Learning to Play by Ear

by Lisel Mueller

This is the second publication of Two Hands Press, and continues our series on apprenticeship. Our First volume was by Clayton Eshleman. Poets work hard to achieve and maintain their craft. Often they serve an apprenticeship, either one of their own making or one within a tradition. Our series gives working poets an opportunity to state what that particular apprenticeship was, and perhaps what they believe the apprenticeship of a poet should be. The press is located in the basement of Two Hands Bookstore ans was given to us along with a case type. The printing work on this book was done mostly through meeting Monday nights, by George Bell, Larry Bole, Sallye Leventhal, Len Kiczula, and Douglas Macdonald. It was completed June 1980. Three Hundred copies of this book were printed on Rives heavyweight paper using a Gordon platen press built around 1880. The type face is Caslon Old Style. Fifty copies were signed and numbered by the author.

74 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1990

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

[Lindsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting essay on the process of revision.