Harryette Mullen, The Art of Poetry No. 120
Sonya Posmentier | The Paris Review
My conversations with Harryette Mullen in Los Angeles this past December took place mostly on foot. Over the course of the three days of my visit, Mullen acted simultaneously as subject and tour guide: we walked around the campus of the University of California Los Angeles, where she teaches poetry, African American literature, and creative writing in the English department; along the cold, windy Santa Monica Pier; through the MONUMENTS exhibit at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA; in the Mathias Botanical Garden, where she pointed out plants (a ginkgo, a Kentucky coffee tree) that had found their way into her poems; and down the streets of Little Tokyo, dodging Waymos and delivery bots. Mullen owns a car but prefers to use public transportation; she knew which bus to take to the beach and which train to take to the museum. She doesn’t have a cell phone, and pays her fare in coins.
Read the full interview.
Pictured above: Mullen reading at Cave Canem, at Mount Saint Alphonsus in Esopus, New York, 1999. Photograph courtesy of the Cave Canem Records, James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection in the Collection of American Literature, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.