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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Cease and Desist

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I'm Helena de Groot. Today, "Cease and Desist." Laura Mullen recently came out with a new collection about a world she knows well, but a world she no longer feels at home in: academia. It's not the students—she loves teaching and she loves her students—but the institution itself, which, as I'm sure you know, is really a business, complete with board meetings and performance targets and glossy brochures that market the dream of higher education to young people who will be ruthlessly milked for cash. In her new collection, titled EtC, Mullen decided to push this milk metaphor as far as it would go by remaking academia into a dairy conglomerate where language is carefully managed, vetted and sanitized because the last thing they need at this fictional conglomerate is people speaking their minds. Meanwhile, in the real world, a few weeks before the book was set to come out, Laura fired off a quick tweet. It was a Thursday around 9pm, and for the past few days, she'd been watching the news, horrified to see how after the October 7th attack by Hamas, the IDF was now meting out collective punishment against the entire civilian population of Gaza, bombing refugees as they fled, bombing patients as they lay sick or wounded in the hospital. Laura has since deleted the tweet, and asked me to respect her decision, but it went something like, "If I were treated the way Palestinians are, I, too, might be tempted to attack Israel." It didn't take long for the death threats to start coming in. Two weeks later, she resigned from her post as Kenan Chair in the Humanities at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. When I sat down to talk to her, she was still dealing with the fallout from her words, but she was also in a place she loved, New Orleans, where she used to live. Here's our conversation.

Helena de Groot: First of all, how's New Orleans? How is it being back?

Laura Mullen: Oh my God, it's so amazing. It's absolutely life-saving. I went to the po' boy festival yesterday, and it ended with a set by George Porter Jr., and he played a Sly Stone tribute. And the tribute included "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)." And I was like, yes, New Orleans. That's New Orleans. It's heaven to be home. I told the people at Octavia Books, my highest life aspiration is to be regarded as an honorary local poet in New Orleans.

Helena de Groot: How long did you live there?

Laura Mullen: Eight years.

Helena de Groot: Huh. That's interesting that eight years has done so much that you feel like that is home. What is it about New Orleans, you think?

Laura Mullen: It really is that permission. It's so arts-oriented, so open. Just—it's OK to live here in a way that it mostly isn't in America.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Laura Mullen: Anyway, let's get down to it.

Helena de Groot: Yes. So, there are two things that I wanna talk about. I wanna talk about your book, obviously. I also wanna talk about the situation that you're going through right now.

Laura Mullen: The most famous poem I'll ever write.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) I know.

Laura Mullen: The thing I realized is, when I wrote EtC, I was terrified of the risks I was taking in the book. Absolutely terrified. I sent the manuscript to a former teacher and mentor and friend, D.A. Miller, and he called me up and he said, "What is wrong with you? You're so scared. I don't even think this manuscript, as it is right now, can be any good because you're so terrified." And I was like, OK, OK, alright. That helped. And I backed off of the fear, kind of got through it a little bit. And then the book went along and went along and was accepted and got close to publication. And my wonderful publishers suddenly started emailing me at like 3am to say, "There are some issues here we think lawyers should look at." And so, we went through that, with like, "OK, this corporation name has to come out, and you can't say this in an interview," and boom, boom, boom, boom. So, I went through this terror. and then I got over the terror, and then I went back into terror. And then the shit came down that is coming down now, and I realized I'm like, I'm not afraid of anything in the book at all.

Helena de Groot: Oh, that's interesting. So, that the thing that happened in your personal life kind of overshadowed whatever dairy company is coming for you. You're like, look, I've had it worse.

Laura Mullen: Yeah. No, listen, I've been on Twitter since 2012. The other big fun I had on Twitter was the year that I asked AWP to try to be more diverse. And that was a thing that got blown up, and the head of AWP wrote to my chair at the time and tried to get me fired on that one. So, this isn't entirely my first rodeo. However, since that time, nobody . . . I mean, my posts don't get much action. Like, 20 likes is a big deal. 60 views is normal, and this got 35,000 views. I'm just gonna pause for a minute, Helena, and just breathe a little bit because I've been sick with stress for over a month, I mean, like, physically sick and unable to sleep. And I am totally willing to talk to you about this, but it might be nicer to start with the book.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, of course, of course. Yeah. Let's come back to it. So, your collection opens with a poem about a dairy farmer strike in 1932. Can you tell me the story behind the dairy strike? What happened? Why were these farmers striking? And what was it about that story that struck you?

Laura Mullen: So, many layers to it. First of all, I'm the daughter of a stevedore. I was raised to believe in unions. My father played me The Weavers in my cradle.

 ("UNION MINERS" BY THE WEAVERS PLAYS)

The Weavers:

Then by honest weights, we labor

Union miners will prevail

 So, keep your hand upon the dollar

And your eye upon the scale

Union miners…

(FADES OUT)

Laura Mullen: So, this strike is about people who have a product and who are not getting the value for their product and are trying to find a way to get the value that they should get for their product. And that requires a strike. That requires action. And that is, of course, something right now we're coming back to in America as unions begin to come back into power, as we realize there is only one way to stop the corporate predatory practices, which will reduce us to . . . The Matrix.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Laura Mullen: But let's contextualize the book as a whole. It's in part about what Jennifer Freyd calls "institutional betrayal." It's in part about the corporatization of academia, and what that means for those who labor in that discipline industry, whatever you wanna call it. Because why don't we just talk about adjuncts for a minute?

Helena de Groot: Interesting.

Laura Mullen: Why don't we just talk about what we're gonna have to do so that people are not ripped by the institution they're working for?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Because, like, when we think about unions and strikes, we do think about this idea of the working class, in the sense that the work that you do is standing on your feet and doing something with your hands or whatever. Like, that's the traditional image. But I feel like we now live in a world where you can have a desk job or you can have a job where you spend a lot of time in books, and it can still actually be structured like a really extractive factory job, where you're just being treated like a cog in a machine. So, I think it's interesting to have that. It would be harder to make a poem about an adjunct because their days don't look as cinematic. You know what I'm saying? Like the image of milk flowing down ditches is something that's hard to produce in academia.

Laura Mullen: Well, I think it helps us to see what we should be able to see, which is human lives flowing away down the ditches.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Laura Mullen: It's so important to me, because I've been a teacher and because I've been a teacher of graduate students, and that means I've been sending people out into a job search that has resulted in pain for them, not being able to get what you thought you would get from the training you paid for.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. At this point it feels almost like a pyramid scheme.

Laura Mullen: Well, it is a pyramid scheme at this point. And it wasn't. Certainly, my teacher didn't think she was participating in it, and I didn't, when I started out, think I was participating in it. But part of the reason I took the job at Wake Forest is [that] I wanted to go back to straight-up undergrad teaching, because I was worried about students who would come to me and they would get their MFA and then they would say, "Well, my parents expect me to go to get a job." And I was like, well, the MFA is a license to hunt. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: That's a really great description for it. Well, let's read that opening

poem to ground us.

Laura Mullen: Sure.

Helena de Groot: In the opening of the book, is there anything that you wanna say to set it up before you launch into it?

Laura Mullen: No.

Helena de Groot: OK.

Laura Mullen:
 

"Sioux City, Melchoir, 1932."

Sing muses, if you will, of what opened once in the spread between what farmers earned for milk and the price consumers paid at the lip of the depression. Speak of roads shut by mazes of hay bales, hot farmers with shotguns asking drivers their business, and the ditches running white with the poured-out milk on this "holiday," which was the word used in place of strike. Tell us again of that long ago August, and those for whom justice became urgent. Sing of the right to collective bargaining if you love us, or let the silence eloquent around that lost history speak here of fearfulness. Chant the history of hikes and dips in land prices, the diminishing numbers of farms and remember now the great corporations, wielders of the cease and desist letters whose names removed here we must not take in vain. May the talking flower or satellite dish from which our avatar partially emerges echo the words of Mr. Archie Wright, who saw the small farm as the basis of our democracy and said "to live, you have to think."

Laura Mullen: So, for instance, this poem where it says, "remember now the great corporations," in the first version of the poem, we got a list of the names of the great corporations. And my very smart, wonderful, beloved publishers said, "Laura, uhh, uhh." And I was like, well, why? And they were like, "Laura, we don't wanna get a cease and desist letter." So, I was like, oh, wait, this actually makes the poem better.

Helena de Groot: It does.

Laura Mullen: It makes the poem better, especially because it gave me the chance to make the religious crossover, which keeps happening in the book and the way we're sort of Christian about our capitalism. So, I could say the names we must not take in vain.

Helena de Groot: It is really wonderful. And wielders of the cease and desist letters is such a great . . . God, what is the word now? An adjective that always goes with the same person.

Laura Mullen: Absolutely. I do know. And it's almost like one of those ancient poems in which wielders of the cease and desist letters would be attached to their name.

Helena de Groot: Exactly. That's exactly what it feels like. So, it's beautiful. I mean, it really elevates the poem, I think. But to hear that it came out of 3am anxiety from your publisher, I think is kind of brilliant, or from . . . Yeah. And what I thought was such an interesting choice is that you open the book with the poem that is maybe the most well-behaved. Can I put it that way? It really gave me the impression like, "OK, this is a poem that opens a politically engaged book, a kind of . . . like an essay of sorts rooted in historical research." And then I read the rest of your book. And what I thought was so fabulous was that you immediately bring in Elsie, the mascot in the shape of a cow for an, again, unnamed dairy company. And Elsie changes the whole game. She leads you into all these directions.

Laura Mullen: She does.

Helena de Groot: And she is all this persona and you know she's sometimes a mascot, and she's sometimes like a corporate girlie with meeting minutes and a statement necklace made out of daisies.

Laura Mullen: The chair of a department of anguish.

Helena de Groot: It's amazing. It's so good.

Laura Mullen: So good.

Helena de Groot: And in some poems, she's a deity, which also led me to one of my favorite puns from your collection. I don't even know how to . . .

Laura Mullen: "Commodeity."

Helena de Groot: "Commo-deity."

Laura Mullen: "Commodeity," where we mix the commodity and the deity together. Yes, I know, for me, I was like, I was ecstatic. I tickled myself pink with that one. "Oh, my God, I can't believe it." Because when I read it, I thought, how have I never seen this before? This is just too good. Like, it encapsulates everything about our current time. Things like that. The book gave me a lot of gifts, like the dyslexic smear, I'll call it, between diary and dairy.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Laura Mullen: That was just . . . It was just a gift.

Helena de Groot: And so, where did she . . . What happened to your poems once you found Elsie? Like, where did she lead you? Do you remember anything feeling possible or an insight happening or a direction that you thought, "huh, that's just thanks to Elsie?"

Laura Mullen: The whole book is thanks to Elsie. And I suddenly remembered and tapped into this image that was so deeply a part of my childhood. If you grow up in America, this face is everywhere. Everywhere. Everywhere. It really is the commodeity. And once I started doing that research and thinking into it, it just . . . Yeah. The book wouldn't exist without her.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I really love Elsie. I mean, I love how all of her different identities, whether she's a deity, commodeity, or she's a girlboss, or she's a slightly huffed sort of white woman who has been wronged. In some way, they all read as still the same person, and a person that's very pervasive in America.

Laura Mullen: Yes.

Helena de Groot: Well, there was a poem that I was wondering [if] you want to read. One of the Elsie poems is the one on page 15, "Stop Writing About Me."

Laura Mullen: Oh, I love that poem. It's one of my favorites.

Helena de Groot: All good.

Laura Mullen: So, yes. Thank you for that.

Helena de Groot: Again, maybe can you set it up a little bit, maybe. I don't know maybe the state of mind that you were in when you wrote it or like . . . Because this is . . . The reason I'm asking you is this is a little bit further away from unions and milk, this poem.

Laura Mullen: Yeah. Let me think about that, as Elsie says. Let's just lay it on the table. This entire book was written at what was then maybe the worst part of my life. Now, it seems like nothing. (LAUGHS) But the entire book was written out of rage and pain and grief. And all the Elsie poems, Helena, came extremely quickly. I wrote 80 poems in three months. I mean, this book is a fraction. There's a—someday, director's cut of all the stuff I cut out to make it the shapeliness that I liked for this. But to remember the state of mind for any of the poems, it's not going to be very various. They all came rushing out of me. I just would come home, open the notebook and just go into this place. And I was so grateful for the way I was very isolated, for the way the poems gave me a place to speak, as far as I was concerned, the truth of what I was experiencing in a way that turned pain, rage and grief into art, and made me often laugh out loud, and gave me the courage and joy and joie de vivre to go on living through what I was living through.

Helena de Groot: Can I ask what you were living through?

Laura Mullen: (SIGHS) Boy, oh, boy, oh, boy. Let me think about that. I would say . . . I think the easiest way to say that—and you hear in my voice the fact that I haven't really prepared myself to answer that question. But let me just say I'm a first-generation college student and it meant the world to me to be able, through mentoring and training and hard work, to become a writer and a scholar. There was a chance I wasn't gonna go to college at all. I was a waitress and had a motorcycle and thought I might be a visual artist. And when I began to realize that the thing I'd worked so hard to become was in fact a thing that involved a participation in an institution that was deeply compromised and, in fact, as we discussed earlier, potentially leading people to spaces that would be extraordinarily difficult and painful for the whole of their lives, I was devastated. Just devastated and lost.

Helena de Groot: Did something happen? Because you had been in academia for a while by then, did something happen that came to a head then?

Laura Mullen: I think that because of who I am I adore teaching, and I really, really am ecstatic to have had the chance to work with the students I've worked with, because I've worked with amazing people. Academia itself has not been an easy place for me to be. And because I've done what you need to do in academia, which is to follow the good jobs, I have spent most of my life in places I didn't wanna be. The eight years in New Orleans were ecstatic and special. They did involve an 80-mile commute each way, but they were worth it, because it was the first time in my adult life that I got to live where I wanted to live.

Helena de Groot: And you were how old when that happened?

Laura Mullen: That was 2013. So, what? 55? 50s.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Wow. That is kind of dark, to think that you had to wait until you were [in your] mid-50s to live somewhere you wanted to be.

Laura Mullen: Yeah. And then I left, and took a job, and I live somewhere I don't wanna be. So, let's just say it's been really dark and really hard. And there's certain ways that academics are, that I'm just not like that. I'm just not. Like, they're just really good at not talking about stuff. And as you can imagine, [I] failed that test miserably. So, it's just been a really, really long, hard go. And I love the Ernest Hemingway quote about somebody losing his money. How did he lose it? "Gradually and suddenly." So, how did academia become impossible? Gradually and suddenly. And I'm not shutting the door on academia. I'm going to teach in December for my favorite low-res MFA program, Stetson's MFA of the Americas, which is pure bliss. Absolutely pure bliss. And I do feel like there's going to be a situation where I'll be able to teach again that will be in a more artsy and human context. (LAUGHS) But the humanities are under extraordinary pressure. So, when we talk about, "Laura, what changed for you?" We have to go back to Archie Wright. We have to go back to the corporatization of academia. We have to say, look, it's not just that I changed. It's also [that] my situation changed. Or as they say about the frogs and the test, the water got hotter and hotter and hotter. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Laura Mullen: And when I noticed that my skin was bubbling, I was like, "Dude, where are the ice cubes?" (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: You found an unlikely ice cube to get you out.

Laura Mullen: Yeah. Indeed. Indeed.

Helena de Groot: So, I wanna get to the poem, “Stop Writing About Me.”

Laura Mullen: Yes, please.

Helena de Groot: The one on page 15. So, just to set the scene again, you are boiling in a pot, slowly boiling.

Laura Mullen: Slowly boiling in a pot. And the pot is the pot of academia. It's also the pot of what we call po-biz. And I'm thinking about what it is to be writing poetry right now.

Helena de Groot: So, every night you come home and you open your notebook and you start writing these Elsie poems.

Laura Mullen: Yeah. And on this particular evening, she says to me, "Stop writing about me." I'm like, "No." I'm like, "Aah!" And I wondered where the rest of that would go.

"Stop writing about me like this," Elsie says primly.

"You need to be sympathetic. Poems are for deepening our emotional capabilities. Yours are not impressive by the by, seeming to be slightly less capacious than your bra size." "Poetry is meant to lead you to love", she huffs as if it were a drug like morphine, which memorably, once allowed me to feel the whole world was my friend, briefly. "Let me think about that and get back to you." Elsie thinks that if I were writing correctly, I'd be married by now or at least have better selfies. And I think a literature meant to help its author be interpolated into the larger marketing strategy is bound to be a very limited field of activity. Right? But Elsie, who hates to be lectured to, as she puts it, is already turning away. "Let me think," she says, "about that and get back to you." She won't.

She fixes her lipstick, adjusts her statement necklace of yellow daisies — I think it's a choker, actually — and fluffs her horns. "Please," I hear her humming as she prances off and she repeats it, 'Me', she adds, like I.

Helena de Groot: It's so interesting how this poem, like all the Elsie poems, comes out of this conceit, this cow, this mascot that has these other layers to her persona. And then so much reality enters the poem. And I just wanna ask you a little bit more about that scene, "'Let me think, she says about that, and get back to you.' She won't. She fixes her lipstick, adjusts her statement necklace of yellow daisies, and fluffs her horns." I love that. Very quick. "Let me get back to you. She won't." (LAUGHS) Because you already said academia, and I think certainly academia is not the only place where we do our utmost to avoid saying what actually really should be said. And "Let me get back to you." We won't. And this whole book is really haunted by the speaker being told to shut up, being told not to press it, not to go there.

Laura Mullen: I ventriloquized the voice that I hear all the time and that I've always heard. I have to say this goes beyond academia. I was raised by alcoholics. So, it's a voice I've always heard that says, if you would just shut up, everything will be fine.

Helena de Groot: Well, I'm grateful that you said it—not me—because that was actually my question. I was like, this book is so haunted by that situation of the speaker being told, shhhh. No, it's (UNKNOWN). So, tell me, like . . .

Laura Mullen: Can I just . . .

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Sorry.

Laura Mullen: Page 82, "The Picture of Radical Doubt in the Diary Industry." Well, so that has the quote in it with the words—we maybe, can we say them? Are we gonna bleep them out? Shut the bleep up?

Helena de Groot: Oh, yes. We can swear on the podcast.

Laura Mullen: Oh, fantastic. Oh, here it goes then. I was sent home from kindergarten for saying "fuck." (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Wow. You started early.

Laura Mullen: That is school and me, man.

Helena de Groot: Wow. It's so interesting how long this line is in your life.

Laura Mullen: One of my grandmothers was a blacklisted communist actress. So, it's all written. It was all . . . Like, it just from the beginning. I was also sent home from kindergarten for refusing to salute the flag. So, yeah.

Helena de Groot: Kindergarten. Wow!

Laura Mullen: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And so, across your work, you do interesting things with narrative. And so, I was just curious about that. Like, what was it like growing up? What were the stories that you were supposed to tell? What were the stories that you were not supposed to tell? And what did it make you feel about story as something to trust or not?

Laura Mullen: Wow. Let's see. If I go . . . I mean, I'm Irish American, and as I say, there was a shit ton of alcoholism. So, stories were part of things and people telling stories to make themselves look good but also, wonderfully, the family liked jokes and my father also liked the stories that showed off the problems a little bit, but he didn't like other people doing that. He could do that about himself. You couldn't do that about him. And my mother was, as I say in another poem somewhere else, one of the last things she said before she died was that she was an Egyptian. She lived by denial. This is a woman who, when I said, "Can we talk about the fact that you're gonna die?" She said, "Laura, that is so tactless." Tactless. So, there was a lot of pressure not to speak and not to speak the truth. And when I was about 15, I tried to kill myself. My grandmother, who was a brilliant, brilliant woman—not the actress, but the art dealer—gave me a journal and said, you have something inside you probably need to let out. And writing has been my lifeline ever since. So, I've always kept writing as the place where when everything around me is saying shut the bleep up, I have a place I can go to and I can say the thing that's real and that keeps me alive.

Helena de Groot: And what is so interesting, I think, about kids is that whatever context they grow up in initially when they're little, they'll think is normal.

Laura Mullen: Yeah, yeah.

Helena de Groot: And so you adjust.

Laura Mullen: You adjust.

Helena de Groot: And I'm wondering, do you remember when the cracks started showing, when you started to realize this is not normal, or "I do not want to join in telling these false stories, or not talking about the things I wanna talk about?" When did the cracks start to show for you?

Laura Mullen: I think the cracks showed the whole way through. But the moment of a suicide attempt is the moment of somebody saying the cracks have become an abyss.

Helena de Groot: That's why I was curious to know, like, when it . . . Because that seems like you've been trying to shout it but no one is listening for a while.

Laura Mullen: Yeah. (CLEARS THROAT). Yeah. There goes my voice. Sorry. I think it's a . . . In more than one book of mine, there is the image I realized of the scream that comes in at the end of this. And yeah, I think weirdly from the beginning, it's just absurd. But I somehow fell out of the womb saying it's not fair.

Helena de Groot: Oh, yeah. Some people are really like that. And it's gonna be a rough life. But, yeah.

Laura Mullen: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: That's so interesting. I mean, but that is what I'm most curious about in reading your work and reading all of the poems in this collection that mention that, or that kind of play into that sort of like, "Oh, shut up, don't talk about this. This needs to be removed." Like this name cannot be taken in vain. [Those] cease and desist letters. The whole poetry collection is struck through with this idea of "Don't say what you see as clear and plain for all to see," because that's not what we do here.

Laura Mullen: "That's not what we do here." And to dip back into the current situation, in fact, you may be deliberately misinterpreted and vilified and threatened.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. That I found so interesting, too. Are you OK with going back to the tweet?

Laura Mullen: I can. I was thinking last night about how much my time in New Orleans played into my writing that particular post, which, as I say, I thought was going out to five of my closest friends. But if you have this sense of injustice and you live in places where things are unequal, you become very, very, very aware of the costs of inequality. So, I was sort of playing last night as I sat in bed with a version, another version, of the post, which goes something like, "Let's see if you run a freeway through my neighborhood, if you redline all of my people into dire poverty, if you refuse reparations, if you go on enforcing the injustice that results from over 400 years of the appalling follow up to the atrocity of enslavement, I might be tempted to jack your car." Yeah. What we do to each other that is violent doesn't come out of nowhere ever.

Helena de Groot: But what I think is so interesting about this tweet . . . Well, first of all, as you said, you wrote it for what you thought was five of your close friends or people who already know you. And of course, then it went out to more people than that, as you said. What did you say? 35,000 impressions or views?

Laura Mullen: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: It's insane. Let's not even think about those numbers. But what I thought was so interesting was that the tweet sort of has two layers. There's sort of the argument of it, and then there's the tone. And having read your poems, I think the tone is so in line with how you write. Like you're so funny and darkly funny, and sort of always putting it in very vivid. You're a poet. So, of course, there's gonna be images. It's gonna be grounded in the world of perceptions. And I thought that maybe because you're a poet, because you're a good writer who makes things visual, maybe that was a little too much for people on the receiving end of that tweet, who . . . It's very hard in the situation, Palestine. When you look too closely, when you look actually, when you actually imagine, it's unbearable.

Laura Mullen: It's our job to feel, and it's the failure of feeling that is allowing us to do what we're doing. And my current statement on the situation is, excuse me, but since I am an American taxpayer and since it means my money, my dollars, are going into allowing Israel to commit genocide, I do not feel like I need to support them verbally. I mean, you have to understand: I'm 65. I protested the Vietnam War. This is stupid on the Vietnam level. This is really a terrible thing that we're doing to our souls that we will never recover from. And meanwhile, there are bodies, there are lives being lost, and we have no idea what the cost of that devastation is.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Laura Mullen: We have no idea except history, which teaches us that when you oppress and murder people, you make a source of future pain for everyone.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. The losses keep rippling and it just keeps compounding.

Laura Mullen: It keeps compounding.

Helena de Groot: And I mean, I'm just so curious, because you were talking a little bit about you as a kindergartener that you were sent out of class for not saluting the flag. And I also read an anecdote recounted by a former student of yours in New Orleans who remembers going to a Planned Parenthood rally with you, and you wanted to say something about the abortion you had in the early ’90s long before then, but you had just become head of the Louisiana State University creative writing program. And so, you realize that, wow, there were possible consequences for you. Like, this was possibly not an entirely safe thing to do for you, but you spoke to the crowd anyway.

Laura Mullen: Yes.

Helena de Groot: So, what went like . . . OK. As a kindergartener, we can just keep that aside as a nice little sort of character study elements. We don't have to talk about what went into that decision. You were a kid. But I really wanna know and not sort of the manifesto. It's important [as] free speech, but what is it about you that you can see, "Oh, I might very well lose my head over this" and do it anyway?

Laura Mullen: The abortion rally, I feel like it's much, much easier. This is one of the reasons that social media is so problematic. It's much easier to be in a real-life situation, real life, real-time, and decide to speak. To speak and then have it picked up by an algorithm and sent out is a whole other thing. So, I have to say, I was completely unprepared. I mean, what's going on in this country around just people just saying a single pro-Palestinian thing is still actually to me . . . Despite the fact that I had a grandmother who talked back to the House un-American Activities Committee, it's completely shocking to me what we're going through. So, I was not prepared.

Helena de Groot: When did you realize . . . Like, what was the first inkling that something had gone differently than you thought?

Laura Mullen: I think if you will forgive me, I think I'd like to maybe draw a line there, because then we get into—we start getting into the details. And all I can say to you, or what I'd like to say to you is, you have no . . . Unless you've gone through it yourself, you don't know . . . I mean, Helena, I was told not to take walks alone. I was told that someone might want to come splash acid in my face. I had set up a reading for Cole Swensen, and the police came to the reading to make sure I wasn't harmed. I've spent a month afraid and I think that . . . I mean, I appreciate the chance to talk with you, specifically you, about it, but I'd like to . . . If we may draw a line and say, "OK, enough." It shouldn't . . . I mean, yeah. Let's talk to Anne Boyer. Let's talk to all of the fabulous, brave people in this country who are saying, no, ceasefire now.

Helena de Groot: But that's why it was . . . Let me . . . How to put this? Anything that you don't want me to say, we will not say and I will not include.

Laura Mullen: Thank you.

Helena de Groot: I am trying to understand the boundaries, though, of this. So, if I probe, please forgive me and don't think that I'm pushing back. I'm just trying to see where that line is.

Laura Mullen: Sure. And I hope . . . Oh my goodness. I really hope that if you have any qualms about what I publicly said, even if we don't include it in the interview, you will just tell me, because that's been one of the horrors of this, is meeting and talking to . . . I mean, it happened right away. Like this lovely young student showed up at my doorway and wanted to talk to me about the post. And of course, I was like, it's a lovely young wake for a student who wants to talk about the post. Of course, all turned out she was being paid to write for the right-wing newspaper Campus Reform. So, I'm like, "Oh my God. Please." (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Ooh. Well, no. I don't know if it would be a credible—it would be a very good cover if I'd be like, "I interview poets, but actually, I'm a right-wing spy." You know that? Wow. Nobody would ever guess.

Laura Mullen: No. I'm not accusing you. I'm just like, oh, let's . . . So, now I'm a little more like, "Let's get the cards on the table."

Helena de Groot: No, I get it, it makes sense. It's just what I find so interesting is that your whole book teases apart that sort of phenomenon that happens all across corporate America and academia and all across our politics—and you know, what was the line that we just read? "Let me get back to you."

Laura Mullen: "Let me think about that."

Helena de Groot: Yeah, "Let me think about that. She won't."

Laura Mullen: Exactly.

Helena de Groot: And so, my question here is, I can see that you have perfectly legitimate reasons to be circumspect. At the same time, here we are not talking about the thing that we wanna talk about.

Laura Mullen: Oh, but what I wanna talk about with you is the book.

Helena de Groot: No. I understand that. I understand, but I think what a coincidence that what the book is about is now coming in such clear relief in your life.

Laura Mullen: Yeah. Like having written the book, like each thing you do—and I would really wanna say this to listeners. Each brave thing you do makes it possible to do the next brave thing. And if you don't do the little brave thing, it's harder to do the large, brave thing. So, always try for yourself to just get in a little bit of something to get you to the next place. I loved hearing Maya Angelou in ’92, in Miami, say if you hear a racist comment and you can't say anything in return, you can get up and leave the room. You can get up and leave the room. Just start with the thing that your body can bear for you to do. Always listen to the body, and do it, and that way you make a space for the next brave thing.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: Well, I wanna read that NDA poem.

Laura Mullen: OK, great. I've forgotten. Yeah, here we go. Page 82.

Helena de Groot: So, it's on page 82.

Laura Mullen: Yeah. "The Picture of Radical Doubt in the Diary Industry, NDA"

Are there things I can't say here, things we've agreed there's no way to say? Are those tears in your eyes as you shush me to catch the chorus? Land of the, home of the, insisting again on your version as you force me to stand with one hand held over, as if to hide or shield my heart in the fog of feelings that don't matter unless they are the right ones, yours, as you usher in the suits, the uniforms, believe they can both die for and live to become someday as the arrests start. Because your objections are patriotism. My objections are chaos. And you want me to listen to you first. But mostly you wanna hear the silence without me. Is it better? It must be better. Everyone will be so free and brave if I just and loving. The gun will lower, the hard gaze below the brim of the helmet, behind the riot shield, will soften and glow to resemble the face of the goddess Elsie in all of her incarnations, laughing, urging us all to indulge ourselves healthy and happy until there is nothing but the sound of joyful cows singing, everyone almost crying with happiness, sniffling into the wadded paper napkins around the juicy burgers, slurping vanilla milkshakes, and weeping with gratitude for the cows and the country where everything is so wonderful all the time. Except there's a lot of, but it's treatable, absolutely, of depression, not to mention pain. And if I would just shut the fuck up, stop voting, or say something nice for once. Can't you say something nice? If you can't say anything nice, you should just be quiet and it will all be great again just like it was before, before, before, before, immediately.

Helena de Groot: It's astounding how this poem echoes what's happening, not just to you, but as you said to so many writers and intellectuals.

Laura Mullen: And people, because here I am in New Orleans, which just had an election where only 27 percent of the people came out to vote. And that means that a whole bunch of people feel like it would just be better if they.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Well, my question about this book, about sort of the concern of the book, what does it mean to be told to shut up? And what does it mean to "acquie—" . . . Can you help me out?

Laura Mullen: Acquiesce.

Helena de Groot: Acquiesce. Acquiesce. Oh, my God. I'll get there eventually.

Laura Mullen: Beautiful.

Helena de Groot: So, I wanna know what you would say to someone who's listening right now and who wants to speak out but sees how dangerous it can be. What would you say to him either way?

Laura Mullen: Yeah. Two things immediately. One, the great advice my grandmother gave me. You have something inside you that needs to come out. Write it down. Write it down. Start there. Write it down. Next, get yourself to a community of like-minded people. Be with the people that you can speak to honestly, the people you can speak your whole mind and whole heart to. That is what you must do and make that community and support that community.

Helena de Groot: Do you feel like you have that community?

Laura Mullen: I am on my way to finding that community. I feel like I have that community. It's far-flung. I certainly have that community here in New Orleans. It's one of the great joys of being here, and I am lucky enough to have that community in other cities, in New York. And I'm talking to you from New Orleans where somebody crept up on all the street signs of Jefferson Davis Highway and changed it to Angela Davis Highway. (BOTH LAUGH) Yes. And we have a chance. We always . . . Where there's life, there's hope. We have a chance. We have a chance.

Helena de Groot: I love that. I love that you're in that place now. That must feel really good to feel supported by the city.

Laura Mullen: Yeah. I am so glad to be here. But New Orleans is a state of mind you need to take with you everywhere. (JAZZ INSTRUMENTAL PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: Laura Mullen is the author of nine books of poetry and experimental prose, including The Surface, which was a National Poetry Series selection, The Tales of Horror, Subject, Murmur, After I Was Dead, Complicated Grief, and her latest, EtC. She also published a translation of the French multi-genre writer Veronique Pittolo's Hero. Laura Mullen received fellowships from MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Károlyi Foundation, and she received the Rona Jaffe Award and the Ironwood's Frank Stanford Prize. She was also a featured poet at the International Poetry Festival in Taipei. To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions. I'm Helena de Groot, and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.