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.

• The Blind Leading the Blind
  Take 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 Season
  In memory of my mother.
  Now she catches fistfuls of sun
  ...My first child in her first spring
  stretches bare hands back to your darkness
  and heals your silence...

• Bach Transcribing Vivaldi
  One remembered the sunrise, how clearly it gave
  substance 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 women
  spread their hair on the water—
  even the wiley moon will leap to that bobbing
  net 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 tongues
  until the water was gone
  and the moon had slipped away
  in the soft bottomless mud.

• A Grackle Observed
  Watching the black grackle
  come out...
  into the sun, I am dazzled
  by an unsuspected sheen,
  yellow, purple and green,
  ...until he, unaware
  of what he means...
  hops back...
  and leaves the shining part
  ...behind, as though
  brightness must outgrow
  its... worldly dress
  and 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
    creatures
  that thrive in the glaze of your art and freedom.
  ...Soon you will
  ...banish yourself from the one flawless place.

• A Holy Madness
  To say thou to the sun
  and call the wind brother;
  to be humble before a grain of sand
  and speak familiarly to the sea;
  to preach to the birds in earnest
  ...o holy love, sweet lunacy,
  which of us, seeing a child
  exhorting a deaf robin,
  does not bless that child
  for 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 And
  Bone Shop
  Trade me, shopkeeper Yeats,
  one filthy rag, one bone
  that can make poetry
  for all the jeweled bits.
  ...A rag to light a fire,
  a bone to whistle on!
  Proprietary, proud...

: Essays and Poems by Lisel Mueller - John Knoepfle - Dave Etter.

• Messages
  ...Dogs talk to us with their bodies
  and accept our answers in words.
  Holes ask for rain; the stunted corpse of an elm
  is revealed as a sign. We keep breaking
  the code of the dead, we reply.

• The Levitation
  ...Whatever exists is floating:
  words without weight, bodies without resistance,
  feelings wavy as trailing scarves
  move through the gently dissolving center
  between heaven and earth where we live,
  briefly, in a mild light.

• On Finding a Bird's Bones in the Woods
  Even Einstein, gazing
  at the slender ribs of the world,
  ...even he, unlearning
  the bag and baggage of notion,
  must have kept some shred
  in which to clothe that shape,
  as we, who cannot escape
  ...swaddle
  this tiny world of bone
  in all that we have known...

• The Biographer
  I came to live in your house
  restored your pictures, brought back your books,
  discovered the key to your desk,
  moved the yellow chair to the window—
  and now you come in, asking
  whose house this is.

• January Afternoon,
  With Billie Holiday
  ...The foolish old songs were right,
  the heart does, actually, ache
  from trying to push beyond
  itself...
  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 Together
  Speaking of marvels, I am alive
  together with you...
  I might have been...
  a woman without a name
  weeping in Master's bed
  for my husband, exchanged for a mule,
  ...I might have been stretched on a totem pole
  to appease a vindictive god
  or 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 together
  statistically nonexistent;
  still we have made it, alive in a time
  when rationalists with square hats
  and hatless Jehovah's Witnesses
  agree it is almost over,
  alive with our lively children
  who—but for endless ifs—
  might have missed out...

• On Reading An Anthology of Postwar German Poetry
  America saved me
  ...I was not crushed
  under rubble, nor was I beaten
  along a frozen highway;
  my children are not dead
  of postwar hunger;
  ...I have forced no one
  into a chamber of death.
  ...I know enough to refuse to say
  that life is good,
  but I act as though it were,
  and skeptical about love, I survive
  by the witness of my own.

• What the Dog Perhaps Hears
  ...We would like to ask the dog
  if there is a continuous whir
  because the child...
  keeps growing, if the snake
  really stretches full length
  without a click and the sun
  breaks through clouds without
  a decibel...
  whether in autum, when the trees
  dry up... there isn't a shudder...
  What is it like up there
  For us...
  the newborn bird is suddenly here,
  ... we heard nothing when the world changed.

• A Nude by Edward Hopper
  ...this body
  is home, my childhood
  is buried here, my sleep
  rises and sets inside,
  desire
  crested and wore itself thin
  between these bones—
  I live here.

• Monet Refuses the Operation
  Doctor, you say there are no haloes
  around the streetlights in Paris
  ...it has taken me all my life
  to arrive at the vision of... lamps as angels,
  to soften... blur and finally banish
  the edges...
  to learn that... the horizon
  does not exist and sky and water,
  ...apart, the same state of being.
  Fifty-four years before I could see
  Rouen cathedral... built
  of... shafts of sun
  and now you want...
  ...youthful errors: fixed
  notions of top and bottom,
  ...wisteria separate
  from the bridge...
  Houses of Parliament [that do not] dissolve
  ...to become
  the fluid dream of the Thames?
  I will not return to a universe
  of objects that don’t know each other,
  ...The world
  is 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 World
  I started out as a girl
  without a shadow, in iron shoes;
  now, at the end of the world
  I am a woman full of rain.
  The journey back should be easy;
  if this reaches you, wait for me.

: New & Selected Poems

• In Passing
  How swiftly...
  ...as if what exists, exists
  so that it can be lost
  and become precious

• Curriculum Vitae
  1992
  2) 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 from
  and where does it go when it's over—
  the child's unanswered question
  about more than music.
  My mother is dead, and the piano
  ...burned with our city in World War II.
  ...it's still her black Bechstein
  each concert pianist plays for me
  and... her... fingers
  are behind each virtuoso performance
  on the stereo, giving me back
  my prewar childhood city
  intact and real.

• Immortality
  In Sleeping Beauty's castle
  the clock strikes one hundred years
  and the girl in the tower returns to the world [unchanged].
  ...fear persists, and...
  the anger that causes fear persists,
  ...its trajectory can't be changed
  or broken, only interrupted.

• An Unanswered Question
  If I had been the lone survivor
  of my Tasmanian tribe,
  the only person in the world
  to speak my language
  (as she was),
  ...and if among all those people
  staring and pointing and laughing
  and making their meaningless sounds
  there had been one thoughtful face,
  who might have instinctively understood
  ...the indispensable word
  I must pass through the bars
  ...what word would it have been?

• Midwinter Notes
  On my shelf of photographs
  the dead have come to outnumber the living.
  They stand like artificial flowers
  among the real ones, so lifelike
  even God might be fooled.
  ...Only after
  our garden became a graveyard
  ...did the white stem rise
  from the hermetic bulb,
  ...five lavender petals
  ...a brilliant contradiction,
  out of phase, like an angel
  strayed into Time, our world.

• The Laughter of Women
  ...Prisoners in underground cells
  imagine that they see daylight
  when 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 doves
  and welcomed them to our gardens.

• Imaginary Paintings
  6 How Would I Paint the Big Lie
  Smooth, and deceptively small
  so that it can be swallowed
  like something we take for a cold.
  ...sweet and glossy,
  that pleases the tongue
  and goes down easy,
  never mind
  the poison inside.
  7 How Would I Paint Nostalgia
  ...A radiant bride in white
  standing above a waterfall,
  watching the water rush
  away...

• Things
  ...we grew lonely
  living 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 bells
  so 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...
  

• Tears
  She looked at the watchful gazelles
  and the heavy-lidded frogs;
  she looked at the glass-eyed birds
  and nervous, black-eyed mice.
  None of them wept, not even the fish
  ...Not even the man. Only she
  carried the sea inside her body.

• Heartland
  When did we enter the heartless age? ...

• Happy and Unhappy Families II
  In the play, we know what must happen
  long 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 turning
  into the dreamwork of trees;
  and all of us...
  myself and the purple finches,
  and rusty blackbirds,
  the ruby cardinals,
  the white-throated sparrows
  with their liquid voices—
  ride the dark curve of the earth
  toward daylight, which they announce
  from their high lookouts
  before dawn has quite broken...

• [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.

• Poetry

• Lisel Mueller 1924-2020 @PoetryFoundation.org

• YouTube Videos
  • Monet Refuses The Operation read by Lisel Mueller