carved, wondering who / shall admire my craft,” she writes in one of her new poems, “Iconoclast.” Indeed her craft is, in some ways, hard to pin down. Mullen presents as a poet who would never want to be restrained to one school of poetics: Her work moves, through the world and on the page, as consciousness does, with a powerful directed voice that feels both omnipotent and deeply intimate. Mullen’s new collection of poetry, Regaining Unconsciousness, the first in twelve years, published by Graywolf Press in August, fosters this godlike voice. But rather than a wrathful God, we have one that’s fully aware of its fallen shadow-half. This is a book imploring humanity for change, for relationship with both sides of the self, to look at what we assume we already see. “Enjoy your brief existence,” she writes in “Seasons in Hell,” then adds, “Whatever sprouts in spring is fuel for wildfires.”
Harryette Mullen, whose new poetry collection, Regaining Unconsciousness, her first in twelve years, was published in August by Graywolf Press. (Credit: Serena Yang Photography)
Mullen lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches at UCLA. Her previous collections of poetry include Sleeping With the Dictionary (University of California Press, 2002); Recyclopedia (Graywolf Press, 2006), which contains three earlier books, S*PeRM**K*T (Singing Horse Press, 1992), Trimmings (Tender Buttons, 1991), and Muse & Drudge (Singing Horse Press, 1995); and Urban Tumbleweed: Notes From a Tanka Diary (Graywolf Press, 2013). Born in Florence, Alabama, Mullen spent much of her childhood in Fort Worth, Texas. Her grandfather and great-grandfather were Baptist pastors. “We spent a lot of time on pews, singing and reading the Bible,” she says. This formative experience of passionate orality in faith seems rich and newly minted in her poetry—and never far from song. Mullen’s new collection pulls from the artistic traditions in multiple forms: Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Johnny Mercer, Rimbaud, Wordsworth, Hughie Lee-Smith, and others. The tone, while dire, remains playful. “Why burn like a brute when you can toast eternity?” she concludes in “Seasons in Hell.” We spoke online on a hot day in June about her new book.
How are you managing in Los Angeles? With the deployment of troops and immigration raids and after all the fires, are you holding up okay?
Personally I’m fine; I do worry about our communities; the ones destroyed by fire, the ones that are being harassed and rounded up, demonized, dehumanized by you know who and his minions. I do worry about our future as a nation, as a planet, as a species. I’m concerned for us.
On that note, I wanted to start with the very opening of the book. The poem “Was It a Dream” reminded me of the end of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” that uncertain shift back to reality from transcendent reverie prompted by the nightingale. In your poem there’s this sense of the whole human fiasco come to an end after a long, mournful but seductive song. “Was it a dream in black and white / with music orchestrating / everybody’s movement… / dancers hot and close / together on the floor?” The poem ending the section is “Wake Up, Butterfly.” Both seem important in terms of a shift in psyche. Talk about this idea of awakening. One of the opening epigraphs is by Huddie Ledbetter, “Best stay woke.”
I put Huddie Ledbetter in because that expression of “being woke” seems to trace back to him, and the people who are against being woke seem to be in favor of being asleep. This idea of the “great” America that never was is a form of denial and refusal of progress—it’s canceling history because they don’t want us to know what happened in history—in our history. There are painful parts of our history—and beautiful, glorious parts of our history—but we can’t really just select one and ignore the other, or else we won’t really learn much about who we are, have been, and might become. There’s a deep background of the book. There are questions about how consciousness and unconsciousness both conflict and cooperate in our daily functioning. Because we are such mysteriously made creatures, we don’t understand ourselves, and there are parts of us that we don’t have access to. So I’m thinking about consciousness and unconsciousness as these two states of being human that are both fundamentally intrinsic to how we are as beings. We don’t know a lot of what’s going on inside us. A lot of it is routine, automatic, learned behavior—some of it is autonomic processes, some of it is—you know, a very small part of it, as Freud suggested, is conscious, deliberate, choice, decision, cognition. A lot of it is completely underground and we don’t have access to it. I’m thinking about us individually and collectively, because collectively—or individually—we respond to immediate danger. And we’re confronted with dangers that are immediate but also with dangers that are incremental and easy to ignore. But since we know about them, and we need to act collectively to work on solving them, we need to be able to marshal our…creativity and our ingenuity, our ability to organize ourselves to do something about these things that are threats to our existence. But they don’t seem like immediate threats to us personally.
I’m thinking of your poem “Weathering Hate.” You show how hate erodes and erodes at us; the very body—being “weathered” by hate, and/or in hate. “A boulder, even a mountain, will wear down.” This immaterial, often unseeable force that’s an “unbearable weight”—of course it will often finally lash out to make itself seen. Another of your epigraphs is from Freud: “Our unconscious does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal.” And “everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.” How do you see poetry handling the unconscious?
When I used to read a bit of Freud, it was partly because his interest in the unconscious seemed to be so much about poiesis. You know, the word association, the slip of the tongue, the dream work—even the repression; the way that something that is repressed and really dark to us, unknown to us, somehow it writes itself into our behavior, even though we don’t know what it is or where it’s coming from. It enacts some significant symbolism, you know, in our lives.
Again, it’s a demanding to be seen.
Yes. One of my professors said Freud wasn’t necessarily the best psychologist, but he’s a very good literary critic. A lot of his theories are coming from literature; the names of his theories like Electra, Oedipus; his absorption of literature and his attention to what I think of as literary and poetic processes as they operate in the psyche, that’s what was interesting to me about Freud.
The title poem of your new book harkens to Milton. I was reminded of the fall of man, the internal-external apocalyptic landscape. “Regaining Unconsciousness” begins “Too late to break our fall, we land on pointlessness, eternal void of feeble souls.” I’m thinking of this vision of paradise regained, reimagined here as aligned with facing our own unconsciousness as key to sort of climbing back up from the fall. We know we’ve fallen, and yet, as you put it so well, we “toast the drought with dry martinis.” In this book you are continually showing our being trapped in paradoxical pleasure in our own fallenness. Regaining Unconsciousness seems like a kind of paradox; can we lose it? And how can we regain what’s here? It feels like you are saying poetry is a way of regaining unconsciousness. And is crucial.
Absolutely, yes. It keeps me from submitting to despair. As long as I can write about the things that would make me despair.
In other words it transmutes the despair to look at the despair. But you show how we’re conscious of what we’re doing to the planet and we’re still not seeing our own complicity in it; there’s some aspect of unconsciousness that’s not being addressed.
We’re used to being able to identify a villain, an external enemy, and here the enemy is our everyday way of living.
How do we get out of it.
That is the problem. I do think it has to be collective action. Collective consciousness, awareness, that there is a problem, which people are still denying, that there’s a problem. And we harness our energy collectively to find the solutions, whether it’s in technology or whether it is in unplugging from technology. And I don’t think we’re ready, we don’t seem to be ready—well, some people are. But it seems as if many of our leaders are leading us in the opposite direction, away from solutions…. What they’re doing is dedicating themselves, committing themselves, to these old ways of living that are killing us. And for that we need to be conscious, be aware…. There’s a doubleness, as you suggest; we don’t want to be sleepwalking to the apocalypse. We want to be awake and alert and aware of the problems that we face. But we also want to be able to use this creative part of us that is unknown to us. We don’t know how to directly access it. Yet it is there, and it can help us individually and collectively to find a way out of our own destruction. And for me, it’s writing poetry, since, you know, I don’t have other skills.
[Laughter.]
If I can’t save myself from destruction, at least I can save myself from the despair. Because I think despair is submitting, giving up; it’s not helpful. We need to have some hope and some faith in ourselves and our fellow humans. Human beings have faced destruction in every generation. Not everyone survives, but those who do survive manage to keep humanity going. I think we need to focus on keeping the planet alive, keeping humanity alive. I’m human-centered, I can’t help that. But to help ourselves we have to help all the other living beings. They are the predecessors; they will go and then we will go, because we depend on them.
I’m thinking of poems like “Natural History” that contrast humans with dinosaurs, the latter having “never pondered the meaning of life nor funded their retirement.” That section proceeds to examine our human interactions with wildlife as part of fashion, entertainment, consumerism, etc. There is a lot of playfulness, but under it there is a poignant rage at this oblivious disconnect for humans with the very flora and fauna we are among. This book turns toward nature. That is such a poetic tradition, right? You invoke the Romantics.
Yes, I have been a little bit more inspired lately by the Romantic poets, who were facing industrializing England, the smoggy skies, child labor, which is coming back to our country. If some people have their way, they want children working in meatpacking plants. I’m trying to write some poems in conversation with William Blake; there’s a little piece of Wordsworth sprinkled here and there in this book. I’m also inspired by the Luddites, who were facing, very directly, those forces of industrialization and capitalist consolidation, those things coming together, technology and money, capitalism and the exploitation of the worker. So those are things that are also, alongside the endangered species…the animals that we have hunted to extinction. I was a little bit unsure about the—what I call my “cartoonish prosopopoeia.” I talk about this with my students because when I say the word prosopopoeia, they give me a blank look, and I say, “Well, but you’ve encountered it since childhood in a Disney film, right—animals are speaking—when nonhuman things are speaking in a poem, they become the persona.” [W]hen we address the nonhuman, for me it’s like the apostrophe, we lyrically address the other, and prosopopoeia, the other speaks back. And human beings…we can’t help it. Nature—we use nature as our mirror. We are part of nature, but nature isn’t just us. You know, nature is more than us; we are a small subset of nature. Poets do this all the time—we look to nature to tell us something about us.
Humans are haunted by its seeming silence—then we can wreck it and ruin it, try to control it. We want, in the poems, stories, films, to imagine nature talking back.
What does nature have to tell us? What can we learn from nature? I think those are valid concerns and questions that we look to nature for—for knowledge, for things as basic as food, clothing, shelter, medicine. So it’s important for us to respect nature. It’s important for us to consider how our action affects the rest of the natural world. There are unforeseen consequences—this is another aspect of being unconscious. We are unconscious, unaware, of our effects on the rest of the world…. Our acts ripple out into the world in ways that we don’t foresee or contemplate.
You spoke once about how listening to poetry at readings really opened up the possibilities of poetry for you early on. Many of these poems in the new collection are prose poems. I was thinking about your love of textuality and orality and the tension between those two things and how the prose poem works in this tension.
I am very interested in the intersection or the interaction—that poetry is heard and seen; it’s on the page, it’s in the air, it’s in our ears, it’s in our mouths. It’s all of that. For me that is part of the sensuality and the kind of bodily pleasure of poetry. It’s something that I enjoy when I’m making poetry and when I get to share it with others. And I think prose poetry needs to be just as musical as verse poetry. Some of the poems I’ve written that are imitating others, they are actually turning verse into prose. How many people tell us…the sonnet…is an argument in verse—that has a volta, a turn, where the argument kind of switches from one track to another. Or there’s a kind of a weird U-turn that happens where everything that we have assumed up to a certain point gets reimagined or rearranged or recalculated, like, you know, when you make the wrong turn, the GPS…rerouting!—that’s funny to me. So the paragraph and the sonnet have a similar trajectory…. It’s kind of like an inside joke for me to turn a sonnet into a prose paragraph [laughs].
People often ask me about the political in poetry. I was struck with the possibility that your book, and poetry like this, is crucial for us to face the dangerous absurdity of our situation without being didactic or moralizing. In some ways what you create in this reality is beyond the confines of the word political.
Well, I’m with [Wisława] Szymborska: “Everything is political.” Including poetry. To say that you’re not political is a political position. But I don’t think that the poem needs to be dictated by ideology. I guess ideology is present in what I do because I am who I am and I think the way I think, but when I’m writing a poem I’m really thinking about: What am I exploring? What am I feeling? What am I able to imagine? And those are questions that I think…are part of political thinking…. They allow a space for something to happen that hasn’t happened before. I think about any creative act. And the space of moving toward this unknown thing that hasn’t happened yet—to me that is the pleasure…. I’m creating something that didn’t exist before. And that’s what I’m mainly focused on.
In the book there is a strong sense of the “I,” but it isn’t overwhelmed with a prose narrative of the autobiographical. I am interested in how you see the uses and misuses of the autobiographical.
I think ever since my first book [Tree Tall Woman, published by Energy Earth Communications in 1981], which people said was autobiographical or confessional—which is not exactly true; I mean, I did use some things that had been part of my life, but in a poem…I try for them to be not just about me. And ever since that first book, I have kind of deliberately moved away from writing about me personally in ways that would allow people to say that “this is autobiographical” or “this is confessional,” and I’m thinking, confessing what? I did go to Catholic school—I’m not Catholic, so I didn’t go into the confessional booth—but the whole idea of confessing in a poem, to me—even though there are some poets who are labeled as confessional who I have enjoyed reading, but this idea that you’re confessing whatever it is—a sin, a transgression, a failing, you know, a character flaw—I don’t know exactly what people are supposed to be confessing. Confessing to being human?
Plus it doesn’t seem like anybody is willing to confess their actual sins in poetry. Only when they’re sinned against really.
I think I have become much more interested in how can I write about not me? How can I write into the world and away from me and my own personal life, which is quite boring, you know, to tell the truth. But sometimes I use the “I,” the speaker, as a stand-in for, yes, a Black woman can be a universal human being in a poem. You know, because as long as people know who I am—that I am a Black woman—I have noticed that I can write a poem and it doesn’t have to have anything to do with being Black or being female, but people will use that as a way of interpreting the poem. So I’ve decided to let them do that for me—I don’t have to do it for myself.
It’s getting at what you were saying before: a grasping toward the universal, this sort of solidarity with humanity through the lens of your unique feeling and imagination in this world, your empathy with the situation, the absurdity, the need to look. A reader is able to step in and do a lot of feeling with the poem.
I want the reader to be able to in some way feel that it’s part of them. It’s an aspect of them. An aspect of me could be an aspect of them. That’s what I mean by universal, not that some individual person is the quintessential human essence. I don’t mean anything like that, I just mean that—to the extent that we share 99-plus [percent] DNA, you know? There is something of me in you, and something of you in me, and can we acknowledge that? And can we acknowledge that human experience, as various as it is—there are some experiences that we tend to have in common as humans?
Do you think that’s the key here to regaining the unconscious?
Well—there’s something called collective unconsciousness. I think this is more Jung than Freud. I’m interested in that because it’s where myth comes from, it’s where a lot of storytelling and poetry comes from, it’s where a lot of art comes from. This collective unconsciousness. It’s the storytelling and the mythmaking that helps us give significance to our lives. That we always have to interpret what’s happening to us. And we use art, we use literature, to help us tell our own stories, and make our own meaning, and find our own myths and symbols and metaphors. We share that in common.
This strong “I” is plucking from these fragments across time, right? All the way back to dinosaurs, this image of glass being blown to make an earth—right up until we’re going through COVID, wildfires, the election. Then we have these fragments of poets, of songs, Bob Dylan—your poetry is in conversation with all of these things simultaneously; it does feel like that kind of collective unconsciousness mythologizing, synthesized; contained in form, song, language, that thing that separates us from the animals that we were talking about; but this song is wind and it’s got blues, Orpheus, meter. Which poem in the book should the reader turn to for fighting despair?
One I seem to be returning to is “The Leopard Coat,” which contains the line: “The magnificent leopard, resplendent in its skin.”
You know, let the skin be on the leopard.
Bianca Stone is the author of the poetry collections The Near and Distant World, forthcoming in January from Tin House; What Is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022), winner of the 2023 Vermont Book Award; The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018); and Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Octopus Books/Tin House, 2014). She also collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated version of Antigonick (New Directions, 2012). Her work has appeared in many magazines, including the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the Nation. She teaches classes on poetry and poetic study at the Ruth Stone House in Goshen, Vermont, where she hosts the Ode & Psyche Podcast.
POEM
Final Flicker of Life’s Ember
In the silence that surrounds us in quiet thoughts and dreams, here’s where we raise a toast to what has been. When fish navigated flowing currents, reptiles basked in sunlight, warm-blooded mammals roamed the earth, birds stretched their wings in flight. Sky was lucid, stars were vivid, when animals and plants exchanged essential elements of life.
Now, think of a scorched briquet, not a charcoal biscuit to soothe an upset tummy, but a crumbling lump of spent energy. When all its heat’s burnt down to grimmest dust, this is the snuffed dark remnant of our depleted sun that’s given up its last ray of hope for our cold and bitter planet.
Since we’ll be extinct before the finale, we can thank our lucky whatsoever. The end will come in a few billion years, when our nearest star runs out of fuel, implodes and collapses, reduced to a fragile shell of cosmic ash, its fire extinguished like a crushed-out butt.
There will be no one left to see the final flicker. By then, we’ll be long gone, with every other creature craving light, before the sun goes dark and every ocean’s frozen, or boiling oceans evaporate in a massive solar flash, before the ultimate gasp of our dying star obliterates what’s left of Earth.
“Final Flicker of Life’s Ember” from Regaining Unconsciousness by Harryette Mullen. Copyright © 2025 by Harryette Mullen. Reproduced with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota. graywolfpress.org
