Lisel Mueller

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Lisel Mueller (born Elisabeth Annedore Neumann on February 8, 1924 in Hamburg ; died on February 21, 2020 in Chicago ) was a German-American poet and translator . As the first and so far only female poet born in Germany, Lisel Mueller received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1997 .

Life

Childhood and youth

Lisel Mueller's parents were the reform pedagogue Fritz C. Neumann (1897–1976) and the teacher Ilse Burmester (1899–1953). Fritz C. Neumann was a teacher at the Lichtwarkschule from 1923 to 1930 and then at a Hamburg secondary school . At the same time he was involved in building up the clandestine Marxist evening school. After the transfer of power to the National Socialists in 1933, he was dismissed from school as one of the first political victims of the law to restore the civil service in May. After unsuccessful attempts to get a job in France and England, and a brief employment in a Hamburg tax consultancy, Neumann was arrested by the Gestapo in 1935 . Released after a few days imprisonment in Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp , he went to Italy to work as a teacher in exile schools for Jewish children.

Elisabeth was allowed to accompany him there in the first summer and had her first opera performance, Cavalleria Rusticana , in the Verona Arena in 1935 , an experience that she would process in a poem of the same title published 54 years later in the volume Waving From Shore . After Fritz C. Neumann succeeded in entering the USA in September 1937 thanks to an affidavit and a one-year job, the mother Ilse, who was left behind with her daughters in Hamburg, managed to become the future poet and her four years as a substitute teacher at an elementary school to bring through younger sister Ingeborg. Family reunification became possible after Neumann got a permanent position at Evansville College in Evansville, Indiana in 1938 . “In June 1939, three months before the outbreak of World War II, we followed him to the United States,” Mueller wrote in 1983 in the autobiographical essay Return . On the Hansa passenger list , which left Hamburg on June 1, 1939, Mueller was still known as Elisabeth; in later documents she is always referred to as Lisel. Mueller later described her school days in Hamburg several times in her prose and poems as characterized by constant lurking danger, tormenting flag roll calls and the fear of betraying her father's whereabouts at school. At the same time, she confessed in her texts her fascination for a teacher who had completely fallen into Hitlerism and who she experienced as a "sexless divinity".

Beginnings in the USA

At the beginning of the academic year 1942/43 Lisel Neumann was enrolled at Evansville College, where she took her BA in Sociology in the spring of 1944. At the same time she met Paul E. Mueller (1923-2001) there. The two married on June 15, 1943. As a conscript , her husband had to go to the front immediately afterwards. He was deployed on Adak, an Aleutian island , as it is called in an unpublished biographical sketch of Lisel Mueller. After the war, Paul E. Mueller first received a BA in musicology from the new Roosevelt College in Chicago. From 1948 the couple studied in Bloomington, Indiana: He worked as an assistant to Paul Nettl on his Forgotten Musicians and obtained his PhD in 1954 with a thesis on the influence of English musicians on continental music of the 16th and early 17th centuries. Lisel, who worked part-time in the city library, was enrolled in comparative literature. In particular, she took courses there with fairy tale researcher Stith Thompson .

After Ilse Neumann's death in early June 1953, the couple moved to Evanston (Illinois) with Lisel's widowed father ; Paul E. Mueller found a job as a lecturer at the law publishing house Commerce Clearing House in Chicago, where he stayed until his retirement. In response to her mother's death, Lisel Mueller began to write poetry. “ The death of the mother hurt the daughter in to poetry ”, says the poem Curiculum Vitae (1992). For this she acquired knowledge of American poetry and technical means in self-study. At the same time, she worked in various positions, including as a consultation assistant in an ear, nose and throat doctor's practice, as stated in the essay Learning to Play By Ear . In 1958 the Muellers built a house in Lake Forest , Illinois and moved there. In the northern outskirts of Chicago they made contact with other musicians. According to the essay Learning to Play by Ear , "a group of poets who meet regularly" emerged there and thus contributed significantly to their career. The writer Felix Pollak is said to have belonged to this circle of friends from the beginning . Lisel Mueller published her first poem in 1957 in the Quarterly Review of Literature , followed by publications in Poetry and The New Yorker the following year . A little over three years apart, Mueller gave birth to her two daughters: in December 1958 Lucy, who now works as a freelance photographer in Chicago, and in February 1962 Jenny, who is a poet and at McKendree University, Lebanon (Illinois) , English teaches.

Career and everyday life

In 1965 Mueller published her first volume of poetry, Dependencies , which won the Robert M. Ferguson Memorial Award. She also took over the work of a poetry reviewer as a freelancer for the Chicago Daily News , which she worked until it was closed in 1978. Her apicultural fantasy The Life of A Queen , published individually in a so-called Chapbook, was set to music for soprano, harp and orchestra by Donald Grantham in 1990 and premiered in New York. She raised her daughters and in 1971, after an unsuccessful attempt to return to Hamburg and a minor stroke, took in the father, who was increasingly in need of care, until his death on April 14, 1976. Traces of these years can be found in poems such as Another Version , which first appeared in 1977 in the Chap book Voices from Forest :

As in a Russian play, an old man
lives in our house, he is my father;
he lets go of life in such slow motion,
year after year, that the grief
is stuck inside me, a poisoned apple
that won't go up or down
...

At the same time, Mueller helped shape Chicago's literary life: she founded the Chicago Poetry Center with Paul Carroll and Mark Perlberg in 1973, which opened in autumn 1973 with a joint reading by Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs . Her essays and poems have been published in a growing number of magazines and anthologies, such as the Chicago Review , Plowshares , New England Review , Poetry and Poetry Northwest , from which she won the Helen Bullis Prize in 1974 and 1977, eleven years later Theodore Roethke Prize. Her longest poem, Triumph of Life: Mary Shelley , published in the Virginia Quarterly Review in the summer of 1976 , received its Emily Clark Balch Award. Even before its publication, Mueller's collection of poems, The Private Life, was awarded the Lamont Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets in 1975, which honors the second book by a poet. At the time, the prize was not yet endowed, but it gave Mueller recognition for the first time in the literary scene across the United States. Reading tours took her across the country. Mueller also began a lively teaching activity: As a visiting professor, she taught at Goddard College in Plainfield (Vermont) , at the University of Chicago and at Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa (North Carolina). The Universities of Washington, Wichita State Missouri-Kansas City and the Elmhurst College have named them Poet in Residence .

Fame and old age

For the 1980 published volume The Need to Hold Still Mueller received the National Book Award for poetry in 1981 . At the same time as this great national recognition, Mueller, who did not shy away from political assessments, became a sought-after public interlocutor in the polarized Reagan era. Especially since radio legend Louis "Studs" Terkel often invited her to the WFMT radio studio . Five one-hour interviews were conducted between 1984 and 1996. In September 1983 Lisel Mueller went on a trip to Germany for the first time at the side of her husband Paul and also visited her hometown Hamburg : In the essay she describes in English "[E] ven now the need for the journey feels more like an obligation than a wish" Return their ambivalent feelings on this trip. Nevertheless, it had immediate consequences for the work. Mueller then emerged as a translator from German: for the first time she translated poems and stories by Marie Luise Kaschnitz and Anna Mitgutsch's first novel Die Zuchtigung (1985) into English. Several of the poems in the later volumes also took up the encounters and experiences of the trip to Germany. The oppressive impressions when visiting relatives behind the wall in the GDR are reflected in The Exhibit in the volume Second Language . The alienation that one's own immersion in the language of childhood can bring about is addressed in the poem Visiting My Native Country With My American-Born Husband , which found its way into Waving From Shore :

When I come back I look different,
while he remains what he is,
what he always was.

As the first and so far only female poet born and socialized in Germany, Lisel Mueller was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1997 . This was awarded to her band Alive Together , which she would later call her swan song. For health reasons, the Mueller couple moved from Lake County to a retirement home in Chicago in 1999, where Paul died on January 1, 2001. In 2002 Mueller received the highly endowed Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

A little later Mueller gave up writing, partly because of decreasing eyesight, partly because, according to her own description, the language images were missing: In 2006, she explained to journalist Nell Casey in English "The language no longer flows" . Until 2011 she worked in the college of the Lisel Mueller Scholarship, initiated by her student Linda Nemec Foster, which supports literature students at Warren Wilson College who have young children. In 2019 she received the Federal Cross of Merit . Mueller died in February 2020 at the age of 96.

poetics

classification

Mueller's own poetological statements can be found in her poems in interviews, in her reviews, in anthologies such as Learning to Play By Ear and in anthologies such as the opening volume of the series Voyages to the Inland Sea from 1971. Her work has so far been little explored in literary studies. Sometimes it was attributed to the movement of the post-confessionals. It was often adversarially described as accessible, but profound: The poet Paulette Roeske attested to it an “absolute clarity”, which however “does not exclude mystery”. In her review of Second Language, Alice Fulton compared the reading to a view of a lake: “First you think: Nothing new here. Another wave and another leaf. But if you direct your full attention to it, you will be amazed by the depth and what is happening under the apparently simple surface ”. According to Mueller's own assessment, poetry is fundamentally marginal and at the same time dependent on the social environment and both cultural and geographical origins: “It's no secret that poets have no place in American society and that […] the true poet especially in the rugged Midwest has to make do with the status of a village jerk ”, she wrote in 1971 in the essay Midwestern Poetry: Goodbye to All That . In several poems she expressly rejected a romantic claim to originality as being illusory. So it says in What is Left to Say :

"The self steps out of the circle;
[...]
How splendidly arrogant it was
when it believed the gold-filled tomb
of language awaited its raids!
Now it frequencies the junkyards,
knowing all words are secondhand. "

Mueller has “ transformed the language of poetry in no way, ” said Willard Spiegelman in his essay Revisiting the Nineties . “ She offers, instead a clarification of ordinary life, even at its most bizarre. ”

Influences

One learns to write poetry “mainly through imitation, just like we learn to speak and walk,” Mueller explained in an interview with Nancy Bunge. Her work accordingly testifies to a great openness to the most varied of literary and extra-literary influences, which, conversely, are difficult to specify. In an interview with Stan Rubin and William Heyen , she explained the attempt to identify echoes of Wallace Stevens in her first volume of poetry, Dependencies , as absurd: “I don't think I write anything like Stevens'. I can't see any influence from him on my work, but I would be overjoyed to write like him. ”Mueller always named Carl Sandburg as the first poet she was enthusiastic about . As a teenager she was fascinated by his work, because "it had to do with the real world and his language was direct." In the course of her self-study, she dealt intensively with the New Critics and received poetry-theoretical writings by Ezra Pound and WH Auden . There are explicit references in the early work to William Butler Yeats : The poem In the Rag and Bone-Shop already quotes in the title of his The Circus Animals' Desertion and asks him for assistance with the poetry. In the long poem The Triumph of Life: Mary Shelley , Mueller designed the protagonist specifically as a figure of identification. Mueller also explicitly referred back to Bert Brecht in several phases of her work , and as a reviewer she shows great admiration for Rainer Maria Rilke . The reflective reception of folk tales and myths was of paramount importance for her work: she referred to this as the “treasure trove of metaphors” that she plundered for her poetry. The narrative gesture of their poetry is also shown to be shaped by them. A large number of specific images or ciphers, such as the hand growing out of the grave or the singing bone, have a folkloric origin. Other poems refer to visual arts or music. Right from the start, Mueller referred to jazz, but above all to classical music. Accordingly, the poem Place and Time , which belongs to the late work, says:

My life began
with Beethoven and Schubert
on my mother's grand piano [...]

Mueller did not limit herself to the reception of classical and romantic periods, but also dealt with the atonal contemporary music of her time: Her In Memory of Anton Webern was one of the first poems she was able to publish.

Works (selection)

Volumes of poetry

  • Dependencies , University of North Carolina Press , 1965
  • The Private Life , Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 1976
  • The Need to Hold Still , Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 1980
  • Second Language , Louisiana State University Press , Baton Rouge 1986
  • Waving from Shore , Louisiana State University Press, 1989
  • Alive Together: New and Selected Poems , Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 1996
    • Letter from the end of the world. Selected poems, bilingual; with the cycle Voices from the Forest . Translated by Andreas Nohl. Maro, Augsburg 2006

Single prints, chapbooks and jewelry editions

  • Life of a Queen . Northeast / Juniper, La Crosse 1970
  • Voices from the Forest Juniper Press, La Crosse 1977
  • Naming The Animals , Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend 1980
  • Missing the Dead , Chicago Poetry Center n.d. (1989?)
  • Spell for a Traveler Lisel Mueller with Michael Donovan (ill), Chicago Poetry Center 2006
  • The White of Ships. Poem by Marie Luise Kaschnitz, translated by Lisel Mueller , illustrations by Michele Burgess. Brighton Press, San Diego 2008
  • Herbarium. Prose Poem by Marie Luise Kaschnitz, translation by Lisel Mueller , illustrations by Michele Burgess. Brighton Press 2010
  • Grave Deposits.Prose Poem by Marie Luise Kaschnitz, translation by Lisel Mueller, illustrations by Michele Burgess. Brighton Press 2010
    • Voices from the forest Translator Wendelin Himmelträger. Offizin Jodok, Göttingen 1989

prose

  • Learning to Play by Ear , Juniper Press, La Crosse 1990

Translations from German

  • Selected Later Poems of Marie Luise Kaschnitz , selection from Neue Gedichte (1957) and My Silence Your Voice (1962) Princeton University Press , Princeton 1980
  • Circe's mountain. Stories by Marie Luise Kaschnitz , Milkweed, Minneapolis 1990
  • Whether or Not by Marie Luise Kaschnitz , Ausw. From Steht noch dahin (1970), Juniper, Lacrosse 1984
  • Three Daughters , translation by Anna Mitgutsch: Zuchtigung (1985), Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, San Diego 1987. Also as Punishment , Virago, London 1988

reception

Settings

  • Howard Sandroff : The bride's complaint for soprano and computer generated electronics: A setting of a poem by Lisel Mueller . 1987
  • Donald Grantham : The Life of a Queen for harp, soprano and chamber orchestra, premiered in New York in 1990

Awards (selection)

literature

  • Andreas Nohl : America saved me: Lisel Mueller , in: The craft of writing: essays and reviews on literature . 2., ext. Ed. Maro, Augsburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-87512-316-6 pp. 118-125.
  • A Study Guide for Lisel Mueller's “The Exhibit” . Gale, Cengage Learning, Farmington Hills 2016.
  • Emmanuel S. Nelson (Ed.): The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature , Volume III, I – M, Greenwood Press, Westport (Connecticut) & London, 2005, ISBN 0-313-33062-X , pp. 1540-1541.
  • Benno Schirrmeister: The poet of the second language , in: Die Tageszeitung from January 2, 2019, p. 15 f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Benno Schirrmeister: Poet who fled from Nazi Germany: The poet of the second language. In: Die Tageszeitung from January 2, 2019, pp. 15–16.
  2. ↑ Karl-Heinz Fuessl: Fritz C. Neumann (1897-1976) - a radical German educator as an emigrant in Europe and the USA (1999) . In: Yearbook for historical educational research, issue 5, 1999 ISSN  0946-3879 pp. 225–246 PDF file, pp. 227–248
  3. ↑ Fritz C. Neumann typescript - Memoirs of a contemporary , at Hoover Institution Archives
  4. ↑ Lisel Mueller: Return. In this: Learning To Play By Ear. Juniper Press, Lacrosse 1990, p. 38.
  5. ↑ List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States, SS Hansa, June 1st 1939, column 3, line 4.
  6. ↑ Lina Falivena / Benno Schirrmeister: So far, so good. The forgotten Pulitzer Prize winner Lisel Mueller. Exhibition text German Emigration Center Bremerhaven .
  7. ↑ Lisel Mueller: Paul Edward Mueller 1923-2001 . (2001) p. 3, quoted in: Lina Falivena / Benno Schirrmeister: So far, so good. The forgotten Pulitzer Prize winner Lisel Mueller. Exhibition text German Emigration Center Bremerhaven, opened on August 9, 2019.
  8. ^ Paul Nettl: Forgotten Musicians, New York 1951, p. VI ( digitized versionhttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Farchive.org%2Fdetails%2Fforgottenmusicia00nett%2Fpage%2Fn9~GB%3D~IA%3D~MDZ%3D%0A~SZ%3D~ double-sided%3D~ LT% 3D ~ PUR% 3D )
  9. ^ Paul Edward Mueller: The influence and activities of English musicians on the continent during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. 2nd vol. Hss. Indiana University, Ann Arbor Microfilm 1954 .
  10. ↑ Jan-Paul Koopmann: "The mother dies. The sun laughs" Interview with Benno Schirrmeister about the Lisel Mueller exhibition in the German Emigration Center. Bremerhaven, taz.die tageszeitung, North, 6 August 2019 , p. 23.
  11. ↑ Lisel Mueller: Learning To Play By Ear. Juniper Press, Lacrosse 1990, p. 37.
  12. ^ Reinhold Grimm, Felix Pollak: The translation of German poems. In: Giessener Universitätsblätter. 2/1987, p. 54.
  13. ^ Princeton University: Quarterly Review of Literature (QRL) Archives 1943–2000
  14. ↑ Poetry , April 1958, pp. 21-24
  15. ^ The New Yorker , May 24, 1958, p. 38
  16. ↑ Lina Falivena / Benno Schirrmeister: So far, so good. The forgotten Pulitzer Prize winner Lisel Mueller. Exhibition text German Emigration Center Bremerhaven, opened on August 9, 2019.
  17. ↑ www.Lucymuellerphotography.com
  18. ↑ McKendree University, www.mckendree.edu
  19. ^ Heinz Dietrich Fischer and Erika J. Fischer: Complete Biographical Encyclopedia of Pulitzer Prize Winners, 1917–2000: Journalists, Writers and Composers on Their Ways to the Coveted Awards. Saur, Munich 2002, p. 173a.
  20. ↑ James R. Oestreich: Florilegium's Zoological Analogies. In: New York Times. June 17, 1990, p. 52.
  21. ^ Fritz C. Neumann: Memoirs of a Contemporary. Typescript, annotation on second cover sheet from LM, Hoover Institution Archives
  22. ^ Chicago Poetry Center: Brief History
  23. ↑ Europa Publications (Ed.): International Who's Who of Authors and Writers , Taylor & Francis Group, London, New York 2004, p. 399b.
  24. ^ Poetry Northwest: Theodore Roethke Prize & Richard Hugo Prize - Past Recipients
  25. ↑ Lisel Mueller: The Triumph of Life: Mary Shelley in: The Virginia Quarterly Review, 52 (3), pp. 400-406 . Retrieved August 11, 2019 http://www.jstor.org/stable/26436473
  26. ^ Academy of American poets: website poets.org
  27. ^ William Sylvester: Mueller, Lisel. In: Encyclopedia.com. 11 Aug 2019 https://www.encyclopedia.com/ .
  28. ↑ WFMT (ed.): Studs Terkel Radio Archive
  29. ↑ Nell Casey: Slightly Larger Than Life Size. A profile of Lisel Mueller Poetry-Foundation, May 8, 2006
  30. ↑ Lina Falivena / Benno Schirrmeister: So far, so good. The forgotten Pulitzer Prize winner Lisel Mueller , exhibition text German Emigration Center Bremerhaven
  31. ^ The Gift of Poetry . In: The New York Times , November 20, 2002.
  32. ↑ Nell Casey: Slightly Larger Than Life Size . A profile of Lisel Mueller, Poetry Foundation, May 8, 2006
  33. ↑ Friends of Writers: Friends of Writers Honors Lisel Mueller February 8, 2015
  34. ↑ Benno Schirrmeister: Late honor for Lisel Mueller. In: taz , November 28, 2019, online , accessed on November 29, 2019.
  35. ↑ John Judson (Ed.): Voyages to the Inland Sea I. Essays and Poems by Lisel Mueller - John Knoepfle - Dave Etter. Center for Contemporary Poetry, Murphy Library La Crosse 1971
  36. ↑ Stan Sanvel Rubin, William Heyen: "The Steady Interior Hum" A Conversation with Lisel Mueller, December 1, 1981 , in: Earl G. Ingersoll, Judith Kitchen, Stan Sanvel Rubin (ed.): The Post-Confessionals - Conversations with American Poets of the Eighties , Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989
  37. ↑ Karen DeBrulye Cruze: Bringing it all Together in: Chicago Tribune , December 5, 1993
  38. ^ Alice Fulton: Main Things in: Poetry. Vol. 151, no. 4, Jan. 1988, p. 68 f.
  39. ↑ Lisel Mueller: Midwestern Poetry: Goodbye to All That in: John Judson (Ed.): Voyages to the Inland Sea , Murphy Library, La Crosse 1971, p. 4
  40. ^ Lisel Mueller: Second Language . Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 1986, p. 63.
  41. ^ Willard Spiegelman: Revisiting the Nineties (2001). In: ders .: Imaginative Transcripts: Selected Literary Essays , Oxford University Press, New York 2009, p. 206.
  42. ^ Nancy L. Bunge, Liesel Mueller in: dies .: Finding the Words: Conversations with Writers Who Teach . Swallow Press, Athens Ohio 1985, p. 103.
  43. ↑ Stan Sanvel Rubin, William Heyen: "The steady Interior Hum". A Conversation with Lisel Mueller, December 1, 1981 . P. 68.
  44. ↑ Lisel Mueller: Learning to Play by Ear , p. 34.
  45. ↑ Lisel Mueller: Learning to Play by Ear , p. 37.
  46. ↑ Lisel Mueller: Alive Together , p. 7.
  47. ^ Lisel Mueller: In Memory of Anton Webern . In: Poetry. April 1958, p. 20 f.
  48. ↑ Pulitzer Prize for Poetry , List of Winners, last accessed January 4, 2019
  49. ^ Taz: Late honor for Lisel Mueller. Retrieved November 29, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Mueller, Lisel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Neumann, Lisel (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German American poet
DATE OF BIRTH February 8, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH February 21, 2020
Place of death Chicago