Happy Birthday, May Swenson! [by Sharon Preiss]

Tuesday, May 28, would have been May Swenson’s 100^th birthday. In her lifetime Swenson was a playwright, a professor, a lesbian, a Mormon, a translator, a lover of nature, a feminist, a critic, and a poet. On the evening of her birthday this week, Poets House, Poetry Society of America and The Library of America got together in Poets House Kray Hall to celebrate the quiet beauty and integrity of Swenson’s life and work with a reading of selections from the recently published Collected Poems, a handsome edition designed for posterity by The Library of America.

To be honored with publication by The Library of America is no small thing. The mission of this organization, founded 34 years ago and funded in part by seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities, is to help “preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing…America’s best and most significant writing.” And yet, as several of this evening’s participants mentioned, Swenson’s sometimes deceptively simple poems are now often taught more in middle school than in graduate school. This definitive collection of her wider body of work, including some of her writings about poetry, will reintroduce readers to “the linguistic density, sonic intensity, and erotic charge” of the greater portion of Swenson’s work, as poet Sharon Dolon pointed out during her portion of the evening’s talk. 

It’s true, Swenson’s poems can be a little “sweet:” several of the poems read by the eleven poets, critics, and editors who participated in the evening elicited from the audience happy laughs and surprised exclamations of joy in their closing lines, as opposed to the solemn hums and grunts that “important” poems often receive. But what’s wrong with a little levity and delight in poetry from time to time? As the editor of the new book, Langdon Hammer, pointed out, “Swenson was popular and accessible in a century known for poetic difficulty.” For poetry to stay alive in the hearts and minds of the general public, every era must have a poet or two whose work, on the surface anyway, is simple and straightforward. Think Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, Billy Collins. Every beginning reader of poetry will, if she’s so inclined, find her way to greater levels of difficulty and sophistication in poems only by starting with work that is more simple and straightforward. Very few of us started a love of poetry by reading Shakespeare’s sonnets, or Charles Olson’s Maximus poems, or Gertrude Stein’s “Sacred Emily” (“Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose.”)

And yet, there is an underlying complexity to Swenson’s poems that presents itself variously as metaphor and double-entendre, economic exactitude of language, pinpoint line and word placement, and formal choices that are as pertinent to the poem as the words themselves. There is nothing wasted in Swenson’s poems, but the layers of even her simplest work reveal themselves to careful readers like the petals of an opening blossom. Here is “Four-Word Lines” in its entirety:

            Your eyes are just

            like bees, and I

            feel like a flower.

            Their brown power makes

            a breeze go over

            my skin. When your

            lashes ride down and

            rise like brown bees’

            legs, your pronged gaze

            makes my eyes gauze.

            I wish we were

            in some shade and

            no swarm of other

            eyes to know that

            I’m a flower breathing

            bare, laid open to

            your bees’ warm stare.

            I’d let you wade

            in me and seize

            with your eager brown

            bees’ power a sweet

            glistening at my core.

The poem is breathtaking. The precise and compact “four-word lines” move the poem “forward,” yet the form forces line breaks that slow the reader down so that she can revel in the mellifluous aural flow of the poem. The sound of longing that the interlinked long i’s and e’s create in the first few lines then floats down and through the lilting feeling of relief the double f and l sounds create in “feel like a flower.” Bees are flower’s pollinators, so while the lover’s eyes do have “brown power,” the flower, in this sense, is the bee’s lover. The intense longing and the potential sting of the bee are assuaged in the poet’s receptiveness and openness under the gaze of the beloved.

The evening ended with a live recording of Swenson reading her elegy to her father, “Feel Me.” “’Feel me to do right,’ our father said / on his death bed. We did not quite / know – in fact, not at all – what he meant.” How fitting that the dying words of the poet’s father should also involve the mystery and magic of language, as Swenson’s own poems do. The poem continues on to explore the possible meanings of these words, posing question after question and possibility after possibility. The elegy, a tender paean to the beloved father, is also a meta-poem that plumbs the depth of the poet’s own work.

This poem, too, is an example of Swenson’s signature “Iconographs,” a type of concrete poem wherein the placement of words on the page acts to enhance the meaning of the poem. “Feel Me” was originally composed on the page with two streaks of white space moving diagonally through the first four then final three stanzas of the poem. The streaks create a disjointedness that echoes the challenge of understanding: there can be a stark break between word and meaning, between what is said and what is understood. 

In her essay “The Poet as Antispecialist,” Swenson writes that the experience of poetry is “based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear to things as they are and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming.” Reading and re-reading Swenson’s poetry opens up this “becoming.” As the poet Samantha Thornhill remarked in her portion of the evening’s celebration, beyond the precision and exactitude of Swenson’s poems, “the page is a playground and poetry is lawless.”