BUILDING UPON earlier explorations of "surplus cultural information" as material for reinvention, Harryette Mullen's new collection Regaining Unconsciousness comes 13 years after her last full-length collection, Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary (Graywolf, 2012). With elements of Urban Tumbleweed's fleeting yet sustained meditations, combined with the language play of Recylopedia (2006), Mullen's latest collection documents linguistic idiosyncrasies specific to the COVID-19 lockdown period and the years since. Mullen's poems, like the memes we shared early in the pandemic, document the new terminology of lockdowns, misinformation, boosters, and natural immunity, while also studying the effect of such language: "Do we, woebegone, forget how to feel better?" Several titles invoke literary classics, climate change, and words du jour pulled from the headlines, insisting on the possibility of pleasure and language's ability to renew and restore meaning and memory, even as the state attempts to censor American letters. Regaining Unconsciousness investigates a history of state violence and obfuscation while navigating questions of trust with heightened vigilance. Under these unsettling conditions, how might we regain a body of letters linked to the physical body?
Poems like "The Wind Is Pink," (which borrows a line from Ernest J. Gaines's short story "The Sky Is Gray") challenge the reader to meet Mullen within a shared literary context or else risk missing layers of meaning. A contemporary addendum to Gaines's story, Mullen's poem circumvents the epiphany of the original text:
Readers may remember how a similar confrontation with an authority figure within the short story leads to the traveler's declaration: "I'm not mad at the world. I am questioning the world. I'm questioning it with cold logic." This essential language -- the logic and conversation of the original -- is replaced by the officer's gunshot and a lack of engagement, which no longer allows for Gaines's Afropessimist critique. While there are poems where Mullen annotates with epigraphs the language she has pulled from music, the news, or statesmen, she also demands that readers participate in a rich tradition of poetic allusion. Through repetition and the emphasis of section titles, she trains the reader's ear to hear when other voices enter and exit the text. I myself only read Gaines's "The Sky Is Gray" because of the sparkling language Mullen borrows. Her poem therefore functions as both an introduction and an expansion. Perhaps my late introduction to Gaines isn't surprising, considering that the American Library Association lists his work among the most frequently challenged books with diverse content. In essence, Mullen's poem illustrates an absence from the canonical syllabus -- her poem lets me hear the whistling gap (in my reading and in my education) where Gaines's work resides.
In another poem that hints at the canon, "As I Wander Lonely in the Cloud," Mullen alludes to the structure of her own project: "The cloud's vast, expanding, and indefinite memory stores all the information I create in my interlinked communications, including what I'm writing to you now." Regaining Unconsciousness is made up of 11 sections tethered together by the vulnerability of human connection. The "indefinite memory" Mullen revisits is porous, fragmented, each section a missive shaped by the technological confines of language, from the book to the data server. Some language permeates the vessel that holds it, and some is fractured by it. Our connection to this vast archive of "interlinked communications" is tentative, reliant on the maintenance of technology that demands the constant consumption of energy. "[W]hat I'm writing to you now" is undoubtedly stored within "smart machines," a server beyond our control and perhaps as ephemeral as the cloud we use to describe it. And within this structure, Mullen depicts the wonder and crisis of the current age: "Smart machines armed with proprietary algorithms remain attentive to my wishes. They use a little known, mysterious mental faculty to anticipate my urges. Ingenious applications of intelligence solve the problem of desire."
We have access to and appetite for materials and information, but the mechanisms that most influence our consumption are disguised, "proprietary algorithms." Proprietary suggests both protection and profit, but our desires, influenced by "the industry of maximum growth," are neither for safety nor for personal gain, but rather for another's "sustainable returns." In her critique of technology, Mullen chooses to invoke William Wordsworth, a central voice of Romanticism, a movement that distinctly responded to the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment. Wordsworth's work reflects his love of nature's "beauteous forms," celebrating the emotional response such natural beauty evokes in humanity. But he also writes to us from the peak of the transatlantic slave trade in the late 18th century, so Mullen's invocation of Wordsworth demands that we engage with both the aesthetic and the ethical questions of the Romantic age, as well as our own.
Reading Regaining Unconsciousness, I'm reminded of Mullen's introduction to Recylopedia: "If the encyclopedia collects general knowledge, the recyclopedia salvages and finds imaginative uses for knowledge. That's what poetry does when it remakes and renews words, images, and ideas, transforming surplus cultural information into something unexpected." Similarly, in her new collection, "surplus cultural information" operates as both refuse and creative medium. In poems like "Sonnets Composed on Loo Roll," the surplus appears as a formal constraint, as the 14 sentences in an unbroken block of prose stand in for a sonnet's 14 lines. An excess of syllables is required to convey the excess of news cycle highlights: "Competent composers offer sorrow songs performers croon to soothe over notes of trombone, cornet, or oboe. Then follow broke poets whose strophes open whole new tropes for lovelorn sonnets."
Despite the dire content that's transcribed -- mass shootings, climate disasters, the attrition of civil rights -- Mullen's poetics centers the many joys and uses of language. I'm thinking particularly of poems like "Now's Not the Time for Your Tears," which is written in rhyme, a primary tool for memory, though today readers often find that the device falls short or easily leads to overwriting. Within the context of surplus information, rhyme not only offers recognition but also reflects our own susceptibility to the familiar (sonically and otherwise). As readers, do we not find comfort in what is easy to recognize ? Elsewhere, in poems such as the ghazal "Transparenthetical," language renames as it conceals. Rather than naming their precise desire, the adressee's "dream of success" is deferred through the prepositional, parenthetical, and idiomatic constraints of language. Within the poem, the addressee seeking employment must stand within "the one-way mirror" of the interview room, which exists within a "frame" that includes the "window of opportunity." The idiom offers the safety of familiarity, but the window does not open:
A rare and desirable option (difficult to predict
in any event) is your window of opportunity.
FYI what you need to know (but you never know) to seize
a limited offer: when is the window of opportunity.
Picture the future opening for you (with a nominal down
payment on hidden costs) a sunny window of opportunity.
These finely developed conceits inform our reading of terser poems in the collection. We see the language of employment and opportunity revised throughout Regaining Unconsciousness as Mullen revisits the relationship between labor and consumption with the constant question of who partakes of each role and to what degree. Who benefits from the economic argument? "Black History Minute," which points to the recently rewritten education guidelines for the State of Florida, becomes an indictment of the economic argument for the transatlantic slave trade, "a win-win-win deal" in which "recruited Africans practiced / marketable skills and built up / solid résumés, working as unpaid interns." In recent years, the economic argument has become the pervasive measure of efficiency. Not only must one's work, service, or art improve the quality of life, but such work must also result in a measured increase in one's own or a participant's earning capacity.
The Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency use the economic argument as a guise to resegregate the United States by reversing policies of diversity, inclusion, equity, and accessibility. Mullen's marked concision here, with the minute replacing the much longer observation of Black History Month ("Black History Minute provides students and educators with all / you ever need to know about American slavery"), reads as a critique of national censorship and the ethical absurdity of reframing a human life as an economic unit. Throughout Regaining Unconsciousness, Mullen dismantles the language of consumer culture to reveal the gendered, racialized, and environmental violence implicit in modern consumption. At the center of this dismantling is the reader's own attention to the world. Why should increased specificity make the world sound increasingly absurd? Mullen's astute observations force us to consider our own concerning reactions, as when a branded recipe evokes nostalgia:
My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of Lipton instant ice tea!
I've clipped a terrific recipe from Sunday's paper: a Betsy Ross
rectangular cake covered with strawberries, blueberries, and Cool Whip,
with a coupon for the Cool Whip.
When I read these lines from "Land of the Discount Price, Home of the Brand Name," I'm weighing my own childhood memory of a flag-like sheet cake to determine if I felt patriotism that summer or if I consumed some discounted and time-efficient version of American inclusion in between my mother's two full-time jobs.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the distinction between something being efficient and something being effective in poetry and in life. So often in daily life, we suggest that both are valuable in tandem, but in art, perhaps, the effect transcends the efficiency. Part of Mullen's virtuosity is that she invites and anticipates the myriad experience of readers. Mullen relies on the fact that her reader exists in the world, and that each reader is arriving with radically different context. As she once explained in an interview conducted by Elisabeth A. Frost, Mullen's poems reflect personal stakes while inviting readers' varied connections -- to literature, to current events, and to each other:
The reader is getting whatever the reader can get. Just as I do when I'm reading. This is about me reading too, getting what I get and passing it on. What I really love, when I read this poem, or when someone else reads it and tells me about their experience, is that different people get different things. If I am in a room with an audience, sometimes the young people are laughing and the old people just stare. And vice versa.
As a writer, I've frequently considered how a poem's speaker might be polyvocal, but Mullen makes space for the reader's polyconsciousness, the multiple consciousnesses of readers finding different access points to the work. If a reader comes to "The Wind Is Pink" without knowledge of the Ernest J. Gaines short story, they may still recognize the tension between the traveler and the officer and hear the echoes of so many contemporary headlines. They may detect the way the passive voice conceals whose hand is on the gun. Or perhaps, if they have been sheltered from the violence of the state, they'll understand the opening quotation ("We bought the best dog") in "Sounds That Dog Can't Hear" and know exactly who owns the dog without even hearing the shot in question:
That dog can't hear
drums and chants of rising demands,
desperate prayers of asylum seekers,
screams of terrified children
shot down in this week's massacre, or
anguished sobs of inconsolable
fathers and mothers.
Mullen's poems have an aesthetic and formal range that is reflected in their spectrum of associations and meandering tangents, constructing a diverse poetics that reflects a coherent wish to interlace the environment around us with our contemporary human concerns. She utilizes the prose poem, concrete poem, rhymed couplets, free verse, and adapted sonnets. Regaining Unconsciousness is a meditation on humanity and the natural world, and the artifice between. If the poems share a single source, it is a mind intimately reaching toward an unresolved future (whose readers are still forming their connections to the collective) and inviting the reader to play. Perhaps above all, it is this bid to play that highlights Mullen's value of effect over efficiency. This playful and patient relation to the reader is embedded in her first address, the dedication of the book itself "to Z of Generation Alpha." For the readers of Generation Alpha, the oldest of whom turn 15 this year, Regaining Unconsciousness offers remarkably accessible content, with references to The Little Mermaid and dinosaurs alongside Wordsworth and Gaines.
Even in her poems about the deep past, she considers and cares for the immediate future. In "Natural History," Mullen describes the late Cretaceous period, "free as songbirds that don't yet exist." The prehuman world is miniaturized (along with our human errors), within a glassblower's "transparent globe":
Within the crystal sphere, a primal landscape of abundant life. In this elemental scene, a captive herd of triceratops grazing, contented, unaware of confinement.
They have never known the humiliation of an embezzler, handcuffed, doing the perp walk in an orange jumpsuit, or the psychosis of a condemned murderer, staring at nothing, locked in a windowless cell on death row.
In the triceratops minds she has invented, Mullen imagines contentment. The humiliation and condemnation she describes are strictly human characteristics, elements of a news cycle that has already grown old for us outside the "transparent globe." In the poem, the triceratops exists beyond extinction: "[N]ot one of them imagines green leaves turning to oil, or coal to diamonds." And yet, we cannot ignore that the globe that holds the dinosaur is a human creation, like the poem.
Always a master of keen observation, Mullen notices both devastation and survival, but in these poems she presents them on a human scale, one that accounts for climate-driven wildfires and recalled pro-vegan license plates. In a world short on attention, Mullen emphasizes that nothing is trivial. And alongside the mess of humanity, Mullen also gives us volcanoes that don't destroy us: "At least today, this uncanny vision is not the sulfurous plume of a volcano ready to blow." In the title poem, Mullen writes, "Our trials continue with inexhaustible fire as we reckon the damage." It is possible to doubt the future and nevertheless trek toward it. It is possible to be clear-eyed toward our past and simultaneously joyful, recounting "pleasure we nearly forget."