SOURCE: "May Swenson," in Tri-Quarterly, No. 7, Fall, 1966, pp. 119-31.

[Howard is an American poet, critic, and translator who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his poetry collection Untitled Subjects (1969). In the following essay, he traces the poetic style evinced in Swenson's verse, finding it magical and incantatory.]

When May Swenson, speaking in her thaumaturgical fashion of poetry, says that "attention to the silence in between is the amulet that makes it work," we are reminded, while on other occasions in her work we are reassured, that there is a kind of poetry, as there used to be a kind of love, which dares not speak its name. Indeed, it was in the latter's heyday (1891, when Mallarmé thanked Oscar Wilde for The Picture of Dorian Gray, "one of the only books that can move me, for its commotion proceeds from an essential reverie, and from the strangest silences of the soul"), that the former's program was devised, by the thanker: "to name an object is to suppress three-quarters of our pleasure in the poem, a pleasure which consists in gradually divining …; to suggest, that is the ideal. That is making perfect use of the kind of mystery which constitutes the symbol." Of course, there is a complementary impulse to identify in this reluctance to call a spade a spade; it is an impulse implicit in the very paradox supported by the word identification, which we use both to select an object in all its singularity, and to dissolve that "identical" object into its likeness with another. The refusal, or the reluctance, to name in order that she may the more truly identify is what we notice first about May Swenson's poetry—though she does not proceed so strictly with the enterprise as Mallarmé, for whom the designation of a flower enforced its absence from any bouquet. When Miss Swenson says:

she means the kind of ascertaining of Existence Hölderlin meant when he said that poetry was a naming of the Gods—and for such an appeal (such an appellation), the ordinary labels do not suffice. Miss Swenson would not be so extreme about her magic as the symbolists, but she is plainly aware of the numbing power of proper names; as the story of Rumpelstiltskin demonstrates, there is an awful mastery in knowing what a being is called, and in so calling him—indeed such mastery suggests, to May Swenson at least, a corresponding lack of attention to the quality of being itself; a failure, by the wielding of nomination's "mace petrific," to encounter, to espouse form as it becomes what it is.

It is an old kind of poetry, then, that this poet resumes in her quest for "my face in the rock, my name on the wildest tree," a poetry that goes back to Orpheus, probably, and moves forward through Blake and Emily Dickinson, whom May Swenson specifically echoes, I think, in her eagerness to see Being wherever she looks:

Any Object before the Eye
can fill the space can occupy
the supple frame of eternity
my Hand before me such
tangents reaches into Much
root and twig extremes can touch
any Hour can be the all
expanding like a cunning Ball
to a Vast from very small
any Single becomes the More
multiples sprout from alpha's core
from Vase of legend vessels of lore …

It is the poetry which comes into existence whenever the need is felt (as by Valéry most recently, most magisterially) to charm, to enchant, bind by spells an existence otherwise apprehended as inaccessibly other. For as Valéry says of Orpheus, it was only by his songs that trees knew the full horror of dancing. Similarly, in May Swenson's kennings, their method "a parliament of overlappings" and their goal "an assuaging singleness," we find that the hand in her lap, the cat on the sill, the cloud in the sky become, before we have a chance to adjust our sights and to enslave our other senses as well to what we know, fables of unlabelled Being:

For each path leads both out and in
I come while going     No to and from
There is only here    And here
is as well as there    Wherever
I am led I move within the care
of the season
hidden in the creases of her skirts
of green or brown or beaded red
And when they are white
I am not lost I am not lost then
only covered for the night

Evidently, Miss Swenson's effort has been to discover runes, the conjurations by which she can not only apostrophize the hand, the cat and the cloud in their innominate otherness, but by which she can, in some essential and relieving way, become them, leave her own impinging selfhood in the paralyzed region where names are assigned, and assume instead the energies of natural process.

From the first—in 1954, the first of Scribners' Poets of Today series included her first collection, the significantly titled Another Animal—May Swenson has practiced, in riddles, chants, hex-signs and a whole panoply of invented sortilege unwonted in Western poetry since the Witch of Endor brought up Samuel, the way not only of summoning Being into her grasp, but of getting herself out of that grasp and into alien shapes, into those emblems of power most often identified with the sexual:

Consider the array of instruments in this fragment of the first poem from that first book, "Evolution": the incantatory use of rhyme; the rhythms of the spell; the typography that lines up the first column to stand not only pat but put, as it were, against the outer verticality of the second column, so that the poem on the page articulates, by the space it leaves as by the form it takes, a regular passage through which the forces can move to their completion; the lower-casing of the first-person pronoun, and the capitalization the three Entities addressed, then their relegation to lower-case too, and the assumption of capital status by the two crucial verbs, "Reincarnate" and "Endure," and by the hypostatized adjective "Wild"; the irregular little stanzas content to exhibit, in loving complacency, a single word as an entire line; the rejection of punctuation as an unnecessary artifice in this organum of being. Evidently, this poet is engaged, and more than engaged, is elated, by the responsibilities of form. In subsequent poems in Another Animal, as in her other books, Miss Swenson exhibits a very determined attitude toward contrivance; aware, I suppose, of the danger inherent in her own siren-songs, with their obsessive reliance on the devices of incantation, she is more than eager to cast off the blasphemies of "Satanic Form":

—and to assume in their place the "blessed" and organic avatars it is her art to invoke, not so much to counterfeit as to conjure:

Contraption, like naming, is seen as the wrong version of experience. The paradox of the riddling poet is that she must identify without naming, make without artifice, "a model of time, a map of space." Miss Swenson is engaged in the Higher Fabrication, that poesis which is the true baptism; when she fails to devise charms that capture Being in their toils, she becomes, like Dickinson, again, merely charming; the appeal is no more, at times, than appealing, when it needed to be a summons:

I live by magic
A little bag in my chest held a whirling stone
so hot it was past burning
so radiant it was blinding
When the moon rose worn and broken
her face like a coin endlessly exchanged
in the hands of the sea
her ray fell upon the doors which opened
and I walked in the living wood …

Throughout this book, as the title itself suggests, and in the course of the collections to come, May Swenson has found a figure which allows her to escape the difficulties of both nomination and mechanism; it is the figure of the centaur, which cannot be merely named for it is imaginary, and which cannot be merely artificial for it is alive. She begins, in the title poem:

the shaped verses undulate down the page in a first presentment of "dappled animals with hooves and human knees"; in "To Confirm a Thing," the figure is moralized a little:

And finally, in "Question," the same figure, which has become perhaps too cosmic, too "mechanical" in its astronomic implications, is returned to its erotic energies, the self addressed in that animal form where, by a certain incantation, Miss Swenson best finds her being in its highest range:

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt
Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick …

In 1958, Rinehart published May Swenson's second book, A Cage of Spines, garlanded with praise by Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur and Robert Lowell, among others; of these, only Howard Moss seems taken with the notion that in Swenson's "world," Being is illuminated so that "whatever she describes is not only more itself but more than itself." The strategies and devices, the shamanism and sorcery this poet deploys have become, in this larger, luminous collection, more elaborate, more convinced, and deserve further attention; their accommodation of the mystery that only when a thing is apprehended as something else can it be known as itself is fierce and full in A Cage of Spines. But we must note, first, an interesting development, from implication to statement, of the Centaur theme, the projection of energies and erotics into animal form, so that the poet may ask, "to what beast's intent / are we the fodder and nourishment?" The new note sounded occurs at the very start of the book, in a poem explicit enough to be called "The Centaur." For the first time, Swenson evokes life—her life—in the chatty, novelistic mode previously judged "too effusive in design for our analyses":

The summer that I was ten—
Can it be there was only one
summer that I was ten? It must
have been a long one then—

Looking down the prospect of her imagination, the poet reports how she would ride her willow branch all morning:

I was the horse and the rider,
and the leather I slapped to his rump
spanked my own behind …

and come inside, after an exhausting morning's riding (and being ridden):

Where have you been? said my mother.
Been riding, I said from the sink,
and filled me a glass of water …
Go tie back your hair, said my mother,
and why is your mouth all green?
Rob Roy, he pulled some clover
as we crossed the field, I told her.

Here not by incantation but an exactitude in narrative, Miss Swenson gets across the doubleness in being she strives for throughout. It is a method she will resume in the book after this one, but the rest of A Cage of Spines is dedicated to the means of witchcraft. By riddles and charms, the poet aspires to a more resonant being than the life grudgingly acknowledged in her own body:

Not only the shaped poems, the compulsive rhymes and puns ("what seams is only art"), the riddles and agnominations ("the shape of this box keels me oval / Heels feel its bottom / Nape knocks its top"—from the conundrum about eggs), but the discovery of secret messages hidden within ordinary speech, as Being is concealed by Labels, excite Miss Swenson to poems of an almost frantic hermeticism: in two homages to writers, she extends her method to a kind of esoteric dalliance. First in "Frontispiece," which appears to describe a picture of Virginia Woolf in terms of the circumstances that led her to suicide, we realize from an odd, ominous resonance the lines have, that not only the names of the writer herself ("your chaste-fierce name") but the titles of her books have been braided into their verse; thus the "frontispiece" is a compendium of names indeed, only disguised, worked back into the texture of Being and used not as nominations but proof:

The waves carve your hearse and tomb
and toll your voyage out again again.

The second poem of dedication is even more curious, for in it not merely names, but all words are susceptible of disintegration into their secret content; what we are offered is ostensibly a description of Frost ("R. F., His Hand against a Tree") but the account is continually breaking down as Miss Swenson discovers, like Nabokov (whose English is so often a matter of perpetual inside jokes), that she can say more about her subject by letting the language speak for itself, merely doing a little pruning and spacing to let the sense in:

These are, as she calls them, "glyphs of a daring alphabet" indeed, and "hide what they depend on." There are other diableries in this book likely to exasperate as well as to exalt; chiefly a poem called "Parade of Painters" in which 36 painters are "assigned" first a characteristic color, then a texture ("Manet porcelain, Matisse thistles," etc.), then a shape. Then the whole thing is assembled in a litany of 36 lines which reads something like a dada catalogue, save that Swenson has shown us her method and its underlying logic: we cannot fault it, but we may fail to be charmed by the procession, as it passes, of painter, shape, texture and color:

Much more characteristic of Swenson's excellence, I think, is "News from the Cabin", in which all her impulses congregate joyously around a less arbitrary theme: visits from four creatures, none named but all identified by the characteristic textures, rhythms, and vocabulary we should associate with a woodpecker, a squirrel, a jay and a snake, if we were to become them by the power of our recital (rather like the interludes young Arthur experiences, in T. H. White's books, as he serves his apprenticeship to fish, hawks, even hedgehogs in order to learn how to be a man). Consider the sound of this from "Hairy":

and the movement of the end of "Scurry":

In these extraordinary poems, animal life is invoked, is actually acquired for the conjurer's purposes (extended energy, a generalized erotic awareness) by the haptic qualities of language itself, even more than by the riddling process so programmatically set up in the other pieces. The generosity, the abundance of Swenson's means may allow her, on the one hand, to speak somewhat sentimentally in "East River" of Brooklyn seen across the water as "a shelf of old shoes, needing repair, but clean knots of smoke are being tied and untied", and thereby we see, though both are patronized, Brooklyn and the shoes; but in "News from the Cabin", on the other, she also commands, as in the last section, "Supple", an utterance whose imagery is assimilated without condescension to its very movement, a diction so wedded to appearances that the speaker "leaves the spot" enriched with an access of being, an increment which comes only when life has been enchanted to its own understanding:

In 1963, Scribner's selected a large group of poems from Miss Swenson's first two volumes and to them added some fifty new poems, under the general title To Mix With Time, a phrase which in its own context reiterates her project: "One must work a magic to mix with time / in order to become old." Here the very compression, the proliferation inward of the new abacadabras seem to have enabled the poet to be elsewhere quite explicit about her undertaking:

It is good to have it spelled out, for there are here many poems of a specifically esoteric quality, whose organization on the page, as in the ear, suggests the location of a mystery in Being which the poet would attain to only by a ritual, a litany of participles and lattices of space:

To which the poet, her own exegete, adds this "Note from a diary: I remembered Giotto's fresco, 'Birth of the Virgin' in a cloister in Florence: the 'Mother of God' was a swaddled infant held upright, like a board or plaque, by her nurse … and I remembered a mummy in the Vatican Museum in Rome: in her sarcophagus shaped and painted like herself, an Egyptian girl 20,000 years old lay unwrapped to the waist." The notation, in the poem, of identities between the infant and the mummy, and the enactment of vital, or mortal differences that reaches the climax of the last four lines with their paradoxical reversals, dramatizes the kind of formal extremes May Swenson is ready to risk. "The idea," she says in "Out of my Head," one of the first poems in this book, "is to make a vehicle out of it." To employ, that is, the spell in order to be taken somewhere; or as she says in another place, and in her most orphic cadences:

we weave asleep
a body
and awake unravel
the same veins
we travel

The unravelling of those travelled veins is undertaken, of course, in other ways besides such necromantic ones. There is a group of poems, in To Mix with Time, written in France, Italy and Spain and concerned with the reporting of surfaces, not the casting of spells. As in the earlier "Centaur," the poet appears sufficiently possessed of her identity to feel no need of commanding her surround by voodoo. She can trust her sensibility, in these new old places, to do its work, and oblige the genius loci to give up its own ghost:

These are secular poems, then, rarely moralized or magicked, but left to speak for themselves, in the descriptive mode of Elizabeth Bishop, though there are exceptions, occurring (as we might expect) in the case of the "Fountains of Aix," where the word "water" is disjoined fifteen times from the lines and made to slide down the side of a stanza:

and again in a poem about death, "The Alyscamps at Aries," in which the words "bodies," "bones," "died," "stones" and "flesh" are isolated in a central column, set off like tombs in each line, and recurring some two dozen times. Europe, we take it, is sacred ground, and the mere fact of treading it is enough, almost, for Miss Swenson's genius to speak low to her. The conjugation, in this book, of a temporal response to earth and a runic riddling of it is indeed "to mix with time"; there is a relaxation of need, somehow, as if the poet had come to find things enthralling enough in themselves:

in any random, sprawling, decomposing thing
is the charming string
of its history—and what it will be next …

Like "Evolution," her first poem in her first book, her last one here, "The Exchange," recapitulates her enterprise—to get out of herself and into those larger, warmer energies of earth, and to do so by liturgical means ("Words? Let their / mutations work / toward the escape / of object into the nearest next / shape, motion, assembly, temporal context"):

Populous and mixed is mind.
Earth take thought,
my mouth be moss …

Wind be motion,
birds be passion,
water invite me to your bed.

"Things Taking Place" was the working title Swenson had originally used for To Mix With Time, and its suggestion of a larger interest in a secular world where events occur, where life "happens," and a lessening concern with the cosmic energies of "mere" Being is even more applicable to the poet's latest work, to be published as a book called Half Sun Half Sleep. Here as the title suggests, once again, the balance between sacred and profane, ritual and report, is carefully tended:

The tug of the void
the will of the world
together …

These new poems are neither so exuberant in their hocus pocus ("One must be a cloud to occupy a house of cloud … refusing the fixture of a solid soul," Swenson sighs ruefully), nor so explicit in exploring "the such of the sea's dark mind"; they are no longer the poems of a small furry animal ("the page my acre") nor of a demiurge ("They founded the sun. / When the sun found them / it undertook its path and aim … / The air first heard itself / called glory in their lungs."); they are the witty, resigned poems of a woman "hunting clarities of Being," asking "When will I grope my / way clear of the entrails of intellect?"; a woman eager still to manipulate the phenomenal world by magic, but so possessed, now, of the means of her identity that the ritual, spellbinding, litaneutical elements of her art, have grown consistent with her temporal, conditioned, suffering experience and seem—to pay her the highest compliment she could care to receive—no more than natural.