HPL Great Books Reading and Discussion Group: Poetry of Lisel Mueller

Friday, July 21, 2017

Poetry of Lisel Mueller

On Monday evening we take up four poems by the modern American poet Lisel Mueller: "Joy," "The Power of Music to Disturb," "Immortality," and "Into Space."

She was born Lisel Neumann in 1924 in Hamburg, Germany, and emigrated with her family to the United States in 1939. In a PBS interview, Mueller stated, "By the time I started writing, English was almost like a first language for me. I never wrote in German. This gave me an advantage .... it made me more conscious."

Mueller won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for her volume of new and collected poems, Alive Together. Read the interview she gave the NewsHour after the announcement of the prize here.

Join us on Monday evening!

Next Meeting

Our next meeting takes place on Monday, January 27th 2025 at 7 pm at the Main Library Meeting Room or via Zoom. The selection is the the dramatic tragedy "Hekabe" by Euripides (480-406 B.C.E.), which can be found in Great Conversations 5. The anthology can be purchased at the Main Library front desk at 338 Main Street, Huntington, N.Y. at the subsidized price of $10 (thanks to a generous donation from the Friends of the Huntington Public Library). The 2025 February meeting will be on Monday, February 24th, when the selection will be three poems by John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "Ode on Melancholy."

About Shared Inquiry

Also known as the "Socratic Method," the Shared Inquiry discussion technique championed by the Great Books Foundation is a nonauthoritarian approach to book discussion that values life experience as a important element of learning. Discussion leaders ask questions and do not give opinions.

Five rules of Shared Inquiry are:

1. Concentrate on the selection.
2. Address the question at hand.
3. Speak up (but one person at a time, please!)
4. Listen carefully.
5. Discuss the author's ideas, not the author's life and times.