Quotes by Laura Mullen - Page 1

Wherever something is "pinned down" there's a little hole - at least one - more likely many.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Holes
Littles
Copy Quote
Given our examination of the behavior of our police forces at this moment the question of protection has an extra resonance, yes?
Laura Mullen / Poet
Examination
Police
Protection
Copy Quote
I'm interested in finding new and more humane modes of safety, and in exposing the arbitrary and superficial protections that have failed us.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Arbitrary
Protection
Safety
Copy Quote
One might say that "Torch Song" is, in part, about the urgency of the effort to pin things down and what wild dart throwing that desire leads to.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Desire
Effort
Song
Copy Quote
Admitting how ill we are, how deep the damage goes, how constantly the abuse cycle is repeated and how horribly we have failed those who most deserve our care and protection.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Abuse
Admitting
Care
Copy Quote
If we take seriously the idea that the stories we want to hear shape the stories we can (and want to, and are allowed to) tell, then the canon emerges as something to examine very carefully.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Ideas
Shapes
Stories
Copy Quote
"Influence" is itself influenced, coming from an Italian word for the outbreak of a disease (influenza, outbreak). Influence is that which flows across - permeates - the boundaries of the self.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Disease
Italian
Self
Copy Quote
It is worth asking who decides what's an "obsession" and where it differs from meditation or the kind of deep dwelling on a subject we see in philosophy or the work of Robert Wilson, for instance?
Laura Mullen / Poet
Dwelling
Meditation
Philosophy
Copy Quote
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (whose mother died ten days after she was born) wrote a novel that anticipates Semmelweis's discovery and serves as a parable for the destructive power of decaying matter.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Discovery
Matter
Mother
Copy Quote
So when we're told to "move on" or "let go," we should take a look at who is saying it and why, and when we see repetition happening it's worth trying to understand it before attempting to shut it down.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Letting Go
Moving
Trying
Copy Quote
The failure of protection, the importance of recognizing the ways in which we influence (and infect) each other - the fact that being an "individual" can't protect you - these are issues I've been thinking about for a while.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Issues
Thinking
Way
Copy Quote
In Frankenstein there is a transfer first of life into death (in the creation and animation of the monster), and then of death into life, as the monster takes his revenge on the father who gave him life but withheld recognition.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Father
Monsters
Revenge
Copy Quote
There's a nice clear difference between real protection (wash your hands, or wear a condom) and the fake protection offered by institutions which often come, finally and sadly, to be much too interested first of all in protecting their own power.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Hands
Nice
Real
Copy Quote
The performance group The Ant Farm redoing JFK's assassination in Dallas was an event that struck a chord with me, especially when one of the members said they'd only intended to do it once, but the Dallas audience insisted they repeat the performance.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Dallas
Events
Groups
Copy Quote
I hope, by being honest about what happened to me, to help nourish a culture of honesty that might make something different - and better - possible. We really need to squarely face the issue of child abuse in America, and to look at our perversity, our illness.
Laura Mullen / Poet
America
Children
Honesty
Copy Quote
In the "Intervention" section of the book we go into that looping from a battery of positions (where healer and sufferer are blurred). I'm very interested in "repetition and revision" (to use Suzan Lori-Parks's phrase) and in the culture's desire to loop or repeat.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Batteries
Book
Desire
Copy Quote
Star Wars film is breaking all previous box office records. (Why might we want to revisit those characters, that narrative, those jokes and tropes again, in this way, right now? I wonder what it will turn out to reveal about the economics and politics of this moment.)
Laura Mullen / Poet
War
Character
Stars
Copy Quote
With Complicated Grief I can say that there was a certain simplification in the process. Getting older means less wasted effort, things are clearer earlier. Being young meant flailing around a lot, especially as I was trying to invent new shapes without a ton of models.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Effort
Grief
Mean
Copy Quote
Though we don't have a cure for cancer we at least have stopped being too ashamed to even say the name of the disease - and the trajectory of the AIDS epidemic is edifying, isn't it? Shame shuts down productive thinking, and I'd like to open the doors. It's a first step.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Cancer
Epidemics
Thinking
Copy Quote
The boundary between expert and amateur was an imposed social-cultural "protection" which actually exposed a number of women to a fatal disease, because decaying matter, as the fireman said of fire (cited in the book's final piece, "Torch Song") "ain't got no rules on it."
Laura Mullen / Poet
Book
Fire
Song
Copy Quote
Is the professor who insists we read Ernest Hemingway again instead of Gertrude Stein "obsessing"? Because although I did a BA in English, an MFA in Poetry, and a year's worth of a PhD, Stein was an author I had to discover on my own. She wasn't on the syllabus anywhere in all that time.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Gertrude
Syllabus
Years
Copy Quote
And Complicated Grief is a text that announces, from the start, in its citation of influence, dense intertextuality and hybridity, a failure of some apparent or usual protections, and a need to re-examine "identity" in the light of an acknowledgement of our entanglements and interdependence.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Grief
Identity
Light
Copy Quote
When I encountered "The Lady of Shallot" (to take a "for instance" allusion from the many in the book, this one from the "Etiology" section) it was still considered a "great poem." What does that poem - or rather a particular presentation of that poem (hey, admire this!) - do to a young woman?
Laura Mullen / Poet
Book
Doe
Hey
Copy Quote
I love that "furious and gorgeous barrage." That helps me see the relation between the introduction and the book's final section, where writing about a fire (and about the attempt to understand the event), also becomes an attempt to understand how writing might get closer to the fire, in so many ways.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Book
Fire
Writing
Copy Quote
Is it possible that where the subject is socially approved (tah tah tah TAH tah, it's war) almost no one thinks we're "stuck," but when we think too much about what no one else wants to think about, as well as when we think without the thoughts evolving, then we're seen as trouble (and / or troubled)?
Laura Mullen / Poet
War
Thinking
Want
Copy Quote
We live in a culture that insists on "moving on" (even while our loyalty to and love of the franchise and the sequel give away a larger loopiness). But I tend to dwell or obsess or meditate, and I came back to, for instance, the figure of Dickens's "Miss Havisham" with some (self) recognition if not relief.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Loyalty
Giving
Moving
Self
Copy Quote
The most important aspect of writing the pieces that make up this eighth book was yielding to my obsessive side, letting my own "complicated grief" in on the process. You can imagine how tempting it is to try to fight the part of you that loops and loops, caught up in tangled sorrow from which it seems there's no escape.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Book
Grief
Writing
Copy Quote
I can tell that I shaped the book very deliberately, after a great deal of thought, and that I insisted this piece function as a prologue, but I find the word "intention," confusing ("trust the art," as D.H. Lawrence said, "not the artist"). These speculations are perhaps better responded to by text and reader, rather than author.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Art
Book
Confusing
Copy Quote
It seems all "protection" has to be monitored, considered, weighed and justified - I am suggesting we do that (but it's something Mary Shelley (and Gertrude Stein) also suggest). "Torch Song," the book's final section, looks at an arson committed by someone hired to protect the wilderness from fires, a catastrophic failure of protection!
Laura Mullen / Poet
Book
Fire
Song
Copy Quote
Helen Vendler calls this kind of interrogation of a work "roads not taken," suggesting that it's useful, when writing critically, to consider what differences it makes to the work or the encounter with the work if changes are made. It's one way of better understanding your experience, comparing it to other possible experiences you can imagine having.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Differences
Taken
Writing
Copy Quote
It's painful, but it's part of the recognition that makes real healing possible, if healing is possible (the jury is out on that, that's the usual phrase - should I say the jury is deadlocked?). Staying with the pain, attending to it, being present to and with it - that's the task, because that's the only (as far as I can tell) hope of finding a way forward.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Healing
Pain
Real
Copy Quote
Miss Havisham is a glitch in the smooth functioning of the Patriarchy, enforcing awareness of a moment of social disaster and personal shame, something it seems she would want us to forget (but no one would forget). (Maybe an interesting "discussion question" for readers of Complicated Grief might be, "What do Terry Barton and Miss Havisham have in common?"?)
Laura Mullen / Poet
Grief
Interesting
Missing
Copy Quote
In a museum in El Paso, Texas, there's a map that shows all the places the border between the U.S. and Mexico has been (because it shifted) - I find it very clarifying (not confusing) to be reminded that everything we feel like we've really pinned down is transient, arbitrary, and marks the site of a painful if not violent negotiation, one that may not have ended.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Confusing
Museums
Texas
Copy Quote
There's a case in Baton Rouge, haunting me, where a mother left her twelve-year-old daughter to be babysat (every day for months) by a known pedophile and his four perverse friends, and the news broke of the bodies of two children, dead after long-term physical abuse, found in a storage locker in California. What hardest for me is, I suppose, what's hardest for my country
Laura Mullen / Poet
Daughter
Children
Country
Mother
Copy Quote
Complicated Grief was written in larger and more coherent (if disparate) shapes. The question was how they fit together. The mind is coherent, trust that was the best writing advice I ever got (I got it from Carole Maso and I pass it on). It's true, and clearer and clearer as one grows and gains an improved sense of who one actually is (as versus who one was supposed to be).
Laura Mullen / Poet
Advice
Grief
Writing
Copy Quote
Oh my research. Well, I got an English Degree. And I got that degree in a certain time/at a certain place. If you add UC Berkeley + 1984 the other side of the = is "new historian" meaning that I studied with and was influenced by those who were interested in how the personal shaped the political (and literary), how science and literature might interact, and what the body got to do with it.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Degrees
Political
Uc Berkeley
Copy Quote
Maybe one way to think about it would be in the context of the historical development of germ theory. The problem of childbed fever was not significant until the development of a male-dominated medical establishment made possible the situation in which a professional might move from touching a corpse (for the purposes of study) to putting his unwashed hands up against, or into, a woman in labor.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Hands Up
Moving
Thinking
Copy Quote
What was toughest for me in writing "Trust," was reliving it, turning and facing this. We move on and we don't move on, you know? She's still there - and by "she" I mean me - caught in that windowless room, that bad bargain and that violation. No one can touch me, sexually, without activating that memory. But I had walled, I thought, that time off. I say that and then want to say "and I got off lightly"!
Laura Mullen / Poet
Mean
Memories
Moving
Copy Quote
I had Paterson, and The Art Lover, to guide me for The Tales of Horror (written from 1988-'97 and published in 1999), but I still was so lost, back then, as I tried to understand what I was writing and how it went together. There was a draft of that manuscript that had all these brightly colored paper clips on the pages so I could visualize what I saw as the book's themes and threads - that was a long time ago.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Art
Book
Writing
Copy Quote
Miss Havisham is an important feminine literary figure in the tradition of Antigone (though it's significant that Antigone is fighting to bury something and Miss Havisham refuses, as it were, to bury the corpse). Like Hamlet, she's focused on what everyone would rather not know or would like to forget, and she seems crazy / stuck as well as bitter, but she's also a perfect prototype of a performance artist. She's intentionally hard to deal with inviting the audience to remain with the violated body, the evidence of violence.
Laura Mullen / Poet
Artist
Crazy
Fighting
Copy Quote

Related Poet Authors

William Blake
Poet
Monday, Nov 28, 1757
Sunday, Aug 12, 1827
Walt Whitman
Poet
Monday, May 31, 1819
Saturday, Mar 26, 1892
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poet
Wednesday, Oct 21, 1772
Friday, Jul 25, 1834
Robert Frost
Poet
Thursday, Mar 26, 1874
Tuesday, Jan 29, 1963
Lucy Larcom
Poet
Friday, Mar 05, 1824
Monday, Apr 17, 1893
Khalil Gibran
Poet
Saturday, Jan 06, 1883
Friday, Apr 10, 1931
John Keats
Poet
Saturday, Oct 31, 1795
Friday, Feb 23, 1821
Zoketsu Norman Fischer
Poet
Zoe Whittall
Poet
Monday, Feb 16, 1976
Zbigniew Herbert
Poet
Wednesday, Oct 29, 1924
Tuesday, Jul 28, 1998
Yvor Winters
Poet
Wednesday, Oct 17, 1900
Thursday, Jan 25, 1968
Yvonne Zipter
Poet
Yusef Komunyakaa
Poet
Tuesday, Apr 29, 1947
Yunus Emre
Poet
Yosa Buson
Poet

Thursday, Dec 25, 1783

View All Poet Quotes

Top Authors

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Civil Rights Activist
Tuesday, Jan 15, 1929
Thursday, Apr 04, 1968
Winston Churchill
Former Prime Minister Of The United Kingdom
Monday, Nov 30, 1874
Sunday, Jan 24, 1965
Muhammad Ali
Professional Boxer
Saturday, Jan 17, 1942
Friday, Jun 03, 2016
Benjamin Franklin
Founding Father Of The United States
Sunday, Jan 17, 1706
Saturday, Apr 17, 1790
Lucy Larcom
Poet
Friday, Mar 05, 1824
Monday, Apr 17, 1893
Thomas Sowell
Economist
Monday, Jun 30, 1930
Vince Lombardi
Football Player
Wednesday, Jun 11, 1913
Thursday, Sep 03, 1970
W. Edwards Deming
Statistician
Sunday, Oct 14, 1900
Monday, Dec 20, 1993
Paulo Coelho
Lyricist
Sunday, Aug 24, 1947
Voltaire
Writer
Sunday, Nov 21, 1694
Saturday, May 30, 1778
Isaac Newton
Physicist
Sunday, Jan 04, 1643
Monday, Mar 31, 1727
Groucho Marx
Comedian
Thursday, Oct 02, 1890
Friday, Aug 19, 1977
Ronald Reagan
40Th US President
Monday, Feb 06, 1911
Saturday, Jun 05, 2004
Francis Of Assisi
Saint
Thursday, Jun 24, 1182
Saturday, Oct 03, 1226
Joe Biden
Vice President Of The United States
Friday, Nov 20, 1942

View All Authors

Laura Mullen Quotes - Page 1

Picture Quotes Maker

Related Poet Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page

Stay Connected

Picture Quotes Maker

Related Poet Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page