By Patricia Farangoli Published in The Worcester Review: Volume XXI, numbers 1&2

Spreading leaves that fall each autumn.  These words, defining deciduous trees, are  underlined in May Swenson's tree book, the field guide May,  took with her to the Macdowell Colony when she was a guest there in the summer of 1957.  The field guide, a gift to me by Zan Knudson, Mays literary executor, sits before me on the kitchen table as I write. The cover is shabby, the corner of it rolled down. Many lines of the introduction are underlined, and the line above is both underlined and then written out below in Mays small delicate script. 1  Between its well-thumbed pages, are pressed leaves; gray birch, black birch, water beech, chestnut oak, striped maple, red maple, each  painstakingly matched to its corresponding page in the book.   Here, then, is evidence of working mind of a poet whom the well-known poet, Howard Nemerov, once wrote: oMaybe no one, scientist or poet, has seen things.....so clearly as she, and surely no one has made seeing and saying so nearly one.  May Swenson, herself, once said:  oI know everything by looking.

May, who was one of Americas most original and innovative poets, earned her position in American poetry by sheer talent and determination.  Born in Logan, Utah on May 28, 1913, she was the oldest of ten children.  Her parents had emigrated from  Sweden to Utah, where her father, trained to be a carpenter and eventually taught woodworking at Utah Agricultural College (presently Utah State University). The Swenson family was a hardworking and happy one. They were Mormons, Mays mother was very active in church work and May, as the eldest child helped out with the younger children and housework.

In spite of the close-knit family with its strong religious ties, May loved being alone, often escaping to explore the fields nearby. And soon she began to have doubts about her Mormon religion, instead choosing to believe what she could see for herself.  She attended Utah State University where she became editor of Scribbles, the college magazine and wrote for Student Life, the college paper. After graduation, she lived at home briefly working as a reporter for The Herald Journal, but soon she yearned to try her luck in the greater world and moved, first to Salt Lake City in 1935 and, in 1936, to New York City.  On the eve of her departure for New York and the city she would live in or nearby for the rest of her life, May, who was then 23, sat down and wrote her heretofore unpublished poem: oIn Spoonfuls: thus setting for herself this seemingly impossible task:

               I demand of myself
               when i say, oYou must write these poems,
               that which in the old tale,
               the mistress charged of her ambitious lover,
               that he go with a teaspoon to empty the sea.

But in the wild sea of the city, May found at first, not the recognition she desired but a struggle to devise a life that would keep her in room and board, while, at the same time, allowing her time for her primary work, that of writing her poems.   All through the series of  low paid clerical jobs, she became more and more determined to become a famous poet.  She wrote constantly and prolifically, and when she wasnt writing, she was paying close attention to everything that was going on around her, saturating her mind with small details of  things as they are, not placing them in categories or naming them, but seeing them with a fresh and accurate eye, and capturing them at last in playful, exquisite and precise language as in the first two stanzas of  oHorses in Central Park, an early poem from her first book,  Another Animal

               Colors of horses like leaves or stones
               or wealthy textures
               liquors of light

               the skin of a plum thats more than ripe
               sheathes a robust
               cloven rump.

But in spite of Mays talent, hard-work and ambition, gaining recognition as a poet as a single woman in New York City in the forties, and far from the academic world, was anything but easy, and her early efforts went unrecognized in the poetry world.  She was shy and uncomfortable in social groups, but gradually, she began to understand that, if she were to attain status as a poet, she needed to have connections within the poetry world who would speak up for her work.

As much as she disliked promoting herself, she asked an acquaintance Alfred Kreymborg, for help getting her published. Kreymborg, who had himself published 8 books of poetry, let her use his name with editors and in August, 1949, Mays poem Haymaking was published in The Saturday Review of Literature.  Later, she also had the support of James Laughlin, owner of New Directions Press (for whom she eventually came to work), and then her poems began to be published on their own merit.

In addition, her new editors wrote letters of recommendation that resulted in an invitation to Yaddo in 1960.  There, she met Elizabeth Bishop who later nominated her for A Guggenheim.  May and Elizabeth wrote to each other over many years and their correspondence throws much light on the philosophy and poetry of both.

Other honors and awards followed: Her first book, Another Animal published by Charles Scribner, 1954, was nominated for The National Book Award and after six years of trying, in 1959 she won the Guggenheim. This was followed in 1960 by The Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship (and at 47, Mays first trip to Europe).  Later came many other awards and honors, among them, teaching residencies, an invitation to the White House and perhaps most notably, The Bolligen Prize in 1981,The MacArthur Fellowship in 1987, (?). and an appointment as a chancellor to The Academy of American Poets.  All this and fifteen books of poetry!  Quite an achievement for a shy woman, uncomfortable at reading and public life, who once considered herself  ouneducated, and  who had never taken a class or workshop in poetry!

What was it that James Laughlin, Elizabeth Bishop, Maxine Kumin, Howard Moss and so many other admirers saw in May Swensons poetry?  What made Dave Smith, editor of The Southern Review, say of her: She may well be the fiercest, most inquisitive poet of her generation?

Lets look to her poems themselves for an answer:

Last year, after I won the May Swenson Book Award Competition sponsored  by Utah State University Press, I received a letter from Mays literary executor and partner for 23 years, Zan Knutson, who asked whether I might be interested in considering some unpublished work of Mays for publication in The Worcester Review.  Yes I wrote back, yes. And soon the poems arrived, backed by cardboard in a manila envelope--ten poems and a letter from Zan detailing the years the poems were written and some of the circumstances.  The poems, which Swenson for one reason or another had not seen fit to publish in her lifetime, give clear evidence of her poetic talents.

Not the least of these is the bell-clarity and uniqueness of her voice, and her extraordinary talent for getting the things taking place into images and language so fresh and innovative that, in fact, the poems redefine the things themselves.

Take, for example these lines describing a dinner in a Chinese restaurant from The Fortune Cookie:

Soup or little colored squares to eat
the neat round rice
steams of surprise
when various dervish dishes with glittering hats alight
Lobster a whole
vermilion landscape on a platter
Our fingers players over the plates
stiltwalk wooden wands......

or this one from This is that: 

          the day the first
boat is set at anchor on its waternest. Wag mast, swish
          waves, lay and overlay
          your hems of frost

What an amazement: images full of humor and originality, yet absolutely accurate so that one, reading them, nods in recognition  This, as Robert Frost once said when he saw her poems, reeks of poetry.

But Mays close attention to things of the senses and her original imagery are only one aspect of her genius.  Also significant is her delight in sensuality and the direct and sometimes playful (but serious) way she explored the subject, most notably in the poems of the posthumously published book The Love Poems of May Swenson.

Look, for example, at these almost erotic lines from The Couple:

A bee
rolls in the yellow
rose.
Does she
invite his hairy
rub?

He scrubs
himself
in her creamy
folds; a bullet, soft imposes
her spiral and, spinning burrows
to her dewy
shadows,

Even early in her career, May playfully explored sexuality in some of her poems. One such poem published here for the first time, Once Upon, was typed ready for publication in the 1950s.  Zan Knutsen writes, however, that  May probably couldnt think of a publication in the 50s that would respond to its playfulness about sex:  Here is the first stanza;

He said he felt as though
She promised to do it when.
They both agreed that if.
Provided he waited then.

Sensuality, nature, animals, iconographs, riddles, these were the stuff of a Swenson poem--sound and sense blended together until they were almost indistinguishable, one from the other.  But Mays teaspoon scooped the sea widely and in a 1978 interview with Karla Hammond, originally published in Parnasus, May said: Other poets may not be on any search other than into their own selves. But I've been on a search into the universe and the human mind. My intuition is the only launching pad I have, but scientists probably take off from intuition too.  As science moved steadily into the forefront of the national consciousness,  May became intensely interested in exploring the same arenas as the scientists,   In Things Taking Place (1978) are such poems as First Walk on the Moon,  The Solar Corona, and Survey of the Whole (...worlds a lemon/wobbles in a loop/ around the sun.....), capture scientific concerns, and release them freshly through the poets poets consciousness, sensitivity and intuition.

In the little room of May Swensons mind, an uncountable number of poems were conceived and written; she published 11 volumes of poetry during her lifetime and another four were published after her death. In addition she left several hundred unpublished poems, thousands of letters, a collection of dreams, drafts of unpublished stories, plays, novels, essays, and fifty=three years worth of diaries.

Babette Deutsch wrote;  May Swenson turns a microscope on the minuscule, a telescope on the grand.   And if May looked to outer space for her material, she also looked to inner space.  Her 1984 poem Mind,  (which was in an early draft of In Other Words but which she withdrew for more work), she explores inner consciousness;  Mind is a room/ in the room of the real/, she writes, This little room/ in the big room.

On the night of December 2nd, 1989, May, had an asthma attack. The following day she told a visiting friend;  Bodies don't last forever, you know. I think mine is wearing out. I may not live much longer. Early the next morning, at age seventy-six, she died. She is buried in Logan, Utah, her gravestone, a bench, on which are engraved three poems: one west, one east, one toward the sky. The poem facing the sky, the one carved into the bench itself is this:

The Exchange

Now, my body flat, the ground
breathes. Ill be the grass.

Populous and mixed is mind.
Earth, take thought. My mouth, be moss.

Field, go walking. I, a disk,
will look down with seeming eye.

I will be time, and study to be evening.
You, world, be clock.

I will stand, a tree, here,
never to know another spot.

Wind, be motion. Birds, be passion.
Water, invite me to your bed.

And so, water begins and ends Mays life as a poet. Just as, on that fateful evening before her departure for a life in New York, the twenty-three year old poet set her life goal: to dip up the sea in spoonfuls,  at the end of her life, having accomplished her almost impossible goal, she surrenders her life back to the embrace of the water, leaving behind for us, the marvelous legacy of her poetry.

Notes and Bibliography

I wish to thank Zan Knutson, literary executor of May Swensons estate for the books, articles and supportive encouragement she offered me, as well as for her anecdotes about the poets poems and life.  The facts and quotes in this essay were taken from the following materials;

May Swenson; a poets life in photos:  Knudson R.R., & Bigelow, Suzzanne, Utah State University Press, Logan, Utah, 1996

The Wonderful Pen of May Swenson:Knudson, R.R., MacMillan Publishing Co., NY, 1993

Made With Words, Swenson, May, edited by Gardner McFall, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1998

New & Selected Things Taking Place, Swenson, May,  Atlantic-Little, Brown Books, Boston & Toronto, 1954

The Love Poems of May Swenson, Swenson, May, Houghton Mifflin Company,  Boston, 1991

In Other Words, Swenson, May,   Alfred A. Knopf, N.Y., 1992

Discovering May Swenson: The Most Distinguished American Poet of Mormon Heritage,  James, Rhett in Mormon Heritage, March/April, 1995

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