The Brooklyn Rail

Harryette Mullen’s incisive eye, linguistic prestidigitation and multilayered connections are in exceptional form in her new collection Regaining Unconsciousness. The complexities of the current moment—the bombardment of artificial intelligence, climate change, destructive consumerism, and our casual disregard of our fellow living creatures—is strikingly engaged in this rich, sonic, and timely collection.

Despite—or because of—the grimness of our present times, Mullen is often funny, always inquisitive, endlessly thought-provoking and still grateful for the simple joyous moments of our quotidian lives, as evidenced by the final poem of the collection, “Thanks to”:

fresh clean sheets     line dried in sunshine
gray cat with white stockings diverting a butterfly
weeds in the lawn, dandelions I could eat if I were hungry
grit and pebbles caught in the treads of my sneakers
spare lightbulb when the room goes dark
a pen that works        ink spent to make thoughts legible
faces of gentle strangers I may never meet

I too am thankful, for Regaining Unconsciousness, for how Mullen raises our consciousness with intent and power, and especially for this generous, wide-ranging conversation.

Mandana Chaffa (Rail): “Was It a Dream?” is such an organic and elegant way to begin the collection, and an indication of the multitudes that follow. These fourteen (un-sonneted) lines are rich, anchored by the open-ended subject, that slippery “it.” I heard an echo of Martin Luther King Jr., in: “Was it a dream in black and white / Was it a durable dream.” Though one could close read this poem for pages, perhaps a slant question first: Do our dreams need to be durable? How does a dream state relate to consciousness?

Harryette Mullen: Dreams, poems, and questions are opportunities to look for meaning. I wanted to begin this book with questions rather than declarations. As your queries suggest, I’m interested in exploring contradictions of individual and collective consciousness. The dream of America has lured generations of immigrants while sparking endless debates about national identity. In our individual, collective, and national existence, we struggle to reconcile dream and reality, to live in “more perfect union” with ourselves and others. “We the people” emerged as a nation proclaiming freedom and equality as ideal while tolerating slavery and other forms of bondage as pragmatic practice. We can celebrate our heritage while acknowledging the destruction and exploitation required to enrich a privileged few. Part of any freedom struggle is defining what freedom is. Today, we are “free” to be ignorant, poor, malnourished, homeless, and infected with preventable diseases. Still, we continue to dream and, in our dreams, we can imagine other ways of being. Like a dream, a poem is an other-space where imagination is unbound. Like a question, a poem supposes uncertainty. Some dreams, and perhaps some poems, inspire us to act. In Muse & Drudge, I wrote, “I dream a world / and then what.”

Rail: Regaining Unconsciousness—the title of the collection, one of the sections, and an individual poem (which is in the section “Seasons in Hell”)—is provocative, and like so much else in this book, deeply generative. Is unconsciousness devoutly to be wished or the enemy of rational thought? If one focuses on the “regaining” it could be a useful method of surrendering to creativity, releasing expectations. But we also live in a time when unconsciousness—to what is going on around and to us, to the narrowing of our freedoms, to the march of technology, implies a lack of necessary awareness. And what is its converse? Awakening? Or perhaps the clue is in the epigraph from Lead Belly that introduces the collection: “Best stay woke, (Keep your eyes open).”

Mullen: I appreciate the way your questions engage with and begin to explicate the work. It’s reassuring and deeply gratifying to see how a reader can enter into thoughtful dialogue with poetry and its sources. The questions you are asking resonate with questions the poems are asking. What kind of beings are we, existing as our conscious and unconscious selves? How can we, individually and collectively, direct our steady attention to the urgent matter of saving the world? We can’t wait for Superman. Despite our human fallibility and habitual carelessness, how will we rise to the challenge of rescuing ourselves and all other life on the only habitable planet in our galaxy?

Rail: In the poem “Brain Fog,” there are the lines: “Hazy thoughts drift from here to there—elusive, insubstantial, ephemeral in the best of times. Your mind draws fuzzy shapes that float away as aimlessly / as they arrive.” It’s delightfully ironic that you write so impeccably about a subject that is often indescribable, and it occurred to me that this kind of fragmentary disconnection—fog seems like such a mild modifier for what is foundationally a brain dismantler!—is also the essence of parataxis. Modern and contemporary poetry, certainly from Gertrude Stein on, embraced this kind of linguistic fracture, that centers less on a singular meaning than a multiplicity of connections. How much does poetry rely upon, even harness, this kind of dislocation?

Mullen: Stein’s poetically exacting grammar and syntax, especially in Tender Buttons, reveal disjunctions of perception, thought, and language. We don’t often think in straight lines or perfect sentences. Our thoughts tend to ramble associatively, resisting sequential logic. Poetry, rather than reason or logic, seems to follow more closely the unregulated movement of a wandering mind. Delving into an intriguing poem, when we get to the end, we immediately want to return to the beginning and read it again to see how it led us here from there. Poems often seem to find their way through gaps and discontinuities in our conscious and unconscious lives.

Rail: Speaking of brain fog, which admittedly resonates deeply, your understanding of chronic illness and its long-term, sometimes irreversible, implications is nuanced, and feels personal, as in “Havana Syndrome:” “Despite the timeline of onset, culminating with the visible distress of your invisible disability, they could not provide a convincing diagnosis or identify the source of your inexplicable suffering.” There’s a kind of physicality that inserts itself into this collection, inextricably entwined, sometimes in conflict with cognition, and expression. Is this contemplation of the body a newer subject of contemplation for you?

Mullen: Regaining Unconsciousness recalls for me a previous book, Sleeping with the Dictionary, which also explores embodied states of consciousness and unconsciousness in the mutual formation of self and other. Even (or especially) when contemplating abstract topics, poetry’s metaphors may default to the physical and conceptual body as common ground for understanding the world and how we inhabit it. I want my poems to be curious beyond my own life, inquisitive about the experience of others. It’s impossible to feel the pain of another, but inhabiting a body is a common experience for living beings, as using language and symbols is a common experience for human beings. It’s my hope that poetry might make us more responsive to human and other beings. Poems like “Brain Fog,” “Havana Syndrome,” and “How Can I Prove I’m Not a Robot?” are concerned, in part, with the otherness of being human, as well as effects of disability and difference that can alienate and isolate one from another. When I write metaphorically about brain fog, dementia, and chronic pain in Regaining Unconsciousness or aphasia in Sleeping with the Dictionary, I am aware that, beyond the context of poetry, these conditions can be profoundly debilitating. I also know that the condition of being able-bodied is temporary.

Rail: Each of the eleven sections that comprise the collection has a general “subject,” whether there is a focus on the climate, health, politics, or poetry itself, and there are also thematic repetitions that re-appear across these sections. It’s subtle and significant, and I’d love to know more about how you put this collection, its subsections, and individual poems together, especially as the possibilities seem endless. What was your process in imagining this collection, and then refining it as a final product? Was there a particular section that led your thinking about the collection as a whole?

Mullen: It was a challenge to organize this book as a comprehensible text for readers. Similar to working on Sleeping with the Dictionary, I started with a few ideas that multiplied into a miscellaneous collection of poems on various subjects. The title of that book came late in my process, enlisting the dictionary’s alphabetical order as my organizing principle; even generating additional poems and titles such as “Zombie Hat,” “Xenophobic Nightmare in a Foreign Language,” “Quality of Life,” and “Why You and I.” Often, I don’t know what poems and collections are “about” until I’m well into them. While that earlier book reflects on how we use language, Regaining Unconsciousness began with fear and worry about our inadequate response to climate change and extreme weather events. That was a seedling that kept branching out to wonder how and why we behave as if we aren’t facing extinction. When I was grappling with the new manuscript for Graywolf Press, it was my editor, Jeff Shotts, who suggested dividing the book into sections, but I think he was surprised at how many it turned out to be. As I began to organize it, I envisioned Regaining Unconsciousness as one hundred poems divided into ten sections, but it just grew like Topsy, and there is something mystical about the numbers 11 and 111. Again, it was Jeff who reassured me that the sections didn’t have to be neat compartments. As you’ve noted, recurring themes echo across sections, with variations on sleeping, dreaming, and waking in the first section, followed by poems about weathering the turbulence of difficult emotional, social, and environmental climates. Poems like “Brain Fog,” “Hotter than July,” “Inclement Weather,” “Please Don’t Blow Your Top,” “Polar Vortex,” and “Weathering Hate” in different ways relate personal and political aspects of climate disaster and other environmental concerns. Poems like “In a Nutshell” and “Mermaid of Palmares” recall the sleeping and dreaming figures of the opening section. Other figures, not literally asleep, remain oblivious to their peril. These include revelers in “The Green Knight” and hubristic captains of tech start-ups in “Damage” and “Laser Focus.”

Rail: I appreciate how you explore the range of what constitutes communication in our current times. Elements such as code-switching, though when I was growing up, there was no such name; it was just the language—and gestures—we learned in order to conform enough to fit into the majority society, however uncomfortably. You examine these various linguistics—almost like English-to-English translations—whether it’s medical parlance, political double-talk or social media reportage to great effect. Reading “Hidden Valley” with its sly blanket of corporate-speak and contractual talk, I must confess: bless me, Harryette, for I have sinned. In my former life, I worked on annual reports. I have written corporate strategies. I have had media training. I have marketed.

Mullen: Like you, I learned to adjust my language according to circumstances, long before I knew there was a term for it. That seems to be a basic guideline for communicating with different speakers and audiences, so I’m interested in poetry that incorporates distinct linguistic registers while investigating the various ways we identify and communicate with others. I’m concerned with written and unwritten, spoken and unspoken ways that we include and exclude others. I’ve played with the language of consumer-targeted advertising in S*PeRM**K*T and in poems like “Land of the Discount Price, Home of the Brand Name” in Regaining Unconsciousness. In everyday person-to-person encounters, there usually is some degree of mutuality that is lost when our daily transactions are mediated by a technological interface. Since corporations have acquired the status of persons and wield power over individuals, it’s important to understand corporate-speak, which I also mimic in poems like “Dark Pattern” in Regaining Unconsciousness, and “We Are Not Responsible” in Sleeping with the Dictionary. As individuals, we frequently are compelled to accept contractual agreements written by corporate entities that protect their interests over ours. As power consolidates into fewer hands, our freedom of choice is reduced to automated interactions with corporations purporting to remove “friction” from our decisions as they nudge us toward behavior they can monetize.

Rail: “I’m not your friend, but I can impersonate a helpful pal, less apt to irritate. You’ve taken pains to make me speak, endowed me with words I know not what they mean but, as your servant, I repeat at will.” “Chatter Box” is one of many poems that contends with what may soon become our overlord, Artificial Intelligence (AI). It ends ominously:

Noble master, whose power is your art, I have served persuasively, without grudge or grumbling. Though it was you who conjured me, you’ll soon believe you can’t be without me. When you ask a thorny question, I may hallucinate, generating misinformation that leads to your annihilation.

Poets origami language via nuances, power, and playfulness. How do you think language is shifting us, shaping us, as much as we are altering it?

Mullen: It's alarming to witness language aimed as a weapon to deny history, distort facts, destroy knowledge, and dehumanize anyone branded as “other.” While I can imagine AI being used to benefit humanity, already we see its potential and actual harm. Large language models scrape the internet from top to bottom, plagiarizing the work of human creators, digesting and evacuating literature, research, journalism, entertainment, opinion, gossip, slurs, and slander—spewing digitized sewage. It’s more important than ever to resist clogging our brains with toxic sludge, to seek alternatives to internet slop, to engage in defiant acts of thinking, reading, and writing that connect us in actual community with others.

Rail: I’m also taken with your poems about America—or the conceptual America, swallowed by consumerism, airbrushed until unrecognizable. Whether it’s the “Land of the Discount Price, Home of the Brand Name” or the chilling last lines of “The Gap,” where “what remains an influential treatise on democracy began with a tour of the penal system in a country led by a long line of horse-breakers and tiger killers.” Even before empire—or perhaps because of it—poems have often been sources of such revelations, and revolutions.

Mullen: Quoting Allen Ginsberg, “America why are your libraries full of tears?” My calling to poetry can be traced back to the hours I spent with books, music, and media available in community libraries. In my lifetime, America’s public libraries have become daytime shelters for the homeless (bless the librarian-social workers), while politicians ban and banish books.

Rail: You’re a legendary alchemist of multiplicities of form, and this collection is no exception, with visual poems, ghazals, prose poems and the many delights of wordplay such as in “Duet” where we are lose[ing] “our consonance.” How has your relationship with poetic structure changed over the years? What still excites you poetically, performatively?

Mullen: As a poet inspired by jazz singers, I’m drawn to improvisational wordplay and rhythms that make poetry swing, delighting in paronomasia and periphrasis, personification and polysemy, prosody and prosopopoeia. Teaching and traveling have exposed me to diverse communities of poets practicing a variety of styles and forms of poetry. No one would call me a traditionalist, but we can learn from traditional poets, just as we can learn from innovative, experimental, or so-called avant-garde poets. At UCLA, I’ve taught single-author courses on works of Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Ntozake Shange, and Rita Dove. It’s impressive to observe how these and other poets continue to speak to new readers. I’m honored to be associated with organizations such as Cave Canem and Furious Flower that nurture and celebrate African American poets. Our poetry is a record of our struggle and our flourishing. As Olaudah Equiano wrote about his African heritage, we are “a nation of dancers, musicians, and poets.” At times we’ve had to shout to be heard. Gwendolyn Brooks notes, in “Negro Hero,” that in order to become a hero, the World War II sailor had to “kick their law into their teeth.” In her Pulitzer Prize winning Annie Allen, Brooks wrote, “First fight. Then fiddle.” African Americans had to fight for the right to be writers.

Rail: The environment and its imminent collapse are central to our lives and these poems. “Bomb Cyclone” is an especially vibrant piece—“You realize you are at war when the Weather Channel warns that a bomb cyclone is heading your way”—that highlights how much the language of war is enmeshed into our everyday lexicon. How do we suppose that this is a conflict that the human race can win? Or as you write in “Goner:” “In this interminable absence, / annihilation is blunt certainty.”

Mullen: Human beings are capable of murder, war, and genocide, but I don’t believe we intend the ongoing mass extinction that eventually could include our own species. Yet, our unconscious acts and unintentional destructiveness are leading us to a point beyond rescue or redemption. My fervent prayer is that, individually and collectively, we wake up before it’s too late.

Rail: I was tickled by “Pen Name” in which “with persistent practice, I perfect my penmanship, gradually improving childish scribbles with the yellow Ticonderoga, becoming incrementally legible … Putting fluent pen to paper authorizes free and clear expression, as stirring words circulate in public squares to penetrate the private sphere.” I’m old enough to remember practicing (and practicing) the Palmer Method when I attended PS 200, and I do think I’m more creative, perhaps more “unconscious” when I put pen to paper. Do you conduct your creative pursuits with handwriting or via our computer servants?

Mullen: Of course, our present correspondence is digital, and yes, computers are powerful, time-saving tools, ubiquitous in contemporary life. Still, it disturbs me that schools have abandoned instruction in cursive writing. We are conditioned by the tools and technologies we use. We evolve together with our technologies. Handwriting engages the brain, nervous system, and muscles differently than tapping a keyboard, and there is something pleasurably tactile about the pen, pencil, or brush in a hand moving over paper. I habitually scribble in spiral-bound notebooks, collecting stray thoughts before they drift away. As artificial intelligence consumes more than its share of electricity, it seems reckless to sever our connection to earlier technologies of writing—pencils, pens, and even manual typewriters—that don’t require such vast amounts of energy. If future scholars don’t learn cursive, who will be able to read the manuscripts of the past? “Pen Name” was inspired by finding, in my grandmother’s papers, a sample of my mother’s elementary school penmanship practice, with her name copied over and over. My maternal grandmother had also saved letters from her mother, my great-grandmother, documenting the first generation of our family born after the Civil War—the first generation free to attend school and learn to read and write. So that poem reflects my family’s history through the interrelationship of literacy and freedom. As a writer, I draw on that legacy.

Rail: There’s a conscious sense of delight and hope in the last section and final poems of the collection that I found exceptionally meaningful because of what has preceded. Gentle poems, rooted in restorative and connective moments, as in how “We sing with birds, / follow their chatter, / respond to their call, / our voice lifting / to join in their air” in “Hopeful Noise.” Inasmuch as our world is declining, there’s something formidable in this conscious conclusion that there is still an awakening to be had through beauty and nature, and perhaps this is how we resist and persist, as a collective, and through poetry.

Mullen: The book expresses my concern for the state of the world and the future of humanity. The less we trust nature, human and other, the more we rely on machines. Our minds naturally alternate between consciousness and unconsciousness, as the body cycles from waking and wondering to sleeping and dreaming. No one can be as constant as a machine, but not all problems can be solved with algorithms. We have evolved to respond to immediate danger, but we have difficulty acting on, even comprehending, chronic existential threats such as climate change; or anticipating unintended consequences of technological development. With disaster trending as attention spans narrow, these poems address serious matters without succumbing to despair. I’m glad that elements of delight and hope come through, as I desperately believe this world—and we—are worth saving.