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LISEL MUELLER: Poems seem to strike me like lightning, or rather, the idea for a poem. And I never know where they come from, and I never know when they come. It's always a matter of something connecting with something else. You know, seeing something, hearing something that at another time would not have meant anything. It would have just been a mundane experience. But for some reason or other, at that particular moment, I see it as something new. I see it as connecting with something else and therefore making a new idea, a new way of seeing it, a new perception.

TOM MEERSMAN: Lisa Mueller has been writing poetry seriously since the 1950s. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and small press publications and has been collected in the book Dependencies, published in 1965, and The Private Life, issued in 1976.

Mueller's language is often rhythmic. And several poems contain references to folktales and myths. She writes with a sense of history and sometimes tragedy of the determinism that underlies life. And she likes to assume particular voices that address her readers directly. More than anything else, Mueller likes to write about real life. And much of her work is drawn from everyday occurrences.

LISEL MUELLER: Some of my things have come when my children were younger, from things that they have said or done, which seemed to me very significant in terms of all human life. Children have a direct access to immediate experience that is very difficult for an adult to have. And also, their language often is very metaphorical. They don't know it's metaphorical, but to me, it is.

One of the poems in The Private Life, the one called "Palindrome", for example, which is about the idea of outer space, where time goes in the opposite direction from our time, was really suggested by something my then little girl was doing. She had just learned to print. She was about six. But concepts like present, past, and future were still confused in her mind.

And so she was very proud of being able to print. And she took this big black crayon and started a list of things that she wanted to buy in the dime store or something. And she headed it, things I will need in the past. And it was from that, connecting with something I had read in Scientific American [LAUGHS] about the time moving in the opposite direction in the ante world, that gave me the poem. It's that kind of experience.

I called it "Palindrome" because a palindrome is something that you can read backwards and forwards as saying a word, and it comes out the same way. Somewhere now, she takes off the dress I am putting on. It is evening in the ante world where she lives. She is 45 years away from her death. The hole would spit her out into pain, impossible at first, later easing, going, gone.

She has unlearned much by now. Her skin is firming, her memory sharpens, her hair has grown glossy. She sees without glasses. She falls in love easily. Her husband has lost his shuffle. They laugh together. Their money shrinks, but their ardor increases. Soon, her second child will be young enough to fight its way into her body and change its life to monkey, to frog, to tadpole, to cluster of cells, to tiny island to nothing.

She is making a list, things I will need in the past, lipstick, shampoo, transistor radio, Alice Cooper, acne cream, five-year diary with a lock. She is eager having heard about adolescent love and the freedom of children. She wants to read Crime and Punishment and ride on a roller coaster without getting sick. I think of her as she will be at 15, awkward, too serious.

In the mirror, I see she uses her left hand to write, her other to open a jar. By now, our lives should have crossed. Somewhere, some time, we must have passed one another, like going and coming trains, with both of us looking the other way. That's my autobiography in reverse. [LAUGHS]

TOM MEERSMAN: Mueller's interest in personal worlds has led to other parts of a child's life. Voices from the Forest is a sequence of fairy tale poems spoken by archetypes. And a set of shorter poems was inspired by children's games, which Mueller says are symbolic of human life situations.

LISEL MUELLER: Pinning the tail on the donkey, you can't be sure where the donkey is, or if there is a donkey and you are holding a tail. You might be pinning a beard on a baby or a willow leaf on the moon. You must resist such questions and assume a tailless donkey, patient and flat as the map of the world, is waiting for you to make him whole. The presumption is of a botched job, but you come as close as you can.

TOM MEERSMAN: But the changing realities of children are only one example of private worlds that Mueller feels are beneath the surfaces of life for all of us, perhaps beyond our sight or above our hearing.

LISEL MUELLER: I can't intellectually defend that there is any kind of other world beyond what we can experience with our senses. But I think that's really what poetry is all about. I mean, it is about, it is about what cannot be apprehended as well as what can be apprehended. And I like the interplay and the tension between those two things.

This is called "What the Dog Perhaps Hears". And that, again, comes out of a very ordinary domestic experience. In this case, it derives from our dog. And this dog was very much afraid of rifle shots. We live out in the country. And people hunt rabbits out there in the fall. So I thought about a dog's hearing, which I know, of course, is different, and that they can hear pitches much higher than we can hear. And so I thought about this whole business of silence, what we call silence, which may actually be replete with noises.

"What the Dog Perhaps Hears". If an inaudible whistle blown between our lips can send him home to us, then silence is perhaps the sound of spiders breathing and roots mining the Earth. It may be asparagus heaving headfirst into the light and the long brown sound of cracked cups when it happens. We would like to ask the dog if there is a continuous whirr because the child in the house keeps growing, if the snake really stretches full length without a click and the sun breaks through clouds without a decibel of effort.

Whether in autumn when the trees dry up their wells, there isn't a shudder too high for us to hear. What is it like up there, above the shut off level of our simple ears? For us, there was no birth cry. The newborn bird is suddenly here, the egg broken, the nest alive. And we heard nothing when the world changed.

TOM MEERSMAN: Mueller's concerns with the surfaces of life also extend to how we organize our perceptions through language. Perhaps in part because she spent the first 15 years of her life in Germany and still translates contemporary German poetry into English, Mueller is sensitive to shades of meaning and the fragility of words. Her most recent group of poems is a series addressed to Helen Keller.

LISEL MUELLER: I was trying to imagine myself, explaining the meaning of certain words to someone who is both blind and deaf, using largely the tactile sense and/or appealing to that. And this is one of the poems from that series. It's called "The Word Water". Water, of course, was the most important word of all for her because it was when she realized what water was, that this thing running down over her hands from the pump was called water. Then she immediately began to realize that everything else had a name also. So that water was the breakthrough word.

"The Word Water." The word water, meaning what leaps on your hands under the pump, what crawls down your back from the washcloth, what runs down your cheeks and tastes salty, what licks your feet in the early morning grass, what spits out smooth rocks and lets you fly like a fish, what coaxes green from black and brown seeds. Helen, try to imagine green.

What has one home in the sky, another in the Earth? What will teach you the word deep and the word cleanse, the word flow and the word drown, the word inexhaustible, and the word birth? What is beginning to quench your thirst for the real name of the world?

TOM MEERSMAN: Poet Lisel Mueller, visiting the Twin Cities this week as part of the third Midwestern Writers' Festival and Book Fair. I'm Tom Meersman.