POET

Lisel Mueller (1924 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Lisel Mueller was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1924. She has had a career both writing poetry and translating. She attended the University of Evansville and did her graduate study at Indiana University. Her collections of poetry include The Private Life, which was the 1975 Lamont Poetry Selection, Second Language (1986), The Need to Hold Still (1980), which received the National Book Award, Learning to Play by Ear (1990), and Alive Together: New & Selected Poems (1996), which won the Pulitzer Prize. Her other awards and honors include the Carl Sandburg Award, the Helen Bullis Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She has also published translations, most recently Circe's Mountain by Marie Luise Kaschnitz in 1990.

In her second book of poems, The Private Life, Lisel Mueller probes the enigma of our public and private selves. So blazingly accurate are her insights into the human psyche that Warren Slesinger remarked "we are transfixed and filled with fascination," and Dick Allen reported "shocks of recognition.... She goes after our secrets, this poet; often, she finds them."

The Private Life is a collection of forty-three short poems on subjects ranging from highways to a child's bed-time story to an old brooch that had at one time belonged to her grandmother. As Russell Brignano noted, her verses are filled with "captivating figures and metaphors, projecting an imaginative, deeply reflective, subtle intelligence."

CAREER

Worked as social case worker, receptionist, library assistant, and free-lance writer and reviewer. Instructor in poetry writing, Elmhurst College, 1969-72; participating poet, Poets, In The Schools, 1972-77; instructor in master of fine arts writing program, Goddard College, 1977—.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Dependencies, University of North Carolina Press, 1965.
• Life of a Queen (chapbook), Juniper Press, 1970.
• The Private Life, Louisiana State University Press, 1976.
• Voices From the Forest (chapbook), Juniper Press, 1977.
• The Need to Hold Still, Louisiana State University Press, 1980.
• (Translator) The Selected Later Poems of Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Princeton University Press, 1980.
• Second Language: Poems, Louisiana State University Press, 1986.
• Waving From the Shore: Poems, Louisiana State University Press, 1989.
• Alive Together: New and Selected Poems, Louisiana State University Press, 1996.

Also co-translator of performing version of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's play, "Das Salzburger Grosse Welttheater," produced in Chicago at Goodman Theatre. Poems represented in anthologies, including The Contemporary American Poets, The Poetry Anthology, and Rising Tides: 20th Century Women Poets. Poems published in numerous magazines and literary journals, including New Yorker, Poetry, Saturday Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest, Ohio Review, and Chicago Review. Contributor of critical essays to numerous journals.

FURTHER READINGS

PERIODICALS

• Book Forum, summer, 1976; Yale Review, autumn, 1976; London Times Literary Supplement, October 29, 1976; America, April 2, 1977; Poetry, summer, 1977; Three Rivers Poetry Journal, March 1978; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 13, Gale, 1980.