Laura Mullen

Cross Genre
“Wildly absorbing, Murmur is a gorgeous genre-bender: detective novel, film noir and memoir... ”
--Rikki Ducornet
"A brilliant, utterly original, fully realized work that wickedly out-tropes horror's cliches and devices.... wonderfully immediate, making an exaggerated, rollicking introduction to many of the pre-occupations, rhetorics and methods of experimental poetry."
--Publishers Weekly, August 1999
Poetry
"Solid and brave and relentlessly inventive."
--Cal Bedient
"There's a rigor and intensity in Mullen's search for truth that often take her to breathtaking lengths." --C.K. Williams // "Accuracy of spirit and ferocity of intelligence prevail...This is thrilling and exacting work." --Jorie Graham
"Laura Mullen proceeds from near void into a powerful reconstruction of self…After I Was Dead is wildly versatile formally, restlessly roving from verse to prose to epistle and back."—Boston Review

Dark Archive's dark archive...

A Poetics

July 23, 2011

Drift

direction tendency trend inclination tenor oriented

digression divergence aberrancy variation in-
direction detour excursion bias slant
straying errantry peregrination curve zig-

zag deflection distortion refraction diffraction
scatter diffusion sheer wander rove straggle
evade dodge ward devious indirect winding snaky
mazy desultory inflective flectional refractile

course career passage progress flow flux flight
(more…)

Cloud Apparatus

March 16, 2011

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...

"A haunted society is full of ghosts,

February 4, 2011

and the ghost always carries the message...that the gap between personal and social, public and private, objective and subjective is misleading in the first place. That is to say it is leading you elsewhere, it is making you see things you did not see before...your relation to things that seemed separate or invisible is changing." Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters p 98

"So let's do that."

January 25, 2011

Tags: Harry Mathews, William Wordsworth, bunnies, mountains

"Pick a subject, anyway: daffodils. Look, the daffodils are out. (more…)

Pause Traveller

January 5, 2011

Tags: Wordsworth, Daffodils, Katrina, Abortion

As if I’d come overcome by feverish passion to mistake fluidity for stability: to see mountains in the green waves breaking around a boat. Should I have said “I know you’ll read her diary”? Would she have turned to me, eager to protect her brother, and let the unbidden word come to her lips: “Who won’t?” I’d actually wanted back in at another point entirely: to intervene. I had no desire to be walking in Grasmere with the sister and brother, and also no desire to be here writing the words “I had no desire.” (more…)