Most humanists show very little curiosity about the physical world outside the self, and usually a positive antipathy to the mental processes we call scientific…. Science will not go away because poets ignore it, and in fact we ignore any great human enterprise at our peril. Yet few poets presently venture beyond dread or annoyance toward the works and ways of physics, chemistry, biology, and fewer bring back more than a gimcrack souvenir or two….

[May Swenson] is known as a nature poet, "one of the few good poets who write good poems about nature … not just comparing it to states of mind or society," as Elizabeth Bishop has remarked. You can easily cull a bestiary from her work … and always with a wondering, curious eye, an intense concern about the structure and texture of her subject, an extraordinary tactility…. She watches things over long periods, and tracks her metaphors through itineraries of implications, with pleasure.

But beyond the naturalist's patient observation lies something else. What critics have called Swenson's "calculated naivete" or her ability to become "a child, but a highly sophisticated child," is actually that childlike ability to envision something freshly, to ask incessant questions and always be prepared for unexpected answers—required of the creative scientist. "What things really are we would like to know," she murmurs, and what else is the motive of the speculative intellect? Swenson's poetry asks as many questions as a four-year-old, and she wants to know not only how things are made and what they resemble, but where they are going and how we fit in. (p. 35)

While Swenson does not write on feminist themes most of the time, she does so occasionally, with electrifying results…. Most often, she blends, she balances. Science, technology, the mental life of observation, speculation: she has invaded these traditionally "masculine" territories. Yet her consistent intimacy with her world, which contains no trace of the archetypal "masculine" will to conquer or control it, seems archetypally "feminine." So does the way she lets herself be precise yet tentative and vulnerable about her observations …, and her affinity for the small-scale object, like Emily Dickinson's, also reads like a feminine characteristic….

To Swenson, everything in the world speaks body language…. If anatomy is destiny, Swenson is at home (and humorous) with that, knowing we share that fate, finding no discrepancy whatever between what some would call a woman's body and a man's mind….

Swenson has always had an individual style, though bearing traces here and there of Cummings, Marianne Moore, and especially Emily Dickinson. She has always been committed to formal experimentation, and she has often played with the shapes of poems. I would like to dwell here on one book, Iconographs, in which the composition of shaped poems has become systematic, in order to show how, apart from producing some beautiful things to look at, the method extends an observer's eyebeam to a new dimension.

Iconographs consists of 46 poems, each of which plays a typographical game. Each has been given a unique shape or frame. Verticals, angles and curves, quirky spacings and capitalizations have all been used. The intention, Swenson suggests in a note, has been "to cause an instant object-to-eye encounter with each poem even before it is read word-for-word. To have simultaneity as well as sequence. To make an existence in space, as well as time, for the poem." The title, she further remarks, can imply:

    icon "a symbol hardly distinguished from the object symbolized"
    icono- from the Greek eikonos meaning "image" or "likeness"
    graph "diagram" or "system of connections or interrelations"
    -graph from the Greek graphe meaning "carve" … "indicating the instrument as well as the written product of the instrument."

But such descriptions scarcely prepare us for the power of the opening poem, Bleeding…. [Beyond the effectively poetic] language, the most frightening thing in the poem is that visible slash down the page, that speaks, that takes the breath away. (p. 36)

"Bleeding" and "Feel Me" have in common, technically, a white line cutting the text. This happens often in Iconographs, and I will not belabor the possibility that "inner space" may be available as actual substance to a woman poet. The point is that in both poems, space is substantial. It stands in the verbal rhythm for hesitation, a gap the voice must leap in every line. It slows the tempo, enforces stillness, makes room for meditation. Visually it "means" separation, as if, between the knife and the cut, between the living and the dying, between experience and the ability to comprehend experience, falls this white shadow. Emotionally, the space expresses that sadness, appropriately wordless, which we feel in the face of all disunity we wish to heal but—so far, so ill—recognize we cannot….

Williams suggested, as a formula for the poetic process, "in the particular to discover the universal." ["Feel Me"] stands as a major enactment of that idea. It is particularly touching that the naturalist's habits of patient attention, and the scientific imperative of hypothesizing as many explanations as possible for any mystery, ready to accept each, yet fixing on none, have been applied so perfectly to the depths of the human condition.

Much of the power here, as well as the intelligence, derives from a cross-cut play of rhyming sounds and assonances, either reinforcing or counterpointing meaning. (p. 37)

[Her poem "Fire Island"] illustrates the fact that the shapes in Iconographs are commonly agreeable to look at, but never because of a mechanical symmetry. Order shapes these poems, but so do pinches of disorder and randomness. If one margin of a poem forms a straight line or a simple curve, another is ragged. If sentences are simple, line-breaks cut their syntax unexpectedly. Where rhyme occurs it does so irregularly, or if the rhyme and meter are regular, then the pattern imposed breaks up and disguises them. In other words, Swenson has taken care to make her poems by the same principles—mixing Law and Chance—which we believe nature itself employs to make all of its objects, from DNA molecules to clusters of galaxies….

Some final points about the method of Iconographs. If all poetry approaches metaphor insofar as it creates verbal equivalents for non-verbal experience, then consciously shaped poetry is a sort of P²⁸ poetry raised by one power. First the experience or perception, then the text necessary to state the experience and all its implications truly, then a visual shape related to both. Swenson distinguishes her method of composition from that of concrete poetry by insisting that the text of each poem comes first, and can be considered complete and self-sufficient before the shapes are found. Shape then becomes a metaphor, enriching language as language enriches experience. But where concrete poems typically, and deliberately, have no interest separable from the visual, the technique in Iconographs maintains distinctions. Perhaps we should call it an art of simile rather than metaphor. Word and picture do not fuse, any more than the special sensation offered by our ear and eye can ever become one sensation, or any more than the external world we behold and the internal world which beholds it can ever become one. Connection exists instead of identity, tantalizing and delighting….

The formal fragmentation of "free verse" necessarily reflects not only social and political incoherence, but a failure of the belief that nature offers us models of significant form…. We may at this moment be coming around to a rediscovery, and a finer perception, of natural laws and natural freedoms, and our position within them.

Swenson does not theorize on the subject, but her work shows some ways to express our relation to the natural world as we comprehend it. The shapes in Iconographs are shapes of speculation, balanced between the patterned and the random—for so we presently guess Nature to be—and attempting to capture both the ways we fit into the world and the ways we cannot fit. They are playful, quirky, eccentric, and imply that these are qualities intrinsic to the world as well as ourselves. But Swenson is modest as well as mentally fearless, and will not let us pretend that our model-building is more than that. (p. 38)