Lisel Mueller

Lisel Mueller (born Elisabeth Neumann, February 8, 1924 – February 21, 2020) was a German-born American poet, translator and academic teacher. Her family fled the Nazi regime, and she arrived in the U.S. in 1939 at the age of 15. She worked as a literary critic and taught at the University of Chicago, Elmhurst College and Goddard College. She began writing poetry in the 1950s and published her first collection in 1965, after years of self-study. She received awards including the National Book Award in 1981 and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1997, as the only German-born poet awarded that prize. Quotes Dependencies (1965) The Blind Leading the BlindTake my hand. There are two of us in this cave.The sound you hear is water; you will hear it forever....You will learn toads from diamonds, the fist from the palm,love from the sweat of love, falling from flying....Once I fell off a precipice. Once I found gold....There are two of us here. Touch me. In the Thriving SeasonIn memory of my mother.Now she catches fistfuls of sun...My first child in her first springstretches bare hands back to your darknessand heals your silence... Bach Transcribing VivaldiOne remembered the sunrise, how clearly it gavesubstance and praise to the mountains...the other imagined twilight, the setting in blood,and a valley of fallen leaves where a stranger might rest. Moon Fishing...And they fished till a traveler passed and said,"Fools,to catch the moon you must let your womenspread their hair on the water—even the wiley moon will leap to that bobbingnet of shimmering threads..."And they fished......"Fools,...You must cut out your hearts and bait your hooks...what matter you lose your hearts to reel in your dream?"And they fished......"Fools,what good is the moon to a heartless man?...get on your knees,and drink as you never have,...And they fished with their lips and tonguesuntil the water was goneand the moon had slipped awayin the soft bottomless mud. A Grackle ObservedWatching the black gracklecome out...into the sun, I am dazzledby an unsuspected sheen,yellow, purple and green,...until he, unawareof what he means...hops back...and leaves the shining part...behind, as thoughbrightness must outgrowits... worldly dressand enter the mind...as vision... pure light. "O Brave New World,That Hath Such People In It"Soon you will be like her, Prospero's daughter,finding the door that leads out of yourself...where you live with the gracious and light-footed   creaturesthat thrive in the glaze of your art and freedom....Soon you will...banish yourself from the one flawless place. A Holy MadnessTo say thou to the sunand call the wind brother;to be humble before a grain of sandand speak familiarly to the sea;to preach to the birds in earnest...o holy love, sweet lunacy,which of us, seeing a childexhorting a deaf robin,does not bless that childfor the paradise in his head?Be praised, my Lord, for Francis,brother to lilies... A Prayer For Rain...let love be brought to ignorance again. In The Rag AndBone ShopTrade me, shopkeeper Yeats,one filthy rag, one bonethat can make poetryfor all the jeweled bits....A rag to light a fire,a bone to whistle on!Proprietary, proud... Voyages to the Inland Sea (1971) : Essays and Poems by Lisel Mueller - John Knoepfle - Dave Etter. Messages...Dogs talk to us with their bodiesand accept our answers in words.Holes ask for rain; the stunted corpse of an elmis revealed as a sign. We keep breakingthe code of the dead, we reply. The Levitation...Whatever exists is floating:words without weight, bodies without resistance,feelings wavy as trailing scarvesmove through the gently dissolving centerbetween heaven and earth where we live,briefly, in a mild light. On Finding a Bird's Bones in the WoodsEven Einstein, gazingat the slender ribs of the world,...even he, unlearningthe bag and baggage of notion,must have kept some shredin which to clothe that shape,as we, who cannot escape...swaddlethis tiny world of bonein all that we have known... The Private Life (1976) The BiographerI came to live in your houserestored your pictures, brought back your books,discovered the key to your desk,moved the yellow chair to the window—and now you come in, askingwhose house this is. January Afternoon,With Billie Holiday...The foolish old songs were right,the heart does, actually, achefrom trying to push beyonditself...all that can be imagined;space is not enough...Desire has no object, it simply happens,rises and floats, lighter than air—but she knows that. ...tomorrow is something she remembers. Alive TogetherSpeaking of marvels, I am alivetogether with you...I might have been...a woman without a nameweeping in Master's bedfor my husband, exchanged for a mule,...I might have been stretched on a totem poleto appease a vindictive godor left, a useless girl-child,to die on a cliff. ......I might have been you....The odds against us are endless,our chances of being alive togetherstatistically nonexistent;still we have made it, alive in a timewhen rationalists with square hatsand hatless Jehovah's Witnessesagree it is almost over,alive with our lively childrenwho—but for endless ifs—might have missed out... On Reading An Anthology of Postwar German PoetryAmerica saved me...I was not crushedunder rubble, nor was I beatenalong a frozen highway;my children are not deadof postwar hunger;...I have forced no oneinto a chamber of death....I know enough to refuse to saythat life is good,but I act as though it were,and skeptical about love, I surviveby the witness of my own. What the Dog Perhaps Hears...We would like to ask the dogif there is a continuous whirbecause the child...keeps growing, if the snakereally stretches full lengthwithout a click and the sunbreaks through clouds withouta decibel...whether in autum, when the treesdry up... there isn't a shudder...What is it like up thereFor us...the newborn bird is suddenly here,... we heard nothing when the world changed. A Nude by Edward Hopper...this bodyis home, my childhoodis buried here, my sleeprises and sets inside,desirecrested and wore itself thinbetween these bones—I live here. Monet Refuses the OperationDoctor, you say there are no haloesaround the streetlights in Paris...it has taken me all my lifeto arrive at the vision of... lamps as angels,to soften... blur and finally banishthe edges...to learn that... the horizondoes not exist and sky and water,...apart, the same state of being.Fifty-four years before I could seeRouen cathedral... builtof... shafts of sunand now you want......youthful errors: fixednotions of top and bottom,...wisteria separatefrom the bridge...Houses of Parliament [that do not] dissolve...to becomethe fluid dream of the Thames?I will not return to a universeof objects that don’t know each other,...The worldis flux, and light becomes what it touches,...so quickly...it would take......my brush to catch it.To paint the speed of light!...shapes, these ...burn to...change our bones...to gases.how heaven pulls earth...to claim this world, blue vapor without end. Letter from the End of the WorldI started out as a girlwithout a shadow, in iron shoes;now, at the end of the worldI am a woman full of rain.The journey back should be easy;if this reaches you, wait for me. Alive Together (1996) : New & Selected Poems In PassingHow swiftly......as if what exists, existsso that it can be lostand become precious Curriculum Vitae19922) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into confetti. ...5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones and primrose marshes...7) My country was struck by history more deadly than earthquakes and hurricanes.8) My father was... eluding monsters. My mother told me walls had ears. ...10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun and the moon across the ocean. My grandparents stayed behind in the darkness. ...13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry. ...14) Ordinary life. Knots tying threads... The past pushed away, the future left unimagined for the... glorious, difficult, passionate present. ...17) And then my father too disappeared.18) I tried to go home... at the door to my childhood, but it was closed... 19) One day... everyone's face was younger than mine.20)...The brilliant days and nights are breathless in their hurry. We follow... Place and Time...We're all pillars of salt....Where does the music come fromand where does it go when it's over—the child's unanswered questionabout more than music.My mother is dead, and the piano...burned with our city in World War II....it's still her black Bechsteineach concert pianist plays for meand... her... fingersare behind each virtuoso performanceon the stereo, giving me backmy prewar childhood cityintact and real. ImmortalityIn Sleeping Beauty's castlethe clock strikes one hundred yearsand the girl in the tower returns to the world [unchanged]....fear persists, and...the anger that causes fear persists,...its trajectory can't be changedor broken, only interrupted. An Unanswered QuestionIf I had been the lone survivorof my Tasmanian tribe,the only person in the worldto speak my language(as she was),...and if among all those peoplestaring and pointing and laughingand making their meaningless soundsthere had been one thoughtful face,who might have instinctively understood...the indispensable wordI must pass through the bars...what word would it have been? Midwinter NotesOn my shelf of photographsthe dead have come to outnumber the living.They stand like artificial flowersamong the real ones, so lifelikeeven God might be fooled....Only afterour garden became a graveyard...did the white stem risefrom the hermetic bulb,...five lavender petals...a brilliant contradiction,out of phase, like an angelstrayed into Time, our world. The Laughter of Women...Prisoners in underground cellsimagine that they see daylightwhen they remember the laughter of women...What language it is ...Long before law and scripture...we understood freedom. Pigeons...Once they were elegant, carefree;they called to each other in rich, deep voices,and we called them dovesand welcomed them to our gardens. Imaginary Paintings6 How Would I Paint the Big LieSmooth, and deceptively smallso that it can be swallowedlike something we take for a cold....sweet and glossy,that pleases the tongueand goes down easy,never mindthe poison inside.7 How Would I Paint Nostalgia...A radiant bride in whitestanding above a waterfall,watching the water rushaway... Things...we grew lonelyliving among the things,so we gave the clock a face,the chair a back,the table four stout legs...We fitted our shoes with tongues...and hung tongues inside bellsso we could listen...the pitcher received a lip,the bottle a long, slender neck....we gave the country a heart,the storm an eye,the cave a mouth... TearsShe looked at the watchful gazellesand the heavy-lidded frogs;she looked at the glass-eyed birdsand nervous, black-eyed mice.None of them wept, not even the fish...Not even the man. Only shecarried the sea inside her body. HeartlandWhen did we enter the heartless age? ... Happy and Unhappy Families IIIn the play, we know what must happenlong before it happens,and we call it a tragedy.Here at home, this winter,we have no name for it. Why I Need the Birds...By the time I arrive at evening,...they are turninginto the dreamwork of trees;and all of us...myself and the purple finches,and rusty blackbirds,the ruby cardinals,the white-throated sparrowswith their liquid voices—ride the dark curve of the earthtoward daylight, which they announcefrom their high lookoutsbefore dawn has quite broken... Quotes about Mueller [H]er book is a testament to the miraculous power of language to interpret and transform our world. It is a testament that invites readers to share her vision of experiences we all have in common... The 1997 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author: Alive Together: New and Selected Poems by Lisel Mueller. [H]er sense of the universality of the fairy tale to explore the human psyche gives her poems a metaphoric brilliance. And in the center of this brilliance is the power of the fairy tale-and, indeed, of the poem-to transform. Linda Nemec Foster, "Transformation of the World: The Metaphor of Fairy Tale in the Poetry of Lisel Mueller" (2005) MidAmerica XXXII The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature p. 78. [Mueller's] sense of history gives her poems a rare philosophical intensity. Judith Kitchen, as quoted by Linda Nemec Foster, "Transformation of the World: The Metaphor of Fairy Tale in the Poetry of Lisel Mueller" (2005) MidAmerica XXXII The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature p. 78. Mueller's poem Muse... interprets art through an individual perspective and latches onto lonesome painted figures. The major influence on her poetry is her childhood experience fleeing Nazi Germany with her family. Having witnessed atrocities in her homeland and escaped death she is both aware of injustice and thankful. Specifically, she is concerned with her position as an outsider in America. ...The poem ...chronicles her own discovery of the painting's meaning in relation to her life. ...[S]he translates the image to the present day. She fills in and rounds the images within contexts. ...She means, how does any artist know her work will endure when they sit alone, isolated, commenting on a melancholy world? Farah L. Miller, Confronting the Reader: Lisel Mueller, "Contemporary American Poetry About Art: Rita Dove, Lisel Mueller and Jorie Graham" (May, 1999) A Thesis Presented to the Graduate and Research Committee Of Lehigh University in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts in English Literature. See also Poetry External links Lisel Mueller 1924-2020 @PoetryFoundation.org YouTube Videos Monet Refuses The Operation read by Lisel Mueller Category:1924 births Category:2020 deaths Category:Poets