Milk Money: On Laura Mullen’s “EtC”
Laura Mullen | EtC | Solid Objects | November 2023 | 108 Pages
While most of the professionalized poetry class are out to pasture, poet Laura Mullen finds herself at the periphery of yet another grim-dark factory floor; in fact, a “Lactorium,” as the poem is titled:
Those being milked by the newly
Invented machines slide past
On the “rotary parlor” which begins
To turn more quickly until out
Of the blur the numbered years come
She’s always stepped further and surer across thresholds. Her ninth book, EtC, published this November by Solid Objects, is purportedly a poetic sequence that takes its ethical charge on behalf of Borden Dairy’s cartoon mascot, Elsie the Cow. Mullen long ago latched onto hybridity as both orient of her style and personal literary-historical conviction. Post avant-garde materialist techniques, elliptical syntax, and so, so many puns make the labor of Mullen’s work a joy to (fail to) categorize. By continually playing up and playing with difficulty, poems waffle between an anxiety and unburdening of the necessity to decipher, as much a practice of voluntary alienation as it is an injunction to reread. Of those who would exceptionalize her difficulty, Mullen said in a 2016 interview with Kristen Sanders: “I just think it’s a confession about a lack of exposure: oops I missed a big part of Modernism!” While EtC is a multi-fanged assault on readerly exposure, the lines quoted above are characteristic of many of the poems in this volume: presentive, barely lyrical, and yet their effect lingers as the “white on white” spills “unfurling… from the edge of nothing into nothing.” Frisky and pitiless in its truth, EtC is not simply a book about a cow, the dairy industry at large, or neoliberal impetus to self-brand, but a reckoning with the “Diary Industry,” her name for the extractive, herd-depleting poetry business her generation (she admits) has done little to change for the better.
“I got in on the pyramid scheme of the Diary Industry early (if not at the very best juncture…),” Mullen explains in the aptly titled “Confessional Poem.” She attended the Iowa Writers Workshop in the 80s, and her first two books won contests, the second judged by her Iowa peer, Brenda Hillman. Mullen’s generation likes to believe the getting is forever good, and like many, she writes and teaches, though there is little causal instrumentality between those two actions. More than any American art form, poetry seems destined to cling to its own institutional ignorance as a way to protect the professional validity of its artists. Rarely are poetry’s elite as widely known as good pedagogists. The job of the poetry educator, relative to the history of poetry, is new; its graduation from consolation to constituent necessity, startlingly rapid. Many established poets self-valorize, making believe they attained institutional validation by gift of their chosenness, of doing poetry well enough to justify the award of financial stability and suggested expectation to cultivate their next of kin. Certain institutional requirements are imposed to even get in line: the MFA, the first book, the awards. Those refused in the production process—a temporary condition, they’re assured—become the necessary surplus of an overvalued profession: adjuncts. The spatial reality of those brutal statistics aren’t easy to look at, as Mullen lays out in darkly comic contradiction:
stables… full of restless li’l doggies anxious indebted ambitious and grateful to be allowed to do my job twice over (and, as each one ardently believed, to do it better) for about a third of what I was paid. Meanwhile we all went on working to make these things—poems!
To say that poetry as a profession is overvalued isn’t to say it doesn't create value, but that its valorized positioning exceeds the market’s ability to recirculate its products. As history has shown, a hungry market is a healthy one. Mullen has held academic positions at several places, and was most recently the Kenan Chair in the Humanities at Wake Forest University. She narrates the experience in run-on inevitabilities: “Grows up marries / Chairs a Department / Of Anguish 3 years.” The reality of the poetry profession is stark when considering its actual product is not, against avowals, poetry, but providing low-pay instruction to undergraduate students in an endless procession. “Think of this as a study guide,” Mullen quips, “You will want to remember that we value the imagination and have the highest esteem for the infinite capacities of the human heart.” Capitalism, that bigger heart, thrives on fresh blood.
The degree to which poets scramble to publish-for-hire has created a hostile, competitive ecosystem in both publishing and hiring. Visible demand, rather than its fulfillment, obscures the crisis at hand. If the fate of the poet is to be employed as a poet, then there simply are too many poets and too few positions. This has had deleterious influence on the poets’ livelihoods, of course, but also on their relation to the commodities they produce. A poet’s first book is no longer an achievement of artistic maturity—it’s a resume. “I want this new century to be full of people who write poems, not full of poets who conduct projects and do nothing more,” Dorothea Lasky wrote a decade ago in her landmark essay “Poetry Is Not a Project.” Overwhelmingly, poetry-as-project took the form of the poetry project-book—a book of poems in series or sequence, narrative or not, though always thematically tethered and packaged accordingly. Though discrete pieces within these collections are published in journals individually, the overall effect and intended consumptive form is cumulative. The poem sequence allows for a frictionless, continuous reading more than the book of discrete lyrics, some of which may have had no thematic attachment to the bulk of the work or, say, in the case of the titular poem in John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait In a Convex Mirror, come to eclipse all other content in the book, even becoming metonym of the book entirely.
Each poem in the project-book, however, looks similar or at least holds a minimum of structural familiarity to the last. In focusing on the process and not the product, Lasky failed to properly diagnose the true impediment to the life-affirming single poem. Poetry projects were not simply the manifestation of mass scientific rationalizations, but a modeling of professional academic requirements by poets who aspired to that role. In the project-book, one could display one’s mastery of composition and one’s research acumen in a single bound package. Calcium and calories in a single glass.
Around the turn of the current century, certain sequence types began to reify. The technology needed simplifying, though antecedents ranged from Early Modern sonnet crowns to Tender Buttons. Most common was the persona sequence, which had its root as much in Spoon River Anthology as it did prose fictional portraits. One exemplar, Maurice Manning’s A Companion for Owls, entailed multi-form lyrics voiced by the historical personage Daniel Boone upon his exploration of the Kentucky territory. In the typical persona poem, the “I” of the speaker necessarily rubs up against the assumed subjectivity of its author—a twist on the confessional. The greater the distance between the author and the speaker, the more dramatically ethical the movement of these sequences become, such as in Davis McComb’s Ultima Thule, winner of the 1999 Yale Younger Poets Prize, a set of two sonnet sequences, one of which is voiced by Stephen Bishop, a slave and South Kentucky cave explorer, and the other by a version of McCombs himself, as a young tour guide of that same cave system in the 90s. And there is Cornelius Eady’s classic Brutal Imagination, nominated for the 2002 National Book Award, which speaks in the voice of the unnamed Black man Susan Smith invented to cover up her own murder of her two sons. As much as these books forefront racial, class, and historical differences between the author and their subjects that respond to contradictions inherent in our contemporary social spaces, they also do quite a bit of educating.
Mullen often always works in the project mode, though never until now the persona sequence. Murmur, her sixth book, remixed the tropes of detection and intrigue found in popular mystery into prose-ish lyrics that desecrated, chewed up, and all but wrung dry those cultural forms to thrillingly ambiguous ends. Seriality in Mullen’s work entails both the engine and primary agon, a work of accretion and erasure in service of compositional momentum. “The stage is occasionally almost erased—all action disappearing—by the hard white glare of rising phosphorescent flares,” reads a fragment from her 2012 book Enduring Freedom. Each of the book’s nominal “mechanical bride” poems presents a different allegorical inflexion on the infinitely gendered ways we repress and re-cast—or more fittingly puppet—the violence carried out in the theater of operations; that is, American global influence; that is, war. That the lyric poem as either the statement or effacement of a thought is itself repeatable, mirrors Mullen’s commitment to a politics that is never accomplished in the work as an achieved effect, but as a suggestion to further recognition.
Where Enduring Freedom multiplies, EtC proceeds by disappointment and deferral, by subtraction and conspicuous incompleteness. Any other book, for example, would have had a preface, a conciliatory apologia written in exegetical, and often just a lyrical prose. M. NourbeSe Phillips’ book-length Zong!, a influential touchstone for all of Mullen’s work since its publication in 2008, ends with an afterword articulating the author’s method and reasoning for remixing its source material. Mullen appends a loose “Supply Chain” of book titles to EtC. One only presumes how or where they informed the preceding work.
As a sequence, EtC really begins after its third poem, a disclaimer, in fact, the poem titled “Disclaimer.” A few constipated shudders and the slap sticks. In “Elsie isn’t my / Invention,” she writes before we've been properly introduced,
Absolutely everything
In these poems is purely
Imaginary and any
Resemblance to real
People living or dead is
Completely accidental
…
That’s my opening
Elsie, as it is fairly cryptically explained later, can’t only refer to the cartoon mascot—the reality, as always, is much more horrifyingly concatenated. Borden, Inc., at one time the largest manufacturing company in the country, created the ad-personage of Elsie the Cow in 1936, a Disney-eyed distraction in the wake of national milk strikes, to represent the wing of their edible consumables, Borden Dairy. Elsie, motherly, wifely, her horns curved to suggest a tiara, the tight necklace of daisies about her collar—“at once bridal / And funereal”—suggesting a feminine nudity just out of frame, became to some (where Borden Dairy products were sold) synonymous with milk itself. Elsie was plastered on cartons, billboards, and even present on the cattle brand used to identify Borden’s livestock, that included a real Elsie the company toured to nearly all 48 state fairs. Given the sad truth of how famous mammals are often treated, it’s not surprising Elsie was in reality a series of exchangeable Elsie’s. “Good enough Lobelia,” one of Elsie’s real-world representatives, was herself, as Mullen reminds us in “The Imaginary Begins,” already “A copy of a copy of,” and picked because she
looked
Like the logo and
Could stand for
That invention
In the real
World
If Elsie isn’t supposed to be a metaphor, she sure rings a lot of bells.
Of course, Mullen herself is a character, the more-than-presumed lyric speaker, though the cow talks almost all of the talk. Elsie rivals Barbara Stanwyck in kittenish impertinence, the irreverence of insta-recognition. In so many short-lined verses left tremendously vulnerable to closure, Elsie’s voice horns in. Her lineated incursions break up, break off, and undercut Mullen’s poetic monological authority:
People!
It’s a war zone, for
Real. “Always a killing
Field somewhere,” she
Laughs
Elsewhere (elsie-where), she even reaches for the poetic reigns, herself:
Like this,” Elsie says,
Primly. “You need to be
Sympathetic. Poems
Are for deepening
Our emotional
Capabilities
Elsie invades the text, contradicting and rebutting the lyric speaker’s noble task of voicing the voiceless. And it is all the more troublesome that the cow often repeats such injunctions of the market in which she is perceived to be enslaved.
What seems to be integral in the ethical test of this volume is the renegotiating of the convention of identificatory pity in historical poetry sequences. Readers are meant to be heartbroken at the conditions which led to the singer’s imprisonment in Tyehimba Jess’ Leadbelly (2005), brought to empathetic reckoning by the harrowing accounts of those surviving (or not) the Spanish Flu epidemic in Ellen Bryan Voigt’s Kyrie (1995)—classics of the genre. But Elsie (or the Elsies) is no simple victim of circumstance. Perhaps too easily, the logo, and especially the cow logo, overmaps our own herded conditions within neoliberal governance. Even Marx resorted to metaphors of animality when formulating his concept of labor estrangement. We’re overburdened, sure. Poetry alone won’t get one the job. On top of a book, you’ll need a website, interviews, and a wealth of public-facing evidence that you will continue to contribute this energy on the job because it was your pleasure doing it off the clock: “Elsie works, / In other words, for free, / In support of the free market.” This sounds familiar enough, but Mullen puts her foot down:
I’m not asking you to identify
With her: I’m asking you to stop.
Like so many nineteenth century entreaties for women’s suffrage based on those of the gender’s innate inferiority, we, the nearly completely proletarianized “precariat,” have lately run circuits around our positive identification with these diagnosed conditions. The focus is rigid on what we think we are owed, rather than upon who and what desires have been making the system’s repetition tenable. The complicity hinges precisely upon an ignorance to power, who has most of it, how they got it, and who already has more than they think. There seems little capacity to envision a future, let alone a different future, when the present is manufactured to be so unstable. Addressing the compulsive attachment to personal identities as an end to liberatory work, Mullen verges on preachful judgment:
momentary absence
Of gunfire means it’s a really really
Good time sexual identities a bit un-
Certain all the proclivities up
For further discussion
More pernicious still in her matrix of power is the tendency to project victim identities onto others and, moreover, in one’s reductive intentions of taking the easy way out, of siphoning others off into foreclosed alterity. Pity and regret, in the words of Elsie herself, ultimately lead down paths at best exclusionary and at worst annihilative:
“We want
The feeling of starting fresh
Or It never happened I mean
Our oopsies not the planet
…
What if the world
Could be cleansed bleached made
Over brand new blank”
Blankness, whiteness, and liquidity are the not-so-subtle watch-words woven through the volume. Repeatedly, Mullen equivocates between milk as that which gives life, nutrients, and means motherly intimacy and other white-stuffs: semen, skin color, even glue (canonically, Elsie was married to Borden’s other mascot, whom many find familiar: Elmer). These materials form a potent metaphorical cluster for white supremacy, this “White stuff that dries clear,” taking itself as natural or “In the absence of the source.” Perhaps one characteristic of Mullen’s work that could be criticized in lieu of a focused, explicit political claim to collectivity is precisely her love of suggestion. It’s not that Mullen fears the possibility of being viewed a white savior herself—someone keeps getting in the way:
why is it
Every image of celebration
Seems to involve white
People skin as blank as
Hush “Inside I’m crying”
There is no vantage of intervention that does not speak for and speak over those on whose behalf one intervenes. Mullen doesn’t even do much of the minimum rhetorical structuring to allow it. Elsie, the supposed easy vehicle of a poetry sequence, becomes the very demon stalling the engine at every stroke.
Elsie has her antecedents. William Carlos Williams famously commandeered the voice of an Elsie, too. His “pure product of America” whose “broken brain” revealed the culture’s ills in empathetic reduction (Spring and All’s “To Elsie”). This Elsie, who referred to a woman he’d hired as a nurse in his home, lives on in poetry by the graciousness of the poet to make seen and make last in another form. Elsie is but the variable capital subsumed in every reproduction of her on the Diary Industry’s factory farm.
Which Elsie does Mullen address when she finally asks, in “For Elise,”
are these poems is this
Collection such as it is a promise
Of future harm to you and yours
Or a reckoning as honest as I
Can make it of the damage
Already done
These ubiquitous, hyper-visible characters (highly gender-ized, animal-ized, and obviously fetishized) are at once our furthest perversion of commodity formation—some once called it “the spectacle”—and our most intimate companions. I love Elsie, and Elmer, and Little Debbie, Chester, Flo, and the Green M&M—these models for consumer survival, cannibals, fiends for their own supply. Even Netflix’s “N” dissimulates across my screen as if applied by a soft horsehair brush. I’ve never once worried about who’s holding the brush. I hold the udder and squeeze. It’s my udder.
“I was wondering, as I finished writing this, whether or not I’d be able to give the book away…” Mullen ponders in “Confessional Poem.” In a way, she has done just that. By undercutting expectations, disallowing the project to gain traction, Mullen has made a poetry sequence unrepeatable, a shoddily gift-wrapped time bomb. “The poems escaped me,” she writes at the book’s end, allowing herself only then a moment of traditional poetic valorization by the muse. If EtC can be said to be crafted, it’s in spite of genre constraints, even deconstructive ones. Mullen hands us this unsellable product of the Diary Industry as if it were what we’d always wanted—a project book stripped of recognizable content by the very process of that projection. It’s genre-ending. No one will ever get a job writing an EtC-type book. And yet, to crib the arch-literary destroyer of the last century, all other writing is cow shit.