About Lisel Mueller: Lisel Mueller is an American poet. She won the U.S. National Book Award in 1981 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1997.
. . .because we had survived sisters and brothers, daughters and sons, we discovered bones that rose from the dark earth and sang as white birds in the trees Because the story of our life becomes our life Because each of us tells the same story but t...
Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it's a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.
Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it.
I thought if only we could go on and meet again, shy as strangers.
What luxury, to be so happy that we can grieve over imaginary lives.
I am imprinted with the whole sense of European history, especially German history, going back to World War I, which really destroyed all the old values and culture. My grandparents had been reasonably well-off but they became quite poor, living in a...
Poetry, for me, is the answer to, 'How does one stay sane when private lives are being ransacked by public events?' It's something that hangs over your head all the time.
When I was in college, I did do some writing of poetry, somewhat inspired, I think at that time, by Carl Sandburg, because English was still relatively new to me, and Sandburg, of course, wrote in a very easy-to-understand, very colloquial and inform...
Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.
