Kristin Sanders

Nymph

—for Laura Mullen

There used to be a website about literary mothers and I missed my chance then—the last post is in 2015—but I won’t miss it again, I know who I would write about then and now: 

She is my literary father more than mother, because of reasons I don’t know, she didn’t birth me but she stood in the room and cheered while I peeled myself from the suffocating chamber of who I had been: a little girl: scared: to say:

Then it was years later and in the video Laura was grinding her stiletto heels on Valentine’s Day chocolates or stomping through trash heaps in a thrift-store bridal gown, whispering to the camera.

That’s her, that’s my guide, I thought. 

She was my poetry professor in grad school and thesis advisor and mentor and then she was my friend and I her catsitter almost like her cat’s aunt I would say 

and she stayed in my apartment and I stayed in hers, she recommended books to me and still does, I hear her voice and still does, it still does. 

Her speaking up for me brought me many great things, her advocating for me and for other writers brought us all great things, her wrenching open a space for us, her taking up space for herself, too, her dedication to art, hers. 

When I had my first poem accepted in a hip magazine—Octopus, which does not sound cool but I swear it was—she said on the phone What a coup! 

and I thought what she meant was I had overthrown the government of their editorial team, the deciding body, they’d been duped. I think now what she meant was Congrats. 

Even recently she read something I wrote all three hundred pages of it and she said Kristin I don’t write for money I write to see what I think about something 

and it will take me another ten years to understand what she meant by that but it’s what we love about her, it’s not always immediately clear but it will be eventually and at the exact right time. 

In grad school, I used to send my dad emails of the praise Laura gave me in workshop or links, a link to an interview I did with her for example. Family rumor has it he would later say academia ruined me, with Laura at the helm, somehow holding all the blame—

a woman, after all. 

Yet he also once wrote in response to my email, back when he and I emailed and I dragged myself around still craving his praise, he wrote back that Laura may just be a true nymph whose purpose is to nudge natural selection and the social evolution of mankind along. You may be one, too! 

and I’m fairly sure it’s true, what he said: 

academia ruins or is yes the worst thing to have happened to many of us, 

and she is a nymph though I don’t know exactly how, but if she is one I sure hope I am too, 

a female nature deity or alternatively a baby insect prior to adulthood prior to acquiring wings, 

bumping along in either form, poet goddesses or newborn organisms molting over and over

until flapping wings capable of flight, 

her work and words nudging us along making us evolve, 

clawing out of the sticky chrysalis of convention, 

and by us I mean do you trust yourself to emerge into the discomfort of resisting clarity:

Laura Mullen Bibliomancy[1]

 What is love?

I can recreate

This paradise any time I choose.

Mouthing the words. Pressing the pen down hard. 

I see. Is that all?

Wait, I said, there is something I must tell you,

Which seemed

to say pretty much all there was to be said about that.

But what is love?

Words occur: abandoned, betrayed, drowned, lost . . . . Words that break across and 

: in a perfect world

I’d be silent, here I talk. Here I talk dirt. Here

Is it to speak against the silence?

here a tent of azure plastic

want to tell you my dream this work “could lead to the breakdown of the 

Can you be more clear?

just magical. It should look as if you can command the kind of

            I’m not asking how you’re angry I know how you’re angry

And then—?

            everything stops, as I write this, and where I feel lost, unable to

            and in the future? Who pays and how?

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[1] All lines borrowed from Laura Mullen’s books, in the following order: The Surface, The Tales of Horror, Murmur, Dark Archive, Enduring Freedom, Complicated Grief

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Statement of Homage

See: Nymph. Also: Mentor, friend, poetry professor. I always call her by her full name, Laura Mullen. I met her in 2006 at LSU. We her students were lucky to learn from her; we her readers are lucky to read her words, to be opened up by the possibility of them.

Laura Mullen

Laura Mullen was born in Los Angeles in 1958. She earned her BA at the University of California-Berkeley and MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her collections of poetry include Enduring Freedom (2012), Dark Archive (2011), Murmur (2007), Subject (2005), After I Was Dead (1999), The Tales of Horror (1999), and The Surface (1991), which was a National Poetry Series selection. Known for writing book-length and hybrid texts, Mullen’s work has been praised for its wild invention and play. Her poems are included in anthologies such as American Hybrid (2009), The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (2012), and I’ll Drown my Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (2012), among others. The composer Jason Eckardt’s setting of her poem “The Distance (This)” was released as Undersong by Mode records in 2011. Mullen’s many honors and awards include foundations from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony.

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