Tuesday, May 28, would have been May Swenson’s 100th
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.”