In 1993, poet Lisel Mueller confessed to an interviewer that her eyes were so frail, she wrote in large, black letters with a felt-tipped pen so she could see her words.
The weakness of her piercing blue eyes, however, has not dulled the focus of her poetry or the descriptive power of her language.
In recognition of that, the Lake County resident on Monday won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her collection, “Alive Together: New and Selected Poems,” published by Louisiana State University Press.
The honor so astonished the writer–who reportedly is 73 years old but who on Monday demurely declined to give her age–that when she received the telegram announcing the award, “I first thought that they had made a mistake, or maybe this was a dream.”
Reality had begun to sink in by Monday afternoon as Mueller sat in her book-lined dining room, waiting for her husband to mix a celebratory martini and answering phone calls from reporters asking questions and friends offering congratulations.
A radio crew camped out near the driveway of her tree-shaded cottage, which lies at the terminus of a dead-end lane in unincorporated Lake Forest.
The Pulitzer is the latest in a string of writing awards Mueller has received over the last three decades, including a National Book Award.
“Her work is clean and pure–honest writing without gimmickry,” said Evanston poet Paulette Roeske, who studied with Mueller in the 1980s and credits Mueller with influencing her career.
“I am delighted and gratified . . . not simply because she was my teacher, but also because it’s a great standard to set. I hope that the Nobel Prize is next,” Roeske said.
Other kudos came from Angela Jackson, a Chicago poet who has given many readings with Mueller.
“Lyrical and accessible, she makes the ordinary glow with her inner beauty,” Jackson said. “It’s nice that so quiet a poet won.”
Mueller describes “Alive Together” as a collection culled from previously published works, as well as 30 new poems.
Though she had written some poetry as a child, Mueller’s writing career began at age 29 as an outgrowth of loss.
After her mother died in 1953, Mueller wrote a poem in her grief.
In that poem–titled “When I Am Asked”–Mueller wrote that she sat on a gray stone bench in a garden and ” . . . placed my grief/in the mouth of language,/the only thing that would grieve with me.”
She once told an acquaintance that she just couldn’t stop after that.
“I hear something, see something that suddenly makes some kind of connection that I hadn’t seen before . . . between two different things . . . That’s what interests me, the unusual juxtaposition of things,” is how Mueller described her creative process.
Mueller’s trip to the pinnacle of writing began in Nazi Germany in Hamburg. She was the daughter of two teachers.
Fearing that their anti-Fascist beliefs would result in persecution, her family fled the country when she was 15, settling in Evansville, Ind. Her father, Fritz Neumann, became a professor at the University of Evansville.
It was there that she met her husband, Paul, now retired, who worked for many years as a legal editor for Commerce Clearinghouse in Chicago.
Armed with a degree of her own from the University of Evansville, Mueller has taught and lectured on creative writing at the University of Chicago, Elmhurst College and Goddard College in Vermont.
She readily acknowledges that her life experiences have influenced her writing.
“I have a sense of connection all through history that I could have been somebody else,” Mueller said. “The sense of `There, but for the grace of God, go I’ (and) identifying with someone else.”
Exactly where does a Pulitzer Prize winner go after winning the big one?
“I suppose I will continue just as I am,” she said. “I suppose this will all blow all over and that I will go back to my normal writing and household life.”
