“Predicting stormy weather will not suffice.”
HARRYETTE MULLEN
Interviewed By: Natalie Tombasco
A review of your latest book, Regaining Unconsciousness, describes your poetic discography as “concept albums.” The concept album may require a constructed persona (e.g., David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust) and ask that audiences listen to the album in its entirety, rather than just a track or two. When looking back at your collections, I wonder if this is a term you reject or embrace?
A friend of mine likes to read the last chapter of a mystery novel first, because she can’t stand the suspense. A book, especially a poetry collection, allows readers various ways of interacting with its contents, although I try to assemble a text that engages people and makes some kind of sense when read from front to back. It doesn’t have to be narrative, and poems needn’t be sequenced in the order they were written. There doesn’t have to be a consistent speaker-persona. There are other ways a poem or collection of poems can feel coherent, though I don’t expect most readers would get through the book in one sitting, like listening to an album of music, if people still do that. As I imagine it, Regaining Unconsciousness suggests a recurring dream, or the possibility of dreaming within a dream. When I read a portion of the book or poems from different books to an audience, it’s another kind of experience.
Right. Coherence without linearity feels especially resonant for poetry readers, who often move intuitively rather than sequentially. How aware are you during the development of each collection of that cohesiveness? Does it feel like each poem, each book, builds toward the next?
Often, I’m well into something before I know what it’s “about.” The structure of a book comes into view gradually, in the course of writing, revising, and ordering the text. Readers may perceive recursive elements in Regaining Unconsciousness—111 poems divided into 11 sections, each with its own internal order in the overall structure of the book. For example, the first section offers variations on sleeping and dreaming, waking and wondering, opening with “Was It a Dream?” and concluding with “Wake Up, Butterfly.” A different section goes from “Departed” to “Returning”; another begins with “The Gap” and ends with “What Draws Us Together.”
It’s perfect how the titles enact a kind of narrative motion from sleeping to waking, departure to return.
Regaining Unconsciousness, similar to Sleeping with the Dictionary, collects verse and prose poems on various subjects. In those works, formal and thematic elements emerged over time as the manuscript evolved. A stack of poems becomes a book through an intuitive process of ordering and reordering to find the flow. There’s no grand scheme or preconceived blueprint guiding the early exploratory writing. I might begin with a perplexing question, or a tentative proposal, like bridging lyric and epic poetry with the blues in Muse & Drudge (EDITOR’S NOTE: Texts are gathered in Recyclopedia). It’s my intention to make each book different, even when they are conceptually related, like Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T (prose poetry responding to Stein’s Tender Buttons), or like Urban Tumbleweed and Open Leaves (tanka and haiku noting the coexistence of nature and culture).
I love thinking of your poems in terms of musical composition, given that they possess a “bluesy, disjunctive” lyricism that’s playful, improvisational. I recently brought some poems from Trimmings into a contemporary dance class at my college. Students focused on the lines: “Lips, clasped together. Old leather fastened with a little snap. Strapped, broke. Quick snatch, in a clutch, chased the lady with the alligator purse. Green thief, off relief, got into her pocketbook by hook or crook.”
The syntax invited erratic movement. The sonic echoes in the language brought repeated gestures. They considered the double entendre of a purse likened to female genitalia. That doubleness is also present in Trimmings’ title. It can mean decorative ruffles on clothing or extra material to be tossed in the trash. Additionally, the dancers picked up on the heaviness of the purse as it slowed them down. The accessory acts as an appendage that invites vulnerability. How do you see poetry, music, and movement working in tandem?
I often drop fragments of popular music, folklore, and media into my poetry, such as “the lady with the alligator purse,” from a traditional jump rope rhyme. A lady’s pocketbook and an alligator’s mouth are two things that might snap shut, and purses literally can be made from alligator hides. I remember hearing a family friend brag about her matching shoes and handbag made with the skin of a gator she’d shot after it had snapped up several chickens on her farm…. Music and movement are bound together in the source material, recalling the playgrounds of my childhood and the memory of skipping rope while singing rhymes.
That origin in jump rope rhymes—skipping, clapping, singing—shows how movement, sound, and memory are inseparable in the work…. Another line the dancers riffed on was one of brutal carnality: “Girls in white sat in with blues-saddened slashers. Laced up, frilled to the bone. Semi-automatic ruffle on a semi-formal gown.” This phonetically distorts the fine line between The Sound of Music and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It feels as if a girl may swiftly step from innocence to violence, depending on the chosen costume.
Trimmings recalls Gertrude Stein’s object studies in Tender Buttons, and so, I’m wondering your thoughts on Stein’s contribution to not only American poetry, but also your own artistic sensibilities. If we could “nerd out” a moment—do you have a favorite Stein work? One of my favorites is “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso” (which has been translated to dance!) for how bratty she is to her companion.
Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T correspond to Stein’s “Objects” and “Food” in Tender Buttons, by way of “Melanctha” in Three Lives. What caught my attention as a poet, ultimately sparking Trimmings, was the very brief prose poem, “A Petticoat,” which I associated with Manet’s Olympia. Stein is a literary frenemy, like Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot, each with a distinctive modernist style. In their deployment of racial tropes, [Stein, Stevens, and Eliot] are more subtle and innovative than their contemporary Vachel Lindsay, who occasionally performed his popular poem “The Congo” in blackface—an act that Ishmael Reed satirizes in Mumbo Jumbo, possibly also targeting John Berryman’s dialogue of Mister Bones and Henry.
Your description of Stein as a “literary frenemy” feels exactly right—both generative and fraught. Looking back at the historical and social contexts in which your earliest collections—such as Tree Tall Woman (1981) and S*PeRM**K*T (1992)—were written, reviewers have noted that your aesthetics bridge the avant-gardism of Language poetry and the Black Arts Movement, both of which resist, challenge, and deconstruct the status quo. I think I remember reading a frustration of yours about how, depending on the critic’s ethnic or racial background, you’d be more aligned with one literary movement rather than the other. Why is there a need to define and categorize poets? Did you ever find this limiting? Or did it, in a way, assist or guide you?
Human beings routinely name, define, categorize, and evaluate whatever we encounter as we create and acquire knowledge. That said, I don’t need to be told that I’m a black woman who writes poems from the perspective of a black woman. I feel free to write in any way I wish about any subject that interests me. My poem “Weathering Hate” does not mention race or gender, but a disgruntled reader who saw it on Poem-a-Day complained that it seeks sympathy for black victims. However, living in what Arline Geronimus calls “an unjust society” diminishes everyone, not only black women.
You’ve mentioned: “I am writing for the eye and the ear at once, at that intersection of orality and literacy, wanting to make sure that there is a troubled, disturbing aspect to the work so that it is never just a ‘speakerly’ or a ‘writerly’ text.” I love that duality, and the purposeful anxiety it generates. Where do you think that comes from—that “intersection of orality and literacy?” What were your earliest experiences with language as a child?
In and out of home, school, and church, I was educated in literacy and literature while simultaneously immersed in traditional culture. My grandfather’s Bible-based sermons supplemented his written text with oral improvisation—what we called “meat and gravy” preaching. We sang African American spirituals and traditional gospels, often learned by following a song leader who would “line it out” in a pattern of call and response. We also learned all the verses of songs from the hymnal. In the classroom, we read and recited poems by Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Paul Laurence Dunbar at one school; Blake, Byron, and Tennyson at another. On the playground, we chanted rhyming verses as we jumped rope, clapped hands, and danced in circle games. I received the written and oral traditions together. They are wedded in my memory and in my own poetry from past to present.
What was it like growing up in Fort Worth, Texas? Is there anything about the geography, culture, politics, history, or folklore that you’ve thought intensely about? How do you see that regional identity feeding into you personally or poetically?
Fort Worth began as a frontier outpost fortified to repel the native population. One of the oldest streets is White Settlement Road. In the days of the Old West, cowboys, gamblers, and outlaws mingled in a disorderly district known as Hell’s Half Acre. Located on the Chisolm cattle trail, “Cowtown” attracted black workers to its stockyards and meatpacking plants that traditionally sponsored cookouts on Juneteenth long before it was an official holiday. “How come y’all ain’t at the barbecue?” is a line from my poem, “Curious Strangers,” about my family’s arrival in Fort Worth, from Pennsylvania, when my grandfather was called to be pastor of Mount Gilead Baptist Church. Listed as a historic site, the building was designed by an African American architect, Wallace Rayfield. It served as a community center where black audiences could attend performances by national figures such as Will Rogers and Marian Anderson, since other venues were for whites only. My grandparents’ neighbors included Ulysses Smith, the “Barbecue King,” and his wife Lucille, a culinary entrepreneur cited in Toni Tipton-Martin’s The Jemima Code. Another neighbor, “Gooseneck” Bill McDonald, was the state’s first black millionaire. My mother marched with Ornette Coleman and Dewey Redman in the I.M. Terrell High School band. She played clarinet and oboe. Years later, she gave me her clarinet to play in my elementary school orchestra.
Oh, wow. It’s incredible how places can archive personal and national histories, music, architecture, celebration, violence….
There was also a black packinghouse worker, Fred Rouse, who was lynched in Fort Worth in 1921, a couple of decades before my grandparents arrived. In the 1920s, the Klan met in a building on Main Street. On 19 June 1939, white rioters vandalized and burned the family home of Opal Lee. My grandmother, who worked downtown, heard JFK speak to a crowd before his fatal trip to Dallas in 1963. Fort Worth was a Jim Crow Southern town that grudgingly began to desegregate during my childhood. I haven’t returned since my grandmother’s funeral, but the 2020 film Miss Juneteenth brought back memories. It’s set in Fort Worth, with people I knew listed in the credits: Shirley Pace, whose children attended the community school my mother founded, and Opal Lee, who campaigned for years to make Juneteenth a national holiday. Ms. Lee appears briefly in the movie. The lead character works in a barbecue joint that resembles places my family frequented, and I recognized familiar landmarks like Baker Funeral Home and the old, abandoned Grand Theater. The committee for the Juneteenth pageant reminded me of ladies’ clubs in which my mother and grandmother were members. A scene with black cowboys evoked memories of western boots I wore to the rodeo in Fort Worth and, later, during my stay at Paisano ranch, south of Austin.
Thank you for sharing some Fort Worth history with me. I’m excited to check out the film for sure. I wonder if you have thoughts on bell hooks’ essay “The Joy of Reading,” in which she discusses her parents’ cultivation of her love of education and literacy. She considers these vital and valuable in a democracy, yet as time goes on and technologies advance, the ability to “deep read” and critically think declines. Slow, sustained engagement with a text is nearly impossible for young adults in the “attention economy.” We also have the consistent banning of books year after year and a government that wishes to “foster AI competency.” What do you think about this intersection between censorship and surrendering our creativity and human connection to artificial intelligence?
I agree with the diagnosis. Education becomes indoctrination when politicians ban and banish books, dictating what and how to teach. The innate creativity of children is stunted when they stare at screens all day. Knowledge is destroyed when AI slop pollutes information streams. Human communication is irrelevant when machines create messages to be read by machines. So far, human beings continue to write, publish, and read books—despite widespread disparagement of authors, librarians, school teachers, and university professors. Even independent booksellers are under attack, like Austin’s BookWoman, one of the first to stock my earliest poetry collection. I fear the growing threats to literacy and literature.
Have you experimented with AI in your own writing? Have you read AI-generated poems, and if so, how would you characterize the craft? What are the benefits or drawbacks of it in relation to creative writing and pedagogy?
I continue to resist AI, GPT, and LLMs in writing and teaching. I avoid that gimmicky technology to the extent possible, though it’s becoming ubiquitous. It’s a malevolent genie granting frivolous wishes with dismal results. As Salman Rushdie said, I can ignore it and get on with my work. Still, it is important to oppose it, if only for the obscene amount of resources it’s wasting. (Coincidentally, I’ve just received legal notice that “allegedly” my copyright was infringed and my work pirated by Anthropic, so I may be part of a class action lawsuit.)
Going off the love of literacy, you’ve developed a close relationship with tertiary texts throughout your career in collections such as Sleeping with the Dictionary and Recyclopedia. In the former, there’s a suggestion of intimacy, and even eroticism, between poets and reference tools as they are “versatile partners,” “stimulating sedatives,” and contain “myriad possibilities.” Glossy multitudes!
Words to the writer are like clay to the potter in their raw materiality. In one fantasy, “Any Lit” organizes phonetically and (re)vises a term of endearment to the beloved (i.e. “a huckleberry beyond my persimmon”). Mutating the common expression and playing with scale in the lines, “You are a universe beyond my mitochondria,” and the splitting/convergence of cells in “You are a union beyond my meiosis.” We’re encouraged to reflect upon the budding romance between words like “ukulele” and “microphone.” In another fantasy, “JingleJangle” amplifies the constraint of the abecedarian form that makes me want to reach for another expression: how is the sausage made? What is your experience working with prescribed forms—tanka, prose, etc.? Are you excited about any contemporary poets writing in form today?
Regaining Unconsciousness includes free verse and prose poetry, along with my adaptations of ghazal, sonnet, visual poetry, haiku, and tanka. Working in a predetermined form is one of many potentially liberating constraints a poet might choose. Tyehimba Jess in Olio, and Terrance Hayes in his American Sonnets (inspired by Wanda Coleman), are formally generative and inventive. Patricia Smith, a champion of spoken word on the stage, is also an accomplished composer of intricate forms on the page.
I think “liberating constraint” is a great way to put it, since form can be catalytic. I’d like turn to how S*PeRM**K*T finds eroticism in the grocery store environment. Unlike Allen Ginsberg’s plentiful peaches, this grocery store is cluttered with the totems of late-stage capitalism: Saran-wrapped, over-processed, high-calorie goods. I love the keen attention to endless inventories, the banality of product placement, the lexicon of chores, and the way the book captures the compartmentalization and isolation of American life. Reviewers have discussed how this text (this goes for Muse & Drudge, too) investigates race, gender, and class, and so I’m wondering how you found the supermarket as a site to explore these subjects?
The supermarket manifests the abundance and standardization of commodity culture, which converts everything and everyone into a product or a brand. Every item for sale is wrapped in plastic. That book was written in a small college town where the arrival of a new supermarket was a spectacular event. The lure of the market extends to advertising that makes products memorable and irresistible. A display of plenty, with everything wrapped in language. Identity is salient when advertisers personify products and create compelling images for targeted consumers, as they track every single purchase we make.
The supermarket, as both spectacle and surveillance, feels chilling. In a way, I see Regaining Unconsciousness as S*PeRM**K*T’s Gen Z offspring, “chronically online” and disillusioned, slipping between cyberspace and reality, cirrus clouds and Google Clouds. This descendant is inundated with corporate-speak, Zoom rooms, microplastics, “Hidden Vall[eys]” that could very well be a Romantic refuge or a bottle of ranch. They are conditioned to be efficient, no matter political outcomes, pandemics, or wildfires. What were your intentions for this collection?
The poems address interrelated challenges of climate catastrophe, environmental destruction, extractive technologies, and societal breakdown. My intention was to confront the dire present and apocalyptic future without succumbing to despair.
Weather and climate disasters appear in many poems: “Polar Vortex,” “Weathering Hate,” “Brain Fog,” and “Bomb Cyclone.” Can you speak a little to this recurring motif and the environmental lens? What’s our forecast?
Predicting stormy weather will not suffice. Forecasting is more urgent as we face deadlier disasters. Noting the recurrence of extreme weather events, I made a list of terms previously unknown to me: atmospheric river, bomb cyclone, derecho, pineapple express, polar vortex. Meteorologists use such colorful monikers to grab our attention so we can act prudently to avoid tragedy, though we seem to be living with our heads in “the cloud.” My list prompted poems that question our individual and collective states of consciousness and unconsciousness. Why are we hurtling so recklessly toward obsolescence and extinction? Are we unable or unwilling to save ourselves and the world from our destructive ways?
Yeah, I suppose the meteorological language speaks to a collective denial that exists on an array of current issues. I was curious about a poem called “Colorless Green Ideas” that alludes to Noam Chomsky’s sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” again, highlighting the linguistic joy present. This poem associates “green” with “raw kale” and explores how the world would be if Adam and Eve had avoided flesh and if Cain were a vegan. How do you see all of these “ideas” working in the same poem?
This poem is in conversation with Vertamae Grosvenor’s Vibration Cooking, Lucille Clifton’s “cutting greens,” Ntozake Shange’s “from okra to greens,” Kevin Young’s “Ode to Greens,” Aneb Kgositsile’s “Collard Green Fields Forever,” Pink Anderson’s “Greasy Greens,” and the Book of Genesis. As a self-styled culinary anthropologist, Grosvenor knew that collards, kale, and other greens commonly associated with African American cuisine, or soul food, originated in Europe, while okra, watermelon, black-eyed peas, coffee, sesame, and Oryza glaberrima are native to Africa, and what we call yams, actually sweet potatoes, were first cultivated in South America, long before the arrival of Columbus in the so-called New World. According to the Bible, the Creator is a carnivore. God prefers Abel’s offering of meat to Cain’s veggie platter, provoking the jealous vegan to murder his brother. At least that’s my interpretation, as far as it concerns this poem.
In “Land of the Discount Price, Home of the Brand Name,” the poem intertwines patriotism with consumerism, questioning what exactly we are pledging allegiance to. As Lucille Clifton’s “Aunt Jemima” and “Uncle Ben” expose harmful tropes and stereotypes in products, your reference to “Dixie” cups brings to the forefront the commonplace and racialized terms that still exist in America’s pantry. “Black History Minute” uses satire and euphemism to consider how the right attempts to make settler colonialism palatable—distilling, sanitizing, and erasing historical facts. It’s a very Florida poem! It seems like much of the current cultural turbulence is due to an awakening, a reckoning with truth, but one wonders when or if we’ll ever push through the clouds. What do you think is the role of the poet these days?
In the words of Ted Joans, “You have nothing to fear from the poet but the truth.”
Interview Posted: February 16, 2026
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