With an almost painfully clear, sharp way of seeing life, Swenson was never a detached observer — she breathed in and wrote what her senses told her, transporting readers to the same place of discovery. As we are absorbed into Swenson's unique perspective, we begin to feel the power of language to evoke images with much deeper meaning than could be achieved by naming an object. For the blind son of a dear friend, she wrote a poem about what colors smell like.

Swenson wrote poems about science, space travel, and DNA, about which she also published essays in scientific journals. She wrote about animals, astronomy, family, baseball, nature, love, sensuality, and almost anything else imaginable. She wrote introspective, humorous, and ruthlessly honest poetry about life as well as death.

In her lifetime, Swenson was photographed by Annie Leibovitz and painted by Beauford Delaney. His portrait of Swenson was recently unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, a distinction shared by such persons as Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, and Duke Ellington.

Swenson was elected as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her work has been compared with that of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, E.E. Cummings and Walt Whitman. The list of her awards, fellowships, grants, medals and prizes is too long to list here. They include, however, the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and Ford Foundation grants, the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award and the Bollingen Prize in Poetry from Yale University.

Unlike most poets of her stature, a complete volume of her works does not yet exist. Her range of subjects and styles that won the respect of critics and other poets also makes her work difficult to classify. Swenson's level of wide–ranging diversity is extraordinary; scholars and professors are not accustomed to teaching a poet whose works are so hard to categorize — it goes against the accepted structure.

Author and longtime companion of Swenson, R.R. Knudson, wrote of her, “I love that she stayed away from poetry fashions of her time, that her poems can't be crammed into a category … that she won a devoted audience without being in the academy or any other establishment.”

Swenson wrote about everything — the death of Robert Kennedy — a James Bond movie—trying to find a toilet on a camping trip. She was not interested in being pinned down by academia; she was only interested in translating her experiences into poems. As a result, her work is, perhaps ironically, some of the most rhetorically accessible in all of American poetry.

Many continue to work to increase awareness and appreciation of Swenson's work, including her friend, Carole Berglie, now the executor of the May Swenson Literary Estate. “Body My House,” the first book of scholarly essays dedicated solely to Swenson, was compiled and edited by Paul Crumbley and Patricia M. Gantt. More Utahns and alumni of USU have become aware of her through the efforts of these and other USU professors, such as Roberta Stearman and Joyce Kinkead.

The May Swenson Project has been established at USU to bring greater attention to the fact that one of the most important poets of the 20th century has come from among us. The university conducted an historic May Swenson symposium in 2004 and established a May Swenson room in the Ray B. West building and in the Merrill–Cazier Library. Under the direction of Michael Spooner, USU Press has sponsored a prestigious, annual poetry contest in Swenson's name for the past 14 years.

Swenson is still emerging, in a sense, with the world turning its attention to her after her death. Her beloved poem, “The Centaur,” was recently illustrated by Sherry Meidell and published by USU Press as a children's book. An engraving of her poem, “Above Bear Lake” will soon overlook Bear Lake itself.

A unique experience awaits those who visit May Swenson's gravesite in the Logan Cemetery. In lieu of a headstone, a granite bench marks the spot. Engraved on every surface with her verses, it invites the visitor to read, then sit and listen. As Richard Wilbur wrote, “I don't know where May is now, but her poems continue to mix with time, and to be part of the vitality of the world.”

On that long ago day when I watched May receive her honorary doctorate, she spent time afterward with her family, not knowing that another surprise awaited her. Two days after the ceremony, she was visiting at her sister Ruth's home near the USU campus when the phone rang. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation had finally tracked her down to tell her that she was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship: an award of enormous prestige that consisted of $380,000 — with no strings attached. This award was given in acknowledgment of her magnificent poetic achievements and to enable her to continue writing.

Recognition, even great prominence, in the world of poetry, does not often lead to much money, and May nearly always lived on a tight budget. But upon receipt of this remarkable award, May promptly and joyfully shared it with her family.

One of my faded memories of that week is of the beautiful dinner she gave for all of us in the Sky Room at the Taggart Student Center. My Aunt May was reticent, yet kind, in the few moments I shared with her. I sensed that she was far removed from my tiny universe of understanding, and I was intimidated by her renown; my parents' well–meant efforts to nudge me into conversation with her “because I was a writer too” had an almost paralytic effect on my brain. By the time my muddled adolescence had passed, she had long since gone from the earth.

But I will not dwell on my longing for missed opportunities. I will be like her, an optimist, in this one thing at least — and be astounded, grateful and glad that so much of her mind and spirit is preserved for me — for all of us — to explore.

In a photo of May at age 40, (top left) she is at once a familiar loved one and a distant icon of black and white sophistication. She looks so like her brother, my grandfather, that I imagine I can feel the texture of the skin on her temples and it will be as familiar to me as my own. I see vulnerability and tenderness in her face as well as the sharp and powerful mind. She is my family — warm and human and real — yet she is unreal too — the Unknown, the Legend, the New Yorker.

That unusual face — with full lips and arching, elfin eyebrows, in later years became somewhat daunting with its abundance of deep, crisscrossing wrinkles. I suspect, however, that her poems written in those years reveal her own vision of herself: fresh, tantalizing and bursting with new life. Swenson was never old because she never ceased to be reborn — to see life anew. Yet looking at a photograph of her rounder, youthful face (bottom left), I am struck by those cool, penetrating eyes — those eyes look as if they were born old — or born, perhaps, with an otherworldly faculty for perception.

Her reserve masked an insatiable hunger for knowledge of life. In the later photo, she looks as if the photographer has interrupted her ravenous devouring of the world — yet she is utterly unfazed by the interruption. The veil remains drawn, and the wheels keep turning, no matter what disturbances sail across her vision. Whatever the disruption, it will be slyly consumed along with the rest. Then, after she has inhaled the world, she will delicately blow it back out, in a pattern as natural as stars in their predestined constellations — out onto the page — like a wizard breathing out smoke–rings or a child blowing a tower of opaline bubbles.

The piercing vitality of her poetry may seem like magic to her readers. For Swenson, her consuming desire to wrap her mind, her senses, and her soul around everything in existence made it inevitable. Her sister Ruth once asked her, “May, how can you write the things you write?” Her answer tells its own story: “I just can't help it.”

—Rebecca Dixon '09

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