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American Life in Poetry: Column 016
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
There are thousands upon thousands of poems about love, many of them
using predictable words, predictable rhymes. Ho-hum. But here the
Illinois poet Lisel Mueller talks about love in a totally fresh and new way,
in terms of table salt.
Love Like Salt
It lies in our hands in crystals
too intricate to decipher
It goes into the skillet
without being given a second thought
It spills on the floor so fine
we step all over it
We carry a pinch behind each eyeball
It breaks out on our foreheads
We store it inside our bodies
in secret wineskins
At supper, we pass it around the table
talking of holidays and the sea.
Reprinted from "Alive Together: New and Selected Poems" (LSU Press,
1996) by permission of the author. Poem copyright (c) 1996 by Lisel
Mueller. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The
Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of
Nebraska, Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
Anonymous
July 18 2005, 04:50:48 UTC 6 years ago
Lisel Mueller
Lisel Mueller's work is almost always quite wonderful. Even though she's won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, her work isn't as well known as it should be. Probably this is because she doesn't play the "fame game" indulged in by so many of our weaker fame game poets. You know their names.July 18 2005, 18:39:06 UTC 6 years ago
Re: Lisel Mueller
I once met a successful poet who said that poets either need to push their own work or have friends who push it for them....He was of the latter variety, but apparently had good friends.Prose-writers often have publicists who do the work for them, while poets usually have to self-publicize. Sigh. This is esp. annoying when one considers how many poets started writing (and continue to write) out of shyness! -T.