May Swenson (1913-1989). Biography and Creativity

According to Harold Bloom, the influential American literary critic and scholar, the poet May Swenson ranks with Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop as one of the three top women poets of the 20-th century, and her impressive publication record and list of literary awards reinforce Bloom’s assertion, in spite of its sexist overtones, (275). During her lifetime Swenson’s poems were published in Antaeus, the Atlantic Monthly, Carleton Miscellany, the Nation, the New Yorker, Paris Review, Parnassus, and Poetry. She received numerous grants and fellowships, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Poet-Playwright Grant, an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, and a MacArthur Fellowship.

To say that Swenson’s subject matter was wide and varied does not begin to describe the depth and visual clarity with which she approached the world. Some of her poems might be categorized by readers unfamiliar with her work into simple groupings labeled space, science, sound, sex, and sports, but all of her poems address human nature, invention, and the natural world, themes that she reveled in exploring.

Born to pioneering parents, May Swenson was the first child of Margaret Hellberg and Dan Arthur Swenson, who were immigrants from Sweden and converts to the Mormon religion. Dan Swenson immigrated to America in 1894, and after returning to Sweden to serve a Mormon mission, he met Margaret Hellberg in church. The two were married on August 21, 1912. Margaret and Dan decided to start their family right away, and on May 28, 1913, Anna Thilda May Swenson was born in Logan, Utah. In Swenson’s earlier publications, scholars of her work will frequently encounter conflicting data that report her birth in 1919, an error that was of Swenson’s own making. She wanted publishers, readers, and her peers to believe that she was younger than she actually was, and so she simply shaved off six years and reported her birth year as 1919.

May was the first of the Swensons’ 10 children, and as were many first-born daughters, she was expected to help with the laundry, the housework, and the cooking. Her father even installed a low sink in the kitchen so the children could help with the dishes. May preferred the outdoor work in the family’s garden and orchard, but her childhood was not composed entirely of work. May’s childhood friends remember that she spent hours alone reading, but they also remember jumping rope with her and playing games like jacks and kick the can.

At about the age of 12, May began to keep a journal. “One day, May showed a page to her older cousin Edna—nicknamed ‘Sunny’—who read the page aloud, noticed that the sentences scanned, and remarked that May was writing poetry in her diary” (Knudson and Bigelow 27). Although that moment in May’s childhood is often described as the first time anyone called her a poet, she had known that she wanted to be a writer much earlier than that. A biographical note in Utah Sings (1934), one of Swenson’s earliest publications, quotes her as saying, “I determined to be a writer when I was seven years old” (274).

Storytelling was another of Swenson’s early literary talents. Her siblings remember her making up stories about the family and telling them while she cut their hair and scrubbed the floors. Swenson’s first publication was the result of a contest at Logan High School. Her short story called “Christmas Day” won the Vernon Short Story Medal, $25, and a place in the school’s newspaper, the Grizzly, in 1929.

After high school, Swenson followed in her father’s footsteps by enrolling at Utah State Agricultural College (USAC), where she wrote for the campus newspaper Student Life. By her junior year Swenson had her own humor column in Student Life, which she called “Station Hooey: Over the U.S.A.C. Nut-work.” The logo for her column depicted a winking gentleman in a suit coat and tie, with shiny black hair parted in the middle and slicked back, in front of a round radio-broadcasting microphone.

The tone and humor in “Station Hooey” would have reminded college students at USAC of contemporary radio programs. Swenson also contributed to the Scribble, the campus literary magazine, where her first poem, “Three Hues of Melody” was published in 1932. It was through her association with the Scribble that Swenson met and formed lasting friendships with a creative and engaging community of writers, including Edith Welch, who became Swenson’s closest friend at USAC; Austin Fife, who became a well-known folklorist; Ray B. West, Jr., who would eventually found the Rocky Mountain Review and publish some of Swenson’s poetry; and the poets Veneta Nielsen and Grant Redford, who both went on to become English professors. Nielsen and Redford kept in touch with Swenson and often read her published work to their classes.

After obtaining her bachelor’s degree from SAG, Swenson spent a little time writing for the Herald, the local Logan newspaper, but quickly persuaded her parents to let her move to Salt Lake City to live with her cousin Sunny. Swenson found work in the advertising department for a newspaper there, but by 1936, she knew she had to leave Utah in order to make her own way. This time she convinced her parents to let her travel with Sunny, who was on her way to pick up a new car. Swenson borrowed $200 from her parents to pay for the “vacation,” which they had lent willingly because she had not told them about her real plan. Sunny and May boarded the Greyhound bus intending to stop in Michigan for the new car and then drive on to New York. Although Sunny was only going for a visit, May planned to stay.

In the late 1930s, the United States was fully immersed in the Great Depression, and as Swenson settled in to life in New York City, she realized that she would not be able to find work as a newspaper reporter. Instead, “May advertised as a writer’s helper, and after many interviews with ‘crackpots’ she found ‘bosses’ who paid her small sums as an editor and ghostwriter” (Knudson and Bigelow 39). Swenson accepted one of these positions with Anzia Yezierska, whose fiction from the 1920s had been successful enough to be made into film. However, Yezierska was also struggling financially and was unable to offer much of a salary. She introduced Swenson to her nephew, Arnold Kates, who worked in advertising and had a large apartment. In order to make ends meet, Swenson cleaned his apartment. Swenson was too proud to ask her family for help, and she rejected Yezierska’s suggestion that she marry Kates as a solution her financial problems.

Instead, Swenson applied for a job with the Federal Writers Project. In order to be eligible for this program, artists had to be “indigent” and receiving welfare, and so she had to lie. Swenson claimed that she had no relatives, no insurance, no money, and no one to support her, even though she knew her father would have been able to help her if he had known about her circumstances. Swenson was accepted into the program and was able to work for a year before her lie was discovered. She worked with the Living Lore Unit of the Federal Writers Project interviewing working-class people in New York City. Swenson lost her job with the project when a relief worker discovered that she had lied on her application. She worked for a while with the United States Travel Bureau, but when the war began, travel decreased and Swenson soon found herself out of work again.

Swenson’s next employment opportunity was as a typist with the Federal Wholesale Druggists’ Association, where she was employed for the next eight years (1942-49). She accepted this position with the intention of finding a way to utilize her writing skills. She wrote news releases, letters, and convention speeches and eventually became the editor of the Federal Pharmacist and the Federal News Capsule, which were two industry publications. At this job she earned $75 per week, and by the time she decided to take a year off to write, she had saved $1,000 from her salary. The goal was to have her poetry published, and she knew that meant two things: spending a great deal of time writing and tackling the “messy business” of making contacts in the publishing world (Knudson and Bigelow 56).

As a member of the Raven Poetry Club, Swenson had already met Alfred Kreymborg, a friend who shared her love of chess. Kreymborg had been the president of the Poetry Society of America from 1943 to 1945 and had been instrumental in helping poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams gain recognition. On January 26, 1949, Swenson invited Kreymborg to tea, asking him to suggest influential magazines where she might submit her work. At tea, Swenson asked him whether he would be willing to recommend her and her poetry to some of these editors.

The result of this meeting took the form of a letter dated February 9, 1949, from William Rose Benet, one of the editors of the Saturday Review of Literature. It reads: “Mr. Kreymborg spoke to me about you, and I am glad that you sent in your poems. I like the ones called ‘Haymaking’ and ‘Goodnight,’ and am showing them to the other editors” (Knudson and Bigelow 56). Swenson’s first breakthrough occurred the same year with the publication of “Haymaking” in the Saturday Review of Literature along with the publication of a group of poems in New Directions in Prose and Poetry. Swenson’s poetry was featured alongside the works of authors such as Henry Miller, Jean Genet, and Jorge Luis Borges, all controversial and experimental writers, because James Laughlin, her editor at New Directions, was interested in publishing literature that moved in “new directions.”

Many doors of opportunity opened to Swenson after the publication of her poems. In fall 1950 she received an invitation to Yaddo, a residence and retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, for artists, writers, and composers, where she met the poet Elizabeth Bishop. They cultivated a lifelong friendship through correspondence, beginning with a letter dated December 12, 1950, in which Swenson invited Bishop to visit her in Greenwich Village over Christmas. Although Bishop declined the invitation, the two continued to write more than 200 letters over a 29-year period, the breadth and depth of which Gardner McFall has called a “vast correspondence . . . between supplicant and master” (McFall 5). It is clear from their letters that the two poets admired each other’s work, and it is common to find one offering comments on the other’s drafts. In their initial correspondence, Bishop often positioned herself as the mentor, and Swenson’s grateful tone reinforces that notion. As their communication progressed, however, Swenson gained ground and their letters began to sound like correspondence between two equals.

By the mid-1950s Swenson took a part-time job with James Laughlin at New Directions reading manuscript submissions. She worked there for 12 years and was also “chief writer of rejection letters” (Knudson and Bigelow 57), a task that must have been difficult for someone accustomed to receiving them herself. Swenson had received eight rejections from Howard Moss, editor at the New Yorker, for example, before he called in 1952 to accept her poem “By Morning.”

Swenson’s next major accomplishment was the acceptance of her first collection of poetry, Another Animal. The correspondence from John Hall Wheelock, an editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, arrived on May 28, 1953. She was delighted by his letter, which congratulated her on the quality and originality of her poetry, in part because Wheelock himself was a poet. Swenson replied immediately, “I hope that when I next see you I can tell you what a great delight your letter brought—it came on my birthday” (Knudson and Bigelow 59). Swenson was 40 years old.

Over the next 10 years, Swenson would take short-term and part-time jobs as a typist and dictaphone operator so that she would be free to quit and write poetry. She made it a practice to save parts of her salary until she had enough to retreat again at Yaddo or MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, another artist’s retreat. During these retreats Swenson was able to engage with a vibrant community of artists. At Yaddo, Swenson attended regular seances with Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, in which she helped them “tip the table,” an experience that inspired her poem “The Fingers.” She played chess with Marcel Duchamp and sat for portraits with numerous artists, including Beauford Delaney, whose portrait of Swenson now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Other friendships included the composer Ruth Anderson, the biographer Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, the poet Louise Bogan, and the artist Milton Avery.

In 1957 Swenson left another job to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, in part because the poet John Ciardi had named her the Robert Frost Fellow that year. She hoped the conference would be an opportunity to find an editor for her new collection, A Cage of Spines. She also planned to meet Robert Frost, who she hoped might even like her poetry. Although she was able to have a short interview with Frost, his response to her book was to say simply that it “reeks with poetry,” a response that puzzled Swenson. She writes, “He said no more. His handsome old face had an impassive ruffian look. . . . Ponderously he stood up. And I never did find out what he meant. I was too paralyzed to ask” (Knudson and Bigelow 68). At Bread Loaf that summer Swenson made another friend, Alma Routsong, who later asked her to read a manuscript called Patience and Sarah, which eventually became a classic but was not being published despite Alma’s efforts. Swenson loved the novel and encouraged Alma not to give up.

Another result of Swenson’s efforts at Bread Loaf was the 1958 publication of her second book, A Cage of Spines. In 1959 she began a reading tour of college campuses, which included a homecoming and reading in Logan, Utah. Swenson was surprised to find that she enjoyed reading for large groups in Logan, because she was often very nervous before public readings. To overcome her fear she would practice her poems aloud, recording them over and over again into a tape recorder. Swenson continued to travel and do public readings in order to supplement her meager income.

Finally, Swenson was able to quit the reading circuit and take a leave from her job at New Directions when she won a Guggenheim Foundation grant and an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship. In 1960 Swenson and her companion, Pearl Schwartz, used the money to purchase camping gear and a French car and camped their way through Italy, Spain, and France. Swenson’s poetry during this time reflects on both the natural and the artistic beauty that she encountered in Europe.

From 1959 to 1966 Swenson served as editor at New Directions. In 1965 she won a theater-association grant from the Ford Foundation, which enabled her to spend a year doing research and writing a play. She read her favorite playwrights, Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, among others, and attended rehearsals of The Changeling to learn from the director Elia Kazan. Swenson’s play The Floor was the result of her year-long efforts; as a comedy of the absurd that deals specifically with time and space, it clearly reflects the influence of both Beckett and Ionesco.

During the academic year of 1966-67 Swenson accepted a position as a writer in residence at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana. Her salary was $20,000 for teaching 12 students once a week. It was an opportunity she could not pass up, despite her fear of teaching. During her time at Purdue she met a fellow faculty member, Rozanne Knudson, who shared her love of poetry. “Zan” introduced her to the world of sports, and in turn, Swenson introduced Zan to a birder’s perspective.

The two women shared a chemistry and camaraderie that evolved into a loving life partnership. Swenson wrote several sporting poems, such as “Analysis of Baseball” and “Watching the Jets Lose to Buffalo at Shea” as a result of Zan’s affinity for sporting events. At the end of her year at Purdue, Swenson and Knudson purchased a summer home together in Sea Cliff, Long Island. Swenson nicknamed the house “Kestrel’s Nest” after identifying a hawk that lived nearby. A series of nature and water poems were inspired by the views from Sea Cliff; Swenson could see the Long Island Sound from every room.

The 1970s gave Swenson some new and interesting challenges. Swenson’s first language was Swedish, and in the 1960s a Bollingen Foundation prize had sponsored her translation of the Swedish poets Ingemar Gustafson, Werner Aspenstrom, Eric Lin- degren, Gunnar Ekelof, Harry Martinson, and Karin Boye, which Swenson included in her 1967 collection called Half Sun Half Sleep. In the early 1970s the University of Pittsburgh Press asked her to translate a collection by Tomas Transtromer, a noted Swedish poet, for an American audience. Swenson enjoyed the challenge and thought of the work as a kind of puzzle to be solved. At the same time Swenson’s science poems were being recognized. She was delighted to be included in anthologies that placed her work beside the likes of Sir Isaac Newton, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and James D. Watson. Although Swenson never enjoyed public speaking, she did accept short teaching assignments at the University of Lethbridge in Canada; at the University of California, Riverside; and at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

In the early 1980s Swenson was named a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 1981 she received Yale’s Bollingen Prize for poetry, joining the ranks of previous winners such as Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Robert Frost. Swenson often took refuge each spring and autumn in a house in Bethany Beach, Delaware, where she was able to escape the social pressures that were continuing to encroach on her writing time. In 1987 she returned to Logan, Utah, to receive an honorary doctorate from Utah State University. While she was in Logan, Swenson received word that she had been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in the amount of $380,000. She gave each of her brothers and sisters a $3,000 “Swenson Fellowship” in celebration.

In 1989 Swenson observed her 76th birthday during a family reunion in Utah. She was tired from the asthma attacks she had experienced on her recent trip to the University of Washington in Seattle, where she had just given the Theodore Roethke reading, but she decided to go ahead with plans for a family dinner on her return trip to Sea Cliff. It was the last time she would be with all of her family in Utah. She treated the Swenson clan to an expensive meal at a French restaurant and presented each member with a copy of a new poem she had written for them called “Night Visits with the Family II.”

In December 1989 Swenson and Knudson moved to their winter residence in Ocean View, Delaware, the “large house” that Swenson refers to in her poem “Last Day.” The first few lines are contemplative and the imagery indicates that Swenson was aware she was nearing the end of her life:

I’m having a sunbath on the rug alone in a large house facing south. A tall window admits a golden trough the length of a coffin in which I lie in December, the last day of the year. (Knudson and Bigelow 123) Swenson died of a heart attack on December 4, 1989, the result of high blood pressure and severe asthma. During her lifetime she had published 11 volumes of poetry and received numerous awards and extensive recognition for her work.