Quotes from Lisel Mueller

Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.

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.

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 an attic apartment.

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.

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 informal manner.

at home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.

What can I say to convince you the Houses of Parliament dissolve night after night to become the fluid dream of the Thames? I will not return to a universe of objects that don't know each other, as if islands were not the lost children of one great continent. The world is flux, and light becomes what it touches.

this body is home, my childhood is buried here, my sleep rises and sets inside, desire crested and wore itself thin between these bones— I live here.

O brave new world, that hath such people in it Soon you will be like her, Prospero's daughter, Finding the door that leads you out of yourself, Out of the rare, enameled ark of your mind, Where you live with the gracious and light-footed creatures That thrive in the glaze of your art and freedom.

Scenic Route Someone was always leaving and never coming back. The wooden houses wait like old wives along this road; they are everywhere, abandoned, leaning, turning gray. Someone always traded the lonely beauty of hemlock and stony lakeshore for survival, packed up his life and drove off to the city. In the yards the apple trees keep hanging on, but the fruit grows smaller year by year...

Late Hours" On summer nights the world moves within earshot on the interstate with its swish and growl, and occasional siren that sends chills through us. Sometimes, on clear, still nights, voices float into our bedroom, lunar and fragmented, as if the sky had let them go long before our birth. In winter we close the windows and read Chekhov, nearly weeping for his world. What luxury, to be so happy that we can grieve over imaginary lives.

How swiftly the strained honey of afternoon light flows into darkness and the closed bud shrugs off its special mystery in order to break into blossom: as if what exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious

This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless, our chances of being alive together statistically nonexistent;

You shall not twist my bones into a star's shape, nor plant my hair as roots for the dreams of the living; and if you open my heart and run your poet's fingers over its walls and cushions you will find it is like yours, dark.

What luxury, to be so happy that we can grieve over imaginary lives.

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 tells it differently and none of us tells it the same way twice . . (from, Why We Tell Stories)

Someone was always leaving and never coming back. The wooden houses wait like old wives along this road; they are everywhere, abandoned, leaning, turning gray.

I search the language for a word to tell you how red is red.

There are Mornings" Even now, when the plot calls for me to turn to stone, the sun intervenes. Some mornings in summer, I step outside and the sky opens and pours itself into me as if I were a saint about to die. But the plot calls for me to live, be ordinary, say nothing to anyone. Inside the house, the mirrors burn when I pass.

I thought if only we could go on and meet again, shy as strangers.

My husband says spring will be early. He says this every year, And every year I disagree. He needs me, the dark side of the planetary equation. Together we make the equinox.

When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature.

What happened is, we grew lonely living among the things, so we gave the clock a face, the chair a back, the table four stout legs which will never suffer fatigue.

How I would paint happiness Something hidden, a windfall, A meteor shower. No- A flowering tree releasing all its blossoms at once, and the one standing beneath it unexpectedly robed in bloom…