Rereading May Swenson
Twenty-five years after her death, I’ve been rereading May Swenson, her Collected Poems, the gorgeous Library of America edition. I wanted to look again at her entire body of work, poems and a handful of spectacular prose pieces, for a talk at a conference.
But it got me thinking about what it’s like reconsider, to some extent rekindle, an old literary flame. Rereading is tricky: one can fall more deeply in love; one can wonder what one saw in a writer after all. Or something in between, which somehow seems worse.
I think about May Swenson a lot.
When someone mentions May Swenson, almost to a person the association with or comparison to Marianne Moore or Elizabeth Bishop comes up, or the comparison to [insert woman poet with intelligence and imagination]. I get it, I suppose, but at times I read such comparisons as diminishment, as if Swenson can’t stand on her own. That’s ridiculous. It’s a sort of elevator pitch, if there were elevators (or commerce) in poetry: “She’s like Amy Clampitt, but with shorter sentences and more lesbian intrigue.” I joke, but this grates on me and starts to read as sexist and kind of intellectually lazy. She is truly like no one; I am here to talk about May Swenson on her own terms.
And what are these terms? Well, in her essay “The Poet as Antispecialist,” Swenson called the poetic experience “one of constant curiosity, skepticism, and testing — astonishment, disillusionment, renewed discovery, and reillumination.” I love these criteria, the journey undercutting the journey; the rigor of that “testing”; the eventual renewal.
And much has to do with Swenson’s quality of seeing, her fearless mode of noticing and processing.
In the poem “A Lake Scene,” she starts: “So innocent this scene, I feel I see it / with a deer’s eye.” I appreciate all of the aesthetic distancing in this diction, the feeling before the seeing, and — line break and metaphor alert! — the seeing narrowed to that of the eye of an other, a deer.
Hers is an active scrutiny, and the agency extends to the things observed: the way, say, “tree trunks intercept the eye” and “irrepressible grass bristles” (that feels so good in the mouth) in an early poem, “Spring in the Square.” There is almost no passivity in the descriptor or the described; this makes her poems feel daringly alive. In “Sunday in the Country,” where the sky, “deep and accusing in its blue, scrapes / my conscience like a nail.” And in “Forest,” where the pines are “aggressive as erect tails of cats.” I could go on.
There’s such a wildness and a vigorous nod toward the instability of the architecture of metaphor in her work, in her outsider notations, in the “culture of my eye,” as she writes in “Colors without Objects.” This perhaps informs her propensity for the catalytic and the concrete, in both cases the construction itself a layer of the said and unsaid.
Maybe part of her project is to try to have it both ways, as it were, to inflict and be inflicted upon, to give but always, always take something from the reader, disillusionment and qualified distraction a form of argumentative charity. Put another way, as she does in “At First, At Last”: “To feel, to feel, / To be the implement // and the wound of feeling.” Swenson is keenly aware of the interdependencies of language and meaning, and the fragile notions of both in, say, the poem “Bleeding,” which begins: “Stop bleeding said the knife. / I would if I could said the cut.” There is a woozy erotic terror to such lines, and dry humor too, that coexist in the truth of the poem.
And often she omits punctuation: I admire the intention of challenging the reader to associate; to pause yet continue; to knot; to take a risk on something being said, the work a mind at work (“populous and mixed is mind,” she writes in “The Exchange.”). Her lack of punctuation enhances, I think, the tenuousness of image-making, allows for inertia while holding the reader line by line, adds to the halting pacing of her work, is itself a kind of unanswered question, a challenge to and prompt for us to fill in the blank of duration and ending and transition.
I think rereading is an act of hope, a way of seeing if the past is truly present, or could be, or should be. As I get older, I find I return to the things that first made sense in poetry, before I was hardened into opinion, or career — before I knew too much, I guess. And to the notion that there can be magic in the betrayals of language we call poetry. Because why look back if not to see, not where one has been, but in that divide, where one still might go.
Her poem “Question,” maybe her most famous, starts with this stanza:
Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
This stanza, the poem entire, has a distinct sense of urgency, a near desperation, achieved through little accentual lines — the tick-tock of the dimeter, the almost sing-song tenor adding to, I would argue — in fact creating — the desolation. Everything is heightened, the alliteration; the tension. There is a sense of grappling toward meaning that Swenson seems to know can only be conveyed through truncation; the concision of these lines is a sense of movement, the movement of the lines, things withheld, unsaid.
Rereading is not just a reminder of the work but a reminder of the self, as certain works are by now a part of me.
May Swenson is a part of me.
I think a lot about a poem I love of Swenson’s, “Above the Arno.” The first stanza is thus:
My room is Florence was the color of air.
Blue the stippled wall I woke to,
the tile floor white except where
shadowed by the washstand and my high
bed. Barefoot I’d go to the window and look
at the Arno. I’d open the broad shutters like a book,
and see the same scene. But each day’s sky,
or night, dyed it a different light.
There’s so much in this little stanza. The room “the color of air” is, I think, such a sensual abstract particular, a wonderful way for the speaker to define the indefinable. I like the r sound of “My room is Florence was the color of air,” how it curls into itself, the r’s making the room more insular. There is a beautiful off-kilter syntactical strategy to “Blue the stippled wall I woke to,” which for me mimics the fumbling toward consciousness. And then the o sounds of “… Barefoot I’d go to the window to look / at the Arno. I’d open the broad shutters like a book …,” adding both openness and inwardness to the scene. And the alliterative b — bed, barefoot, broad, book — coming to a sense of play in the speaker’s waking. The shutters themselves are like a book, and the speaker sees “the same scene” every day — the same, but not the same, because of both the “different light” and, one could interpolate, the daily shift of the speaker. So, though every poem is in a way about poetry, this feels like a high ars poetica, not just about reading but, perhaps, in that survey of the same changed scene, rereading.
And these are just the first 8 lines in a 96-line poem about art, displacement, travel, seeing, and seeing afresh: “My mind was fresh — all was silent,” she writes later in the poem. This line is as good as any to describe what it’s like to read, and then read again, May Swenson: her poems force, through their clarifying insight, my mind to try to meet her at hers.
May Swenson’s poems, crucially, live in the language: “In a poem, Subject is not presented by means of language, but Language is the thing presented with the aid of subject,” she writes in that essay “The Poet as Antispecialist.” Her work is so attentive to the world that it makes it the only world, one rediscovered in the effort, mystery, puzzle, and machinery of rereading May Swenson.