Harryette Mullen

A Reading and Conversation with Poet-scholar Dr. Harryette Mullen

Thursday, September 04, 2025
Event Time 03:30 p.m. - 05:30 p.m. PT
Cost Free
Location HUM 512
Contact Email cwriting@sfsu.edu

Overview

This Thursday, September 4, 2025, the Creative Writing Department in LCA is honored to host a reading and conversation with poet-scholar Dr. Harryette Mullen in HUM 512 (the Poetry Center) from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.

[A Professor of English at UCLA,] 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.”

— from “Toasting Eternity with Harryette Mullen,” Bianca Stone, Poets & Writers, September/October 2025

Dr. Mullen has received a Gertrude Stein Award for innovative poetry, a Katherine Newman Award for best essay on U.S. ethnic literature, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2004), and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a PEN/Beyond Margins Award for her Recyclopedia (2006).[6] She is also credited for rediscovering the novel Oreo, published in 1974 by Fran Ross. Mullen won the fourth annual Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers in 2010.[7]

We are celebrating the occasion of the publication of her new poetry collection Regaining Unconsciouness which is drawing praise for extraordinary work. (Included in this email is a list of reviews as well as several poems by Dr. Mullen’s.) This is a rare and joyful opportunity.

Join us if you can, and please share this invitation with interested colleagues and students and friends.

Excerpts

As I Wander Lonely in the Cloud

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.

By now, their ability seems less arcane, considering how my aspirations
may be formulated to coincide with goods and services of marketers whose
product lines cohabit in the cloud with the history of all my searches as I
browse, added to the sum of my mediated sociality.

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, as on my couch I multitask in pensive mood, opening my mail to
find a discount coupon reminding me that nothing says spring like daffodils.

— from Regaining Unconsciousness by Harryette Mullen, (Graywolf Press, 2025)

 

Weathering Hate

The way, exposed to weather, a body is worn. Velvet threads begin to wither,
rapid-ripened beyond the burst bloom. Vibrant strands, cut short, then fray,
unweaving faded fabric. Sun-struck, rain-warped, storm-blasted, rough-sanded
in whipping wind that whittles rock.

Small, torturous fractures opened in stone where water freezes in the pores
with grains of salt. Cracks in the surface pried apart by unrelenting pressure.
With incessant freezing and thawing, shock and fatigue speed rugged stress
to ultimate breakdown. Intemperate weather, abrading edges, gradually
disintegrates resolute minerals.

A boulder, even a mountain, will wear down. So will bodies, bent and broken
under toilsome burdens, caving beneath unbearable weight, in adverse
climate, exposed to harsh elements, caustic rains.

— from Regaining Unconsciousness by Harryette Mullen, (Graywolf Press, 2025)

 

Any Lit

You are a ukulele beyond my microphone

You are a Yukon beyond my Micronesia

You are a union beyond my meiosis

You are a unicycle beyond my migration

You are a universe beyond my mitochondria

You are a Eucharist beyond my Miles Davis

You are a euphony beyond my myocardiogram

You are a unicorn beyond my Minotaur

You are a eureka beyond my maitai

You are a Yuletide beyond my minesweeper

You are a euphemism beyond my myna bird

You are a unit beyond my mileage

You are a Yugoslavia beyond my mind’s eye

You are a yoo-hoo beyond my minor key

You are a Euripides beyond my mime troupe

You are a Utah beyond my microcosm

You are a Uranus beyond my Miami

You are a youth beyond my mylar

You are a euphoria beyond my myalgia

You are a Ukranian beyond my Maimonides

You are a Euclid beyond my miter box

You are a Univac beyond my minus sign

You are a Eurydice beyond my maestro

You are a eugenics beyond my Mayan

You are a U-boat beyond my mind control

You are a euthanasia beyond my miasma

You are a urethra beyond my Mysore

You are a Euterpe beyond my Mighty Sparrow

You are a ubiquity beyond my minority

You are a eunuch beyond my migraine

You are a Eurodollar beyond my miserliness

You are a urinal beyond my Midol

You are a uselessness beyond my myopia

— from Sleeping with the Dictionary, Harryette Mullen, (University of California Press, 2002)

 

REVIEWS for Regaining Unconsciousness

Published/Online

Coming Soon

  • Regaining Unconsciousness, review in POETRY Magazine/The Poetry Foundation, 2025
  • Regaining Unconsciousness reviewed by Harmony Holiday, BOMB Magazine, September 2025

We hope to see you there.

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