[In the following essay, Van Duyn, who was a friend of Swenson, offers a tribute to Swenson, reflecting on both Swenson's personal attributes and on her poetry.]

May Swenson twice warmly introduced me from the reading platform, but I never had the privilege of introducing her. When I was invited to write a "blurb" for her last book, my eager pen moved on and on, writing, I knew, too long a response to be useful; passages were, however, taken from that tribute and printed on the book, along with praise from some of her many other admirers. I will begin by repeating those relatively condensed feelings of mine about her work, with the already printed parts indicated by quotation marks:

"May Swenson's is an art that comes as close as I know to what I like to think must have been the serious fun, the gorgeous mix of play and purpose of Creation itself. One almost feels that nothing has gone before it; no visions of earlier perfections impinge on its originality; it is a First Thing."

Under the spell of her work, poems of more apparent high finish seem false—their glaze would not have let show the grainy, the gritty detail; the big and little pits; the funny, the quirky, the cranky; the gratuitous streakings of the earth itself out of which the poems were shaped. Focussed almost always on a reality outside herself, her camera records it for our viewing, and, in "Double Exposure" like that produced by the human lovers who simultaneously snap pictures of each other in her poem of that name, her ground in return has pictured for us the poet's face at camera. "Drawn up into" her own absolutely unmistakable "squint," her lens of hard-headed affectionate wonder is aimed into the light by a mind that has always taken its own advice to "make your own moves."

"What would the rest of us who truly love the world, but whose self-absorption will not usually permit so clear a sight of it, do without her poetry?"

And now we must do without any more of it than we already have.

I first met May, whose poetry I loved, so many years ago that I cannot guess at the date, when, in the early days of readings, she was invited to Washington University (St. Louis). In those bygone days the poet was put up in the guest room of someone congenial (ours, almost always) and fed by that host; the payment was a pittance. May had given few readings (I none, I think), and the rows of chairs in the reading room were arranged in a semi-circle which curved round behind the podium. I sat on one of the ends, front row, and could see May's knees shaking so wildly all during her performance that I wondered how they could hold her upright. Her voice was, throughout, courageously and amazingly controlled, as if the knees were living a terrified life of their own which had nothing to do with the mind, face, and voice. How I admired her! Later, of course, along with the rest of us, she became a calm performer.

At home with us, she and my husband (Jarvis Thurston) discovered a warm connection which kept them excitedly chattering for hours. They had both grown up in Mormon families in Utah, May in Logan, Jarvis in Ogden; May came from a large family of eight or nine children, my husband had only one sister by a mother who was his father's fifth wife (the wives were not simultaneous—each of them had died before a remarriage), but he lived in a small community filled with his grown-up half-brothers and half-sisters. Both he and May had "escaped" from Mormonism, physically and emotionally. While she rested before returning, May read a book of my poems and enthusiastically praised it. When she left St. Louis, Jarvis and I knew we had found a friend, one whom we did not often see in person, but who had permanently lodged herself in our affections.

Still, we did meet from time to time, at Bread Loaf, New York, or St. Louis, and kept in erratic touch by mail. For one reason or another, Jarvis and I never got out to the Sea Cliff house with the inadequate or nonexistent heating system which there was never enough money to repair. May was one of the most unmaterialistic people I know. Nunlike, she warmed and fed herself primarily with writing. A croissant a paté, the goodies I bought for her lunch when she came to see us in a borrowed apartment in Manhattan, seemed gustatory wonders to her. Some genius in the mysterious award-making machine of the MacArthur Foundation gave her a MacArthur in time for her and Zan to go to New Zealand, feel its warmth, and see its animals. The first taste of travel pleasures came in the nick of time.

Her poems were often playful, as Marianne Moore's were often playful—in rhyming, in tone, in shape. Different as they are from each other, unique as is each poet's voice, it is as if the most minute detail of the visible world flowered for both of them with a brightness that lit up the dark personal feelings; or that the rich, exciting passage of discovery through external Creation continually brought to them both "good tidings of comfort and joy." Zan tells me that May particularly loved my poem "Letters from a Father," which contains a litany of birds, seen toward the morose and self-hating end of the father's life with the kind of love with which May saw them (and all nonhuman creatures) all her life. In my poem "the world," through the birds which come to a new bird feeder, slowly "woos its children back for an evening kiss."

That round, lined face, framed by an undeviating Dutch bob, its characteristic expression seeming to say, "I am precisely who I am; take me or leave me," will stay with us as long as we can keep our own memories. She was a wonderful woman, a wonderful poet.