Laura Mullen

"Does it matter where you first encounter a book you love? Doesn't the book become instantly and forever its own world, at once familiar and strange? Head full of words that must not be spoken, you read them, duck pit, radish patch, threshold, notebook, tongues that wander a girl's mouth or flutter on a line, the gaze fixed on nothing (as required), a huge sky blank, white…—Stéphanie Chaillou's first book transports me. Yes. But. And. A grey light falls through the large windows of one of Paris' many wonderful small independent bookstores, where I am standing in the poetry section, quelque chose se passe open in my hands, feeling that arrow shock of joy: here is a voice I longed to hear, telling me something I need to know. White sky of the open pages, rain light of Paris in autumn: bright dimness like the magic of reading words in one language (French / source) and beginning to hear how they'd sound in another (English / target). Of course the possibility of recognition is conditional: you only find the book you need (you know you need) because you found or were given other books; what and how you read depending on what you have experienced (and how you came to think of and describe that experience)." This paragraph is from the translator's introduction for something happens (just out from  Lavender Ink / Diálogos, but I cite it here because I realized that--as I joyfully raved (over the weekend) about S. J. Kim's THIS PART IS SILENT--that I really do experience the same rush of happiness, when I fall in love with a book, that I feel when I fall in love with a person. My heart opens in my chest and the world seems wider and better. Recently (because I have the time) I'm more inclined to try to share that love: so I'm running a free poetry book club that meets once a month in Ventura, and writing reviews for the California Review of Books. Monica de la Torre. Denise Newman and Norma Cole. Forrest Gander. So many people have had their sense of poetry limited (by lack of exposure) or damaged (by clumsy and controlling teachers)--it really seems necessary to make spaces and provide the tools for better encounters. Watch the events page at Timbre Books  for book club information, check out VITA Arts Center if you want to take a workshop with me, and if you need a manuscript consultation / editing, go through the Black Square Editions website.

You-Tube: Kelly Writers House event

 

reading with Airea D Matthews, and performances by Laynie Brown, Airea D Matthews, and Rachel Zolf.

I recently completed an artist book with John David O'Brien: produced in an edition of 50 copies (text by me, photos by John David O'Brien, and an intro by Herman Rapaport): contact if interested...


Born in Sagamihara, Japan into a military family, John David O’Brien works as an artist, writer and curator, living between Los Angeles and Umbria, Italia. He works in both studio and public art exhibiting locally and internationally and was the recipient of California Community Foundation Fellowship in 2012, the City of Los Angeles Artists Grant in 1998 and a Fulbright Research Grant to Italy in 1994. He has also been art event organizing and curating since 1989. This work has ranged from curating exhibitions at a local and international level, to being on the exhibition committee for area non-profit organizations, to directing long term project spaces that create venues for new and experimental art forms.

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The marvelous poet Min Kang wrote and asked if she could “tag” me as part of this "blog tour" project (she’d been tagged by the splendid Metta Sama) and I said yes—in part because I was interested in the relay aspect: I was interested in the chance to then tag two (extraordinary)  Read More 

These interview questions were sent to me by Lola Gerber. Lola Gerber earned an MA in Poetry from Southern Illinois University, and is currently an MFA student at Naropa University, where she is currently exploring the notion of the body as bridge and as barrier. Lola has had her poetry published in various journals, both print and online, includingPoemsMemoiresStories magazine, Monkey Puzzle Press, Dead Snakes, and Mixed Fruit Magazine, and have self-published a novel titled Serrated Soul.

Lola Gerber: I really enjoy both your performances and your writing. What is the relationship for you between performance art and writing? Do they work independently of each other for you, or is there an intersection?

Laura Mullen: I came to writing via performance (if “via” can describe the long and wildly twisted path!). Growing up I had a passion for theater as well as a passion for poetry, and while poetry “won” (as it were) when I committed to that genre I wrote works I wanted to read out loud and music guided composition in important ways. I wrote the songs I wanted to hear—I might say. And the hybrid texts only expanded  Read More 

“With,” the opening poem of my recent book (Enduring Freedom), haunted me—in pieces: notes, drafts, scrawled repetitions—longer than I knew. Though I recalled that the central image had been given to me  Read More 

This is a book without imagination in it. Or, the only imagination in it involves a certain inventiveness with structures—a gesture toward the failure of other systems of containment (memory, etc): what is invented here marks an absence, functions as an acknowledgement of loss.

Admit failure, I wrote, start from that place…

Dedication: “ to those who, in their time of need, have been renamed” or “have been given nothing—except a sweeter name.”

Is there ANYONE here who hasn’t declared their “commitment to excellence”?! Do it now, get it over with…

The split between the page you read (this page) and my writing (2009) then typing (2013) it—the intervention of time. The secrecy of the process (I think it’s secret). These notebooks, all that time… Days of silence. Lines scrawled on a page. Avoidance and shame and pleasure repeated to dullness and the increasing pressure to “write” which is to produce some evidence of “writing.”

The method is not the subject or is it / it is shaped by

Ways we frame the world determine how we respond to it. Keep breaking the frame in search of the most fluid most present response.

Learning to listen to the quality of the mind itself—to listen for capacities and the resistance of limitations.

To learn to speak—to trust the exposed mind. To trust, and then to worry or fret about what is thrown off scattered given away—oh why not? You must… And yet and yet—what’s given away seems worthless.

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After I Was Dead
Laura Mullen
University of Georgia Press, $15.95 (paper)

The Tales of Horror: A Flip-Book
Laura Mullen
Kelsey Street Press, $12 (paper)

In After I Was Dead, Laura Mullen proceeds from near void ("These layers / Are great: this white, off white and off off white in a dense / Application") into a powerful reconstruction  Read More 

Definition: some invisible force moving the edges around.
Definition: to justify, to intercede.
Translation: there is no such thing as translation.
Arriving out of the glowing infinite,
Hands raised in horror or benediction.
"An unreadable look." Definition: reading.
Translation: the complete withdrawal of belief.
Some invisible force shivers the edges of the broken.
Definition: chord change drum rumble chorus"...need."
Hopelessness, failure. Some invisible force
Going back over it again the wrong way. Moving:
Meaning something shifted in me. Some form
Of transport necessary: edges glowing. Definitely.
Division of the enclosed. Attention: to intervene...
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