The Need to Hold Still

by Lisel Mueller

Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry

An adventurer, Lisel Mueller pursues the protean possibilities of communication. In Dreiser’s works she finds language solid, “as plain as money, / a workable means of exchange.” More often she experiences exhilaration in the shapes that communication makes possible. In “Talking with Helen,” for example, she re-creates Heller Keller’s flash of discovery when water suddenly became language, the stream that connected time and space, maple leaves and hands.

Mueller’s poetry links varying music and discourse, memory and immediacy. Perennial weeds in her title poem recall ancient times and prayerful monks. Musical names―“Teasel / yarrow / goldenrod / wheat / bed straw”―hold the moment still like the echoes of a tolling bell.

“I’m trying to make connections,” Lisel Mueller says of her poems, “looking for links between where we have been and where we are going, between the life outside and the life within.”

Genres: Poetry

76 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1980

About the author

Poet and translator Lisel Mueller was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1924. The daughter of teachers, her family was forced to flee the Nazi regime when Mueller was 15. They immigrated to the US and settled in the Mid-west. Mueller attended the University of Evansville, where her father was a professor, and did her graduate study at Indiana University.

Her collections of poetry include The Private Life, which was the 1975 Lamont Poetry Selection; Second Language (1986); The Need to Hold Still (1980), which received the National Book Award; Learning to Play by Ear (1990); and Alive Together: New & Selected Poems (1996), which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Her other awards and honors include the Carl Sandburg Award, the Helen Bullis Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She has also published translations, most recently Circe’s Mountain by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1990).

(from Poetry Foundation)

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a random pull from the university bookshelves, but a fortuitous one.

Lisel Mueller was born in Germany and her family had to flee from the Nazis, settling in Illinois, where her father was a professor. This 1980 volume won the National Book Award, and she later won a Pulitzer.

What I loved most about Mueller's poems was their subtlety, packaged in plain language, about the human condition. She has said in interviews that she is fascinated with how we all come to be who we are in a particular era and place through the accident of birth and timing, and those themes show up in some of these poems.

She is particularly good at tying the human condition in to our place in nature, and to some of our oldest folk and fairy tales.

Here is one of my favorites:

One More Hymn To The Sun

You know that like an ideal mother
she will never leave you,
though after a week of rain
you begin to worry.

but you accept her brief absences,
her occasional closed doors
as the prerogative
of an eccentric lover.

You know which side of the bed
she gets up on,
though, being a night person,
you are on more intimate terms
with the moon, who lets you watch,
while the sun will put out your eyes
for tampering with her privacy.

She wants to be known by her parts,
fingers, a flashing leg,
a cheek, a shoulder, by things
spilled from her purse:
small change, a patterned scarf,
mirrors, keys, an earring

You like the fact that her moods
are an orderly version of yours,
arranged, like the needs of animals,
by seasons: her spring quirks,
her sexual summers,
her steadfast warmth in the fall,
you remember her face on Christmas Day,
blurred, and suffused with the weak smile
of a woman who has just given birth.

The way she loves you, your whole body,
and still leaves enough space between you
to keep you from turning into cinders
before your time!

You admit she colors
everything you see,
that Renoir and Monet
are her direct descendants;
she could make you say
the grass is red, the snow purple

She never gave up on you
though it took billions of years
to learn the alphabet
and the shadow you cast on the ground
changed its shape again and again.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found this book on a shelf in a half-priced bookstore and was intrigued by the author’s handwritten note, “To my friend Jill: Happy reading! Lisel May 3, 1980”. I felt that Jill’s slight annotations and underlines added to my experience of reading these deeply personal and reflective poems.

For example, of the poem “Night Song”, Jill underlines “among daughters, I am the recluse,” and writes in pencil *explain*. Not knowing much of Jill and Lisel’s relationship other than them being friends, I wonder if this annotation of an alternate perspective casts doubt on the accuracy of this line. Asking how Lisel feels recluse when, from Jill’s perspective, she is not.

Overall this is a wonderful collection of poems with far more hits than misses.

[Noa ౨ৎ‧₊˚ ⋅ · Rating 4 out of 5]

monet refuses the operation lives in my mind rent free so i decided to read more of mueller's works, did not disappoint

[Tom Romig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lisel Mueller has a lively and original mind, and thus her work delights and surprises us with wit and wisdom. Also she's just a whole lot of fun to read, even when her theme is humanity's penchant for malfeasance!

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite poems from Lisel Mueller’s The Need To Hold Still:

For a Thirteenth Birthday- This poem, the first in the collection, takes the form of an extended allusion to Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie. Mueller carefully unfolds it, as if it were an aging map intended to guide the reader through the rest of her book. Her poems will “second the real world”, we learn, with “a language as plain as money”. And that’s true. But we protest; certainly there will be more. Yes, but “Start out with that, at least.”, the poet replies.

Another Version- Sister Carrie is of course set in turn-of-the-century Chicago, the same city that the nonagenarian Mueller calls home today. But to associate her with Chicago is to sound a discordant note. Many of her poems are pastoral in nature. They call to mind a solitude of presence wholly uncharacteristic of frenzied metropolitan life. Those pastoral qualities are on display in this fine poem, in which Mueller poetically imagines an American life framed in the timbres of a Chekhov play, with aspens substituted for birches and possums for wolves. When she writes about how the neighbors perceive her family of German emigres—“they think us characters in a Russian novel,”—we sense a certain American unconcern with the world beyond its borders. But now, far removed from the condition of escape, the more relevant truth is that hers is an American family. And so she muses, “like them, we complain about things / that don’t really matter and talk / of our pleasures and of the future: / we tell each other the willows / are early this year, hazy with green.”

The Middle Distance- This small symmetrical poem – just two four line stanzas and one two line stanza – is written in the second person. The poet disparages the self for turning inward, but acknowledges the seduction: an open-armed figure awaits. Its embrace is the promise of eternal life. But that final foreshortened stanza, a haunting appendage, gives life to a phantom: “It is always the same figure / and the distance remains the same”.

Fiction- This short sonnet-like poem makes use of the trope of the book as metaphor: “Going south, we watched spring / unroll like a proper novel:” But that plural subject in the first line and that imprecise verb in the second line alert us there’s more to this poem than words on a page. The poet describes a journey that begins with optimism as expressed in florals and hues of green: “forsythia, dogwood, rose; / bare trees, green lace, full shade.” But then there’s deep complications. In the second stanza, the word ‘read’ suggests its homonym ‘red’ and, with astonishing rapidity, the poem’s palette transforms. Suddenly we’re confronted with wild maroons, burning scarlets, and the tender pink left in the wake of tears. Says the forlorn poet of her tempestuous amour: “I thought if only we could go on / and meet again, shy as strangers.”

Sometimes, When the Light- It can be difficult to write about childhood sans sentiment, but Mueller proves able here. The title of this short poem, with its foreboding pause after the comma, sets the tone for the lines below. The imagery is gothic: odd-angled light, a crumbling mansion, a walled convent, old willows, hemlocks, “and giant firs standing hip to hip.” In its final lines, the poem also captures the melodrama of youthful imagination caught in contemplation of an adulthood, “that if you crawled through and saw, / you would die, or be happy forever.” For me this is one of the best short poems of the collection.

Beginning with 1914- I don’t know if there’s something called bio-cinematic poetry, but there should be, and this poem its proud anthem. Cueing off of the conventions of the documentary film, the poet describes a life, her own presumably, that is borne of tragedy and, later, begorged in tranquility. The poem/film opens in the fateful month of June 1914; the Archduke is shot, “We watch the trenches fill with men, / the air with live ammunition.” War. But then the scenes turn personal, “A closeup of a five-year old / living on turnips. Her older sister, / my not-yet-mother, already / wearing my daughter's eyes,”. Then the horrors of warfare bring two families together, “under the oaks of the cemetery.” Soon after the poet makes her entrance in the shadow of an enormous swastika that hangs at her back. “The soundtrack of a hysterical voice / is threatening us. We’re heard as whispers.” she laments. Just as the ovens are heating up the poet replaces that first reel with its sequel, which is “set in a different location / and made in another language”. America. The focus is gentle and she basks among bright colors. Music plays, “Little happens.” “The camera sums up the even flow / of many years in a shot of a river.” Peace. It’s impossible not to notice how the poem, the final one in Part I, reflects back on the first line of the first poem of the collection, which reads “You have read War and Peace”. Mueller has indeed read both war and peace. As such, her poems resonate not only with an abiding humanism, but also with a profound appreciation of still life. To be still, alive, is a sotto voce plea for the recognition of ‘good enough,’. Beginning in 1914 embodies the need to hold still and gives poetic import to the splendor of stability.

Merce Cunningham and the Birds - Here Mueller struggles for words to describe the splendid performance of a travelling dance troupe before she alights on a comparison: the dancers had been like birds, their tightly choreographed movements like avian flashes of color, the liveried birds feeding outside her window. But what does it all mean? Perhaps “perpetual proof that the world / is energy, that to land / in a certain space in a certain time / is being alive;”?

The Cook – This is ekphrastic poetry par excellence; the masculine voice of the poet impregnating the feminine image, Vermeer’s Milkmaid. It doesn’t matter the gender of our poet. The voice is a playfully ironic one: “No wonder she thinks there’s more / where everything came from.” Smart. The cook, after all, has been pouring the milk out of its earthen vessel for the better part of three and a half centuries, “although the paint is dry.”

Picking Raspberries – Genesis has it that Eve partook of the forbidden apple. Now I have nothing against that upstart tart, but as far as hoodoos go, would not the bloody raspberry, cradled by its cutting thorns, been a more apt fruit to stain those first feminine teeth? Mueller’s poetic imagination would seem to concur. Picking Raspberries presents a parallel story of temptation and ultimate ejection from Eden. Once that first merciless raspberry melts in your mouth, “You will have invented pain,”. “You will remember nothing / of your old life.” The dye will have been cast, “you have only to look at your arms / and discover the long, red marks.”

Signs – In The Pagan Rabbi, Cynthia Ozick tells the story of a brilliant and pious young rabbi led astray by the spirits of natural world. What begins as a simple appreciation of the outdoors quickly spirals into a passionate love affair… with a tree nymph. Once the affair has been consummated, the nymph spurns the rabbi, leading him ultimately to hang himself from the very tree the spirit had possessed. Mueller’s poem Signs can be read as an eerie analog to that story. It begins: “They have entered the trees. / They let you know they are there / by a slight stir, an almost / imperceptible wave”. And when you lean against the tree, in other words, when you try to resist its charms, you’ll soon be in for “a reminder of how it was / when they were human and you their child, / as though death had changed nothing.”

The Need To Hold Still – The title poem of the collection reads as an introduction to the twilight of life. In sentiment, it reminds of Monsieur Legrandin’s lamentation as he dines with Proust’s young narrator: “And you see this, my boy, there comes in all our lives a time …when the weary eyes can endure but one kind of light, the light which a fine evening like this prepares for us in the stillroom of darkness, when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence.” Mueller writes, “A woman / coming in from a walk”… “has stopped asking / for anything except calm”. But whereas M. Legrandin’s summer evening is that of the gentlemanly belle epoque, its colors the elegance of midnight blue and port wine, Mueller’s is the twentieth century’s winter evening, bathed in dun-colored shades: pale burlaps, drab bedstraws, bread and water. Her subject tends to winter’s weeds and “The dignity of form / after seduction / and betrayal / by color”. But how does one find the dignity of form in a post-literate culture in thrall to the motion picture, the moving image, and the nervous jangle of non-stop adverts?

Those were the 11 I most enjoyed. There were, though, a few that left me cold, or that I found wanting:

Drawings by Children
Daughter
This Sadness, This Happiness
Not Only The Eskimos
Night Song

Still, The Need to Hold Still is an immensely enjoyable collection of poetry. I particularly appreciate how Mueller calls forth her subjects in plain but beautiful language:

They know without knowing that death is red,
its petals thinner than the thin skin
of their crackling crepe paper fevers

These three lines come from Mueller’s poem Poppy. With their internal rhymes and alliterative flair, they shine brighter than most. But that’s not to suggest a lack in the rest of her work, in fact the truth is quite the opposite. When I was young, I sold paint at a local hardware store. I had never painted anything more than a pinewood derby car… when I was nine. A few weeks into the job, my manager pulled me aside and said, Jeff, why are you selling high-gloss paint to our customers for their bedrooms? Several of them had apparently complained. One poor guy even painted part of his house with a high shine product before a neighbor, wisely, suggested he reconsider. What’s not to love about shine?, I entreated my boss. He then carefully explained to me that interior surfaces are most appropriately painted with matte finished products, though on some occasions it was proper to recommend a paint with a semi-gloss finish, such as for a kitchen, or the trim and mouldings that might adorn a bedroom. Poetry is a little like paint. Too much shine, it turns out, distracts from the object of attention. In this case, from stillness itself. Mueller’s matte base is made all the more beautiful by accents such as those three lines.

Another thing I like about her poems is the fact that rarely does she allow form to trump her subjects, but, when such is required, she does so with a zest. The best example of this in this collection is Talking to Helen, a poem both dedicated to and in awe of Helen Keller and her abilities. Mueller puts a series of potentially vexing words on display, as we might encounter them in a museum of philology. Her words, sitting at the head of their descriptive stanzas, invite meditation. Their italicization reminds us that, unlike Helen, we can see them, say them, and hear them. But we can’t feel them; our fingers blight. The word 'vast', for instance:

The long drawn-out idea
of the word vast contracts
into four brief letters
already obsolete

Or how about Mueller’s poem Eggs, which quite frankly revolts, but in which I nonetheless detect a certain roundness of form, or circling indicative of the subject itself:

Mothershape, how we love you!
In a dream we almost remember
the floating cushions, the waterbed;
in nightmares we hack our way
out of the calcium walls
which refused to expand with us.

I mentioned, in some of my favorite poems above, Mueller’s allusions. They are solid and learned, but never scholastic. Sometimes her writing responds in sentiment to her contemporaries, the beacons of mid-20th century poetry. Reading lines like these from Found in the Cabbage Patch

The shiny head is round,
full term, between
the spread leaves of it’s mother.
I come as the midwife,
a kitchen knife in my hand.

reminded me of similar poetic imagery in Richard Wilbur’s A Summer Morning, a poem composed two decades earlier, in which a cook hard at work for her employers pauses in front of the kitchen window:

Then, with the bread-knife lifted, stands and hears,
The sweet efficient sounds
Of thrush and catbird, and the snip of shears
Where, in the terraced backward of the grounds,

A gardener works before the heat of the day.

As mentioned above, Mueller, in this collection, seems to lean slightly toward winter tableaux, but there’s a feeling inside me that she’s a poet of summer. I find the imagery of the summer morning an especially fruitful way to convey the sense of calm composure that radiates from her poems, no matter the coming day’s long hours or thickened snuffle. Perhaps the poem which does the feeling the most justice is One More Hymn to the Sun where we read these lines:

She never gave up on you
though it took you billions of years
to learn the alphabet
and the shadow you cast on the ground
changed its shape again and again

This bespeaks patience, surely one of the most enduring qualities on display in The Need to Hold Still. Patience, it seems to me, is a value that we too often forget about in our harried lives. Reading poetry, in fact, takes patience. It’s no wonder our popular culture no longer has a taste for it. It used to be that all classes of men and women read and recited poems like those to be found in this collection. Today, that’s sadly not the case.

Finally, I’d be remiss not to mention a feature of Mueller’s poetry that has been widely commented on, though I fear never with the considered thoughtfulness it deserves. It’s contumely, I think, to describe any poet with a serious artistic sensibility as patriotic, but you do get the sense, quite often, that Mueller writes from the privileged perspective of someone who has known both what it is to be an American and not to be an American. But to say so is not to suggest hers is the poetry of the immigrant. There’s no discernible hyphenation in her identity, at least not in these poems. America has simply made good on its promise. And for those of us Americans privileged enough to read her accounting, we cannot but help to count our own good fortunes. © Jeffrey L. Otto, February 8, 2016

[Katrina Gaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short anthology of poems by poet Lisel Mueller, whose works I’ve admired since I first came across “Monet Refuses the Operation”, one of my all-time favorites. “The Need to Hold Still” won the National Book Award for Poetry, and demonstrates her craftsmanship well — how she uses her personal history, folklore and fairytales, and observations on nature to write poetry that highlights the human experience, with subtlety, nuance, and complexity, always while keeping her words simple. Here was one of my favorites:

Why We Tell Stories by Lisel Mueller

I
Because we used to have leaves
and on damp days
our muscles feel a tug,
painful now, from when roots
pulled us into the ground

and because our children believe
they can fly, an instinct retained
from when the bones in our arms
were shaped like zithers and broke
neatly under their feathers

and because before we had lungs
we knew how far it was to the bottom
as we floated open-eyed
like painted scarves through the scenery
of dreams, and because we awakened

and learned to speak

2
We sat by the fire in our caves,
and because we were poor, we made up a tale
about a treasure mountain
that would open only for us

and because we were always defeated,
we invented impossible riddles
only we could solve,
monsters only we could kill,
women who could love no one else
and 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

3
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

Because grandmothers looking like spiders
want to enchant the children
and grandfathers need to convince us
what happened happened because of them

and though we listen only
haphazardly, with one ear,
we will begin our story
with the word and

[Brett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mueller pulls at the interior of things here, but she doesn’t leave them unraveled, she’s teaching the reader how to examine it all—all that inside, or under.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this after it was recently profiled in the National Book Foundation Poetry Blog, after winning the award in 1981. I loved the little moments in some of the poems where something that seems simple takes on a deeper meaning. I ended up bringing it home another night instead of taking it to the library.

From The Story
"You are telling a story:
How Fire Took Water to Wife

It’s always like this, you say,
opposites attract

They want to enter each other,
be one,
so he burns her as hard as he can
and she tries to drown him

It’s called love at first
and doesn’t hurt

but after a while she weeps
and says he is killing her,
he shouts that he cannot breathe
underwater—"

I loved this one because of being a baker, and it could be describing me (but is really describing the Vermeer painting "The Cook")

The Cook
After Vermeer

"No wonder she thinks there's more
where everything came from

a girl as round as the jug
that never runs dry

her arms thick cream, her yellow bodice
filled with anticipation

the bread before her risen
in the same light in which she stands"

And my absolute favorite:

Picking Raspberries

Once the thicket opens
and lets you enter
and the first berry dissolves on your tongue,

you will remember nothing
of your old life. You can stay
in that country of sun and silence
as long as you like. To return,

you have only to look at your arms
and discover the long, red marks.
You will have invented pain,
which has no place there.

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I tried to return this book to the library today but I couldn't let it go. These poems are wonderful. I especially liked the first & last ones, "For a 13th Birthday" and "Why We Tell Stories". But I want to read them all over again, the one about the sacredness of hard-boiled eggs and the one about Mary Shelley and the one about the characters in fairy tales. I almost can't wait for the bus ride home from here so I can go back to that world.

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Several extended metaphor poems and some historical persona poems. Not my favorite.

Going south, we watched spring unroll a proper novel: forsythia, dogwood, Rose.

I dream of touching the winter trees, their stiff unruly hair, and the collection of roofs from a child's bag of blocks.

We start in an obsolete country on no current map.

[Vision Seeker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Couldn't put this one down. Really liked it!