RIP Lisel Mueller (1924-2020)
Over the weekend we read of the death of Lisel Mueller, who passed at her retirement community in Chicago. She was 96. At the Washington Post, Harrison Smith writes about Mueller's life and may achievements. From the top:
Lisel Mueller, who fled Hitler’s Germany as a teenager and became a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet in the United States, drawing on her family history for lyrical works about love, art, nature and loss — acknowledging pain even as she looked outward with joy — died Feb. 21 at a retirement community in Chicago. She was 96.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, said her daughter Jenny Mueller.
After immigrating to the United States at age 15, Ms. Mueller spent some eight decades in the Midwest, where she lived for many years in a rural stretch of Chicago’s North Shore suburbs. Awakened in the morning by the moos of Holstein cows from a neighboring farm, she set to work from her second-floor study writing free-verse poetry that often reflected the beauty of the natural world, and what she called “the indifference of nature” in the face of human suffering.
Her poetry career began relatively late, with the publication of her first collection, “Dependencies” (1965), when she was 41. She had effectively come to the United States as a political refugee — her father, a teacher and outspoken leftist, lost his job after criticizing Hitler — and began writing poetry in her second language after her mother died in 1953.
“I sat on a gray stone bench/ringed with the ingenue faces/of pink and white impatiens/and placed my grief/in the mouth of language,/the only thing that would grieve with me,” she recalled in “When I Am Asked,” from her Pulitzer-winning book, “Alive Together: New and Selected Poems” (1996).
The collection was praised by the Pulitzer jury as “a testament to the miraculous power of language to interpret and transform our world” and “a testament that invites readers to share her vision of experiences we all have in common: sorrow, tenderness, desire, the revelations of art, and mortality — ‘the hard, dry smack of death against the glass.’ ”
Mueller was a long-time and frequent contributor to Poetry magazine, and she was honored with the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. Read on at the Washington Post here, and then head here to read a poem and celebrate her life.