One of the most accomplished poets of her time, May Swenson was born Anna Thilda May Swenson on May 28, 1913, in Logan, Utah, to Swedish immigrant parents. Fluent in Swedish, May Swenson learned English in school but spoke Swedish at home. Swenson's father worked as a mechanical engineering professor at Utah State University, where Swenson herself later studied as an undergraduate, receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1934. Swenson then moved to New York City in 1935 where she worked as a stenographer, ghostwriter, secretary, news reporter, and as a manuscript reader at the modernist publishing house New Directions Press.
During her lifetime, Swenson published eleven volumes of poetry, including three for young people, and co-edited an anthology of sports poems. Her work won her much critical acclaim and put her in contact with other prominent mid-century poets, such as Elizabeth Bishop, with whom Swenson corresponded until Bishop’s death in 1979. Swenson also translated the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer with Leif Sjoberg; the book, Windows and Stones (1972), received a medal of excellence from the International Poetry Forum. Collections of Swenson’s own poetry that were published posthumously include The Complete Love Poems (1991), Nature: Poems Old and New (1994), and May Out West (1996). In honor of Swenson's 100th birthday, the Library of Congress published May Swenson: Collected Poems, edited by Langdon Hammer.
Swenson’s poetry was acclaimed for its rigorous attention to the natural world, for its eroticism and imaginative power, and for its formal experiments. Swenson’s poems often take concrete forms and also play with typography and spacing; her work in both imagist and surrealist modes earned her wide praise from peers and critics alike, and drew comparisons to poets like E.E. Cummings and Gertrude Stein. Swenson’s many literary awards include fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. Swenson was also the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award, the Bollingen Prize, and Award in Literature from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She received an honorary doctor of letters degree from Utah State University as well as their Distinguished Service Gold Medal. From 1980 to her death in 1989, Swenson served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Swenson lived in New York City until 1967, after which she moved to Sea Cliff, Long Island, to live with her partner, the author R.R. Knudson, and pursue her writing full time. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, she taught as poet-in-residence at several universities in the United States and Canada, including Bryn Mawr, the University of North Carolina, the University of California at Riverside, Purdue University, and Utah State University.
May Swenson died on December 4, 1989 in Ocean View, Delaware, and is buried in Logan, Utah.
Works
Feel Me
Feel Me
“Feel me to do right,” our father said on his deathbed.
We did not quite know—in fact, not at all—what he meant.
His last whisper was spent as through a slot in a wall.
He left us a key, but how did it fit? “Feel me
to do right.” Did it mean that, though he died, he would be felt
through some aperture, or by some unseen instrument
our dad just then had come to know? So, to do right always,
we need but feel his spirit? Or was it merely his apology
for dying? “Feel that I do right in not trying,
as you insist, to stay on your side. There is the wide
gateway and the splendid tower, and you implore me
to wait here, with the worms!”
Had he defined his terms, and could we discriminate
among his motives, we might have found out how to “do right”
before we died—supposing he felt he suddenly knew
what dying was. “You do wrong because you do not feel
as I do now” was maybe the sense. “Feel me, and emulate
my state, for I am becoming less dense—I am feeling right
for the first time.” And then the vessel burst,
and we were kneeling around an emptiness.
We cannot feel our father now. His power courses through us,
yes, but he—the chest and cheek, the foot and palm,
the mouth of oracle—is calm. And we still seek
his meaning. “Feel me,” he said, and emphasized that word.
Should we have heard it as a plea for a caress—
a constant caress, since flesh to flesh was all that we
could do right if we would bless him?
The dying must feel the pressure of that question—
lying flat, turning cold from brow to heel—the hot
cowards there above protesting their love, and saying,
“What can we do? Are you all right?” While the wall opens
and the blue night pours through. “What can we do?
We want to do what’s right.”
“Lie down with me, and hold me, tight. Touch me. Be
with me. Feel with me. Feel me to do right.”
"Feel Me" c 1970 by May Swenson. From May Swenson: Collected Poems (Library of America, 2013). Used with permission of The Literary Estate of May Swenson. All rights reserved.
October
October
1
A smudge for the horizon
that, on a clear day, shows
the hard edge of hills and
buildings on the other coast.
Anchored boats all head one way:
north, where the wind comes from.
You can see the storm inflating
out of the west. A dark hole
in gray cloud twirls, widens,
while white rips multiply
on the water far out.
Wet tousled yellow leaves,
thick on the slate terrace.
The jay’s hoarse cry. He’s
stumbling in the air,
too soaked to fly.
2
Knuckles of the rain
on the roof,
chuckles into the drain-
pipe, spatters on
the leaves that litter
the grass. Melancholy
morning, the tide full
in the bay, an overflowing
bowl. At least, no wind,
no roughness in the sky,
its gray face bedraggled
by its tears.
3
Peeling a pear, I remember
my daddy’s hand. His thumb
(the one that got nipped by the saw,
lacked a nail) fit into
the cored hollow of the slippery
half his knife skinned so neatly.
Dad would pare the fruit from our
orchard in the fall, while Mother
boiled the jars, prepared for
“putting up.” Dad used to darn
our socks when we were small,
and cut our hair and toenails.
Sunday mornings, in pajamas, we’d
take turns in his lap. He’d help
bathe us sometimes. Dad could do
anything. He built our dining table,
chairs, the buffet, the bay window
seat, my little desk of cherry wood
where I wrote my first poems. That
day at the shop, splitting panel
boards on the electric saw (oh, I
can hear the screech of it now,
the whirling blade that sliced
my daddy’s thumb), he received the mar
that, long after, in his coffin,
distinguished his skilled hand.
4
I sit with braided fingers
and closed eyes
in a span of late sunlight.
The spokes are closing.
It is fall: warm milk of light,
though from an aging breast.
I do not mean to pray.
The posture for thanks or
supplication is the same
as for weariness or relief.
But I am glad for the luck
of light. Surely it is godly,
that it makes all things
begin, and appear, and become
actual to each other.
Light that’s sucked into
the eye, warming the brain
with wires of color.
Light that hatched life
out of the cold egg of earth.
5
Dark wild honey, the lion’s
eye color, you brought home
from a country store.
Tastes of the work of shaggy
bees on strong weeds,
their midsummer bloom.
My brain’s electric circuit
glows, like the lion’s iris
that, concentrated, vibrates
while seeming not to move.
Thick transparent amber
you brought home,
the sweet that burns.
6
“The very hairs of your head
are numbered,” said the words
in my head, as the haircutter
snipped and cut, my round head
a newel poked out of the tent
top’s slippery sheet, while my
hairs’ straight rays rained
down, making pattern on the neat
vacant cosmos of my lap. And
maybe it was those tiny flies,
phantoms of my aging eyes, seen
out of the sides floating (that,
when you turn to find them
full face, always dissolve) but
I saw, I think, minuscule,
marked in clearest ink, Hairs
#9001 and #9002 fall, the cut-off
ends streaking little comets,
till they tumbled to confuse
with all the others in their
fizzled heaps, in canyons of my
lap. And what keeps asking
in my head now that, brushed off
and finished, I’m walking
in the street, is how can those
numbers remain all the way through,
and all along the length of every
hair, and even before each one
is grown, apparently, through
my scalp? For, if the hairs of my
head are numbered, it means
no more and no less of them
have ever, or will ever be.
In my head, now cool and light,
thoughts, phantom white flies,
take a fling: This discovery
can apply to everything.
7
Now and then, a red leaf riding
the slow flow of gray water.
From the bridge, see far into
the woods, now that limbs are bare,
ground thick-littered. See,
along the scarcely gliding stream,
the blanched, diminished, ragged
swamp and woods the sun still
spills into. Stand still, stare
hard into bramble and tangle,
past leaning broken trunks,
sprawled roots exposed. Will
something move?—some vision
come to outline? Yes, there—
deep in—a dark bird hangs
in the thicket, stretches a wing.
Reversing his perch, he says one
“Chuck.” His shoulder-patch
that should be red looks gray.
This old redwing has decided to
stay, this year, not join the
strenuous migration. Better here,
in the familiar, to fade.
"October" c 1978 by May Swenson. From May Swenson: Collected Poems (Library of America, 2013). Used with permission of The Literary Estate of May Swenson. All rights reserved.
Women
Women
Women Or they
should be should be
pedestals little horses
moving those wooden
pedestals sweet
moving oldfashioned
to the painted
motions rocking
of men horses
the gladdest things in the toyroom
The feelingly
pegs and then
of their unfeelingly
ears To be
so familiar joyfully
and dear ridden
to the trusting rockingly
fists ridden until
To be chafed the restored
egos dismount and the legs stride away
Immobile willing
sweetlipped to be set
sturdy into motion
and smiling Women
women should be
should always pedestals
be waiting to men
"Women" c 1970 by May Swenson. From May Swenson: Collected Poems (Library of America, 2013). Used with permission of The Literary Estate of May Swenson. All rights reserved.
Little Lion Face
Little Lion Face
Little lion face
I stopped to pick
among the mass of thick
succulent blooms, the twice
streaked flanges of your silk
sunwheel relaxed in wide
dilation, I brought inside,
placed in a vase. Milk
of your shaggy stem
sticky on my fingers, and
your barbs hooked to my hand,
sudden stings from them
were sweet. Now I'm bold
to touch your swollen neck,
put careful lips to slick
petals, snuff up gold
pollen in your navel cup.
Still fresh before night
I leave you, dawn's appetite
to renew our glide and suck.
An hour ahead of sun
I come to find you. You're
twisted shut as a burr,
neck drooped unconscious,
an inert, limp bundle,
a furled cocoon, your
sun-streaked aureole
eclipsed and dun.
Strange feral flower asleep
with flame-ruff wilted,
all magic halted,
a drink I pour, steep
in the glass for your
undulant stem to suck.
Oh, lift your young neck,
open and expand to your
lover, hot light.
Gold corona, widen to sky.
I hold you lion in my eye
sunup until night.
"Little Lion Face" c 1987 by May Swenson. From May Swenson: Collected Poems (Library of America, 2013). Used with permission of The Literary Estate of May Swenson. All rights reserved.
Bibliography
- Another Animal, Scribner (New York, NY), 1954.
- A Cage of Spines, Rinehart (New York, NY), 1958.
- To Mix with Time: New and Selected Poems, Scribner (New York, NY), 1963.
- Poems to Solve (for young adults), Scribner (New York, NY), 1966.
- Half Sun, Half Sleep; New poems (new poems and her translations of six Swedish poets), Scribner (New York, NY), 1967.
- Iconographs; Poems, Scribner (New York, NY), 1970.
- More Poems to Solve, Scribner (New York, NY), 1971.
- (Translator, with Leif Sjoberg) Windows and Stones, Selected Poems of Tomas Transtromer (translated from the Swedish), University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1972.
- New and Selected Things Taking Place (includes "Ending"), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1978.
- In Other Words, Knopf (New York, NY), 1987.
- The Love Poems of May Swenson, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1991.
- The Complete Poems to Solve (for young adults), illustrated by Christy Hale, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1993.
- Nature: Poems Old and New, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1994.
- The Centaur, illustrated by Barry Moser, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1994.
- May out West: Poems of May Swenson, Utah State University Press (Logan, UT), 1996.
- Dear Elizabeth: Five Poems and Three Letters to Elizabeth Bishop, afterword by Kirstin Hotelling Zona, Utah State University Press (Logan, UT), 2000.
- The Complete Love Poems of May Swenson, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2003.
