SOURCE: “A Conversation With Lisel Mueller,” in The Post-Confessionals: Conversations with American Poets of the Eighties, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, Judith Kitchen, and Stan Sanvel Rubin, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989, pp. 65–72.

In the following interview, Mueller discusses her creative process, her background, and being a female poet in America.

Born in Hamburg, Germany, Lisel Mueller came to this country in 1939 and has lived near Chicago for many years. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including The Private Life, winner of the 1976 Lamont Poetry Prize, The Need to Hold Still, winner of the 1981 National Book Award for poetry, and Second Language (1986), all from Louisiana State University Press. She is the translator of Selected Later Poems of Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Whether or Not (short prose by Marie Luise Kaschnitz), and Three Daughters, a novel by Anna Mitgutsch.

Ms. Mueller says of her work, “I'm often asked...