The Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Lisel Mueller, died in February, 96 years old. She had been living in a retirement community--an odd detail to absorb. I don't think of poets retiring, even less living in such places. They're artists. Artists age in place, surrounded by amanuenses and admirers, their every need anticipated and accommodated.
I spent part of the day last week after reading the NYT obituary, searching my shelves for poems by her or mentions of her work. I looked through anthologies of work published in the last forty years, particularly in the mid- to late 1990s, around the time Mueller received the Pulitzer. I looked through the tables of contents and indexes of critical studies. I searched my memory for poems by her. Nothing.
So how is it that I recognize the name so readily? Why did that name feel so familiar in the obit's headline? Most likely, I've seen the name and the books among various book stores' poetry selections, and passed over them for other poets' books. A name so immediately recognizable, but a life's work so unknown, overlooked. Maybe that's on me.
Maybe that's on the poetry establishment, just a little.
At any rate, it's not too late to fix the ignorance.
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