Pirene’s Fountain interviews Lisel Mueller
With Ami Kaye
PF- Lisel, thank you so much for gracing Pirene’s Fountain with your presence today. Perhaps we can begin this interview by hearing about some of your early writing experiences and how you entered the world of poetry?
LM- I came to this country when I was 15 and a school friend introduced me to Carl Sandburg, and while I had difficulty reading Keats, Shelley and Byron and other poets from English literature, I could read Sandburg fine, and that really turned me onto poetry in the beginning and I tried to write a few poems of my own, some of which appeared in the school paper, I don’t want to see them again now, (laughing) but anyway, that’s what started me. I did go through a period later, for about ten years, during which I did not write at all -I thought I had given all this as up childish or something- and then, when my mother died in 1953, I felt a great need in my grief to write a poem again and I did, and I wrote ever after. That was it. That was the real beginning of my work as a poet. I didn’t keep that first poem but it just started the flow of writing and I was fortunate with being accepted very quickly in various little magazines, then in Poetry magazine and The New Yorker.
PF- When you started writing poetry, did you think in German and translate in English, or did you write in both languages?
LM-I thought in English by that time, so as a result, I have always written poetry in English. I have never written poetry in German at all, no. It just doesn’t come to me, because, by the time I started writing poetry in college, I was thinking in English so it had really become my first language at that point. I have translated quite a bit from German, though.
PF-Is there anyone else in your family who writes?
LM-Yes, I have two daughters, and one of them is a poet also. Her name is Jenny Mueller. She has published one book called “Bonneville.” She is a college teacher. She studied at the University of Chicago and subsequently moved on to the University of Utah, working on her PhD in English, where she started to write her book.
PF- How did you start a poem in your mind? Perhaps you can share that process with us.
LM-It is a very mysterious process, as you know, and I might go for many, many weeks without anything and then all of a sudden, something… something that usually becomes a first line, some new vision of a contrast between two things or a likeness among two things will come into my head and that is what starts a poem. Usually when I get started writing one, I go on to write a few more…so it comes in bunches!
PF- Are you still active in poetry circles? What other interests do you have besides poetry?
LM- Although I no longer write because of my poor eyesight, I keep in touch with several friends and former students who are poets.
In 1973 seven Chicago poets, including myself, founded “The Poetry Center of Chicago.” Each of us would choose a favorite poet to read for us during the year, so there were seven readings annually. The museum of contemporary art generously provided the space for our readings and lodging for the visiting poets, and the events were a great success. Since that time, they have continued under the auspices of “The Art Institute of Chicago.” Lately, the “Poetry Foundation of Chicago” has introduced a free series of readings, by currently active, well-known poets, which is free to the public.
Besides poetry, I am very interested in music. My husband was a musicologist and we listened to music all the time and went to concerts, and…I still do that. I listen to classical music for the most part, although, I also like Jazz very much.
PF- There has been a lot written about MFA programs and how academia often holds sway over the validation of poetry. What do you think of that?
LM- Teaching and participating in such programs is a wonderful experience, but sometimes poetry written by people trained in these programs tends to be very much alike. I do not believe the academic world should necessarily dictate directions taken by poetry, plus there is the problem of getting published and there is so much more written more than can be published.
PF- Do you think a poet can ever really been done writing? Even though you might physically stop writing, do you find yourself looking at things in a different way, unconsciously making poems in your mind?
LM- That is absolutely true. I couldn’t agree more with that. Well, I think maybe people who write poetry are different in their thinking, to begin with, and how they translate what they experience into writing or maybe what they experience is somewhat different from what others do.
PF- Do you still give poetry readings?
LM-I used to give lots of poetry readings when my eyesight was better. I have given poetry readings all over the country and have really enjoyed it. When I was not able to read comfortably any longer, I used to memorize quite a bit, but I can’t do it anymore. It got to the point where it became quite stressful. I really loved reading to an audience and getting the response from them, and the interesting and intelligent questions that people would ask. Just the contact with people who love poetry has been very, very important to me and I am very sorry I can no longer do that.
PF- Well, we are sorry too, Lisel, it is certainly a loss to the poetry community at large, but even though you no longer give readings, perhaps you can share with us some favorite poems from your various works?
LM- Midwinter Notes is kind of a gloomy one, but it is one that still interests me, I think. A lot of people liked The Concert, it was an earlier poem and it was fun. A lot of people liked the Palindrome because it is a kind of trick. One of my favorites is a later work, Romantics, which is about the friendship between Johann Brahms and Clara Schumann. I also like Necessities very much. I don’t read it at readings because it is so long and I think audiences get fidgety listening to that. I was very happy when Joseph Parisi published an anthology recently of women poets, and he chose that poem of mine as an illustration of my work. Another one of my favorite poems is a very early poem, the first one in the first book, The Blind Leading the Blind.
PF- Can you tell us about your poem "The Triumph of Life: Mary Shelley?” What led you to write that poem?
LM- "The Triumph of Life: Mary Shelley" is the longest poem I’ve written.
I had fallen in love with Percy Shelley, so I read about their lives, his and hers, about their living in Switzerland and all the friends who came there. One night they all decided they were going to write something and read it to the circle and no one did, except Mary, and she wrote “Frankenstein” as a result. So I read about that and I became interested in her life with Shelley. I read her journal, and that is mentioned in the poem, and learned of the terrible things that happened to her such as the death of her two children, actually, I think she lost another one later, and the long lapses in the writing because she had very bad depressions during that time. (And, of course, her beloved husband drowned at the age of 30)
So I became interested in her after I had become interested in her husband, whom I adored! And reading about her life was what inspired me to write that poem. What a remarkable woman she was, and what a remarkable story! Her father, William Godwin, was a poet and scholar and she was brought up by him instead of being sent to the usual “girls” school, so it is no wonder Percy became interested in her because, not only was she this attractive 16 year old but she had this fantastic background, and was very intelligent. I don’t think there was another woman in England at that time with that background. Her mother was the famous Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist, who died when Mary Shelley was born, so she grew up without a mother.
I worked on that poem for many years and, even though I knew what I wanted to write about, I could never find the voice. When I first wrote the long draft of the poem, it was a poem in which I was addressing her. Then I decided that really didn’t work and so I turned it around after I suddenly got the idea to make it her voice talking to us, two centuries later, and whoosh, there it was. It took me years to write…I would put it away, not sure how to finish it, and then go back to it. I’d put it away again for months and half way forgot about it, but somehow, it always bugged me, you know, and I would go back to it and write some more, and so eventually, I completed the poem.
(In 1976, Lisel Mueller received the “Emily Clark Balch Award” from “Virginia Quarterly Review” for The Triumph of Life: Mary Shelley)
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"The Triumph of Life: Mary Shelley."
1
My father taught me to think
to value mind over body,
to refuse even the airiest cage
to be a mouth as well as an ear,
to ask difficult questions,
not to marry because I was asked,
not to believe in heaven
None of this kept me from bearing
four children and losing three
by the time I was twenty-two
He wanted to think I sprang
from his head like the Greek goddess
He forgot that my mother died
of my birth, The Rights of Women
washed away in puerperal blood
and that I was her daughter too
2
I met him when I was sixteen
He came to sit at my father's feet
and stayed to sit at mine
We became lovers
who remained friends
even after we married
A marriage of true minds
It is what you want
It was what we wanted
We did not believe in power
We were gentle
We shared our bodies with others
We thought we were truly free
My father had taught us there was a solution
to everything, even evil
We were generous, honest
We thought we had the solution
and still, a woman walked
into the water because of us
3
After that death, I stopped
believing in solutions
And when my children died
it was hard not to suspect
there was a god, a judgment
For months, I wanted to be
with those three small bodies,
to be still in a dark place
No more mountain passes
No more flight from creditors
with arms as long as our bills
No more games to find out
who was the cleverest of us all
No more ghost stories by the fire
with my own ghost at the window,
smiles sharpened like sickles
on the cold stone of the moon
For months, I made a fortress
of my despair
"A defect of temper," they called it
His biographers never liked me
You would have called it a sickness,
given me capsules and doctors,
brushes and bright paints,
kits for paper flowers
4
An idea whose time has come,
you say about your freedom
but you forget the reason
Shall I remind you of history,
of choice and chance, the wish and the world,
of courage and locked doors,
biology and fate?
I wanted what you want,
what you have
If I could have chosen my children
and seen them survive
I might have believed in equality,
written your manifestoes
Almost two hundred years
of medical science divide us
5
And yet, my father was right
It was the spirit that won in the end
After the sea had done
what it could do to his flesh
I knew he was my husband
only by the books
in his pockets: Sophocles, Keats
The word survives the body
It was then I decided
not to marry again
but to live for the word
6
I allowed his body to be burned
on that Italian beach
Rome received his ashes
You have read that our friend
snatched his heart from the fire
You call it a grisly act,
something out of my novel
You don't speak of the heart
in your letters, your sharp-eyed poems
You speak about your bodies
as if they had no mystery,
no caves, no sudden turnings
You claim isolation, night-sweats,
hanging on by your teeth
You don't trust the heart
though you define death
as the absence of heartbeat
You would have taken a ring,
a strand of hair, a shoelace
—a symbol, a souvenir
not the center, the real thing
7
He died
and the world gave no outward sign
I started a Journal of Sorrow
But there were the words, the poems,
passion and ink spilling
over the edges of all those sheets
There was the hungry survivor
of our bodily life together
Would it have lasted, our marriage,
if he had stayed alive?
As it was, we fed each other
like a pair of thrushes
I gave his words to the world
and they came back to me
as bread and meat and apples,
art and nature, mind and flesh
keeping each other alive
His last, unfinished, poem
was called The Triumph of Life
8
You are surprised at my vision,
that a nineteen-year-old girl
could have written that novel,
how much I must have known
But I only wanted to write
a tale to tremble by,
what is oddly called a romance
By accident I slid
out of my century
into yours of white-coated men
in underground installations,
who invent their own destruction
under fluorescent lights
And in a few more decades
when your test tube babies sprout
you will call me the prophet
of ultimate horror again
It was only a private nightmare
that dreamed the arrogance of your time
I was not your Cassandra
In any age, life has to be lived
before we can know what it is |
The poem above is taken from Lisel Mueller's “Alive Together” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). Copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller. Used with the author's permission, and with permission from the LSU Press.
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