Have you ever heard of May Swenson?

Most people have not.

And yet she’s undoubtedly one of America’s greatest poets — a poet and playwright, I should say, though it’s for her poetry that I write this post.

She was born May 28th, 1913, in Logan, Utah, the oldest of ten children. She was raised Mormon. She graduated from Utah State Agricultural College and for one year worked as a journalist at a Salt Lake City newspaper.

She moved to New York City in 1938 and there worked for several years as a stenographer. She was well into her forties before her first book of poems appeared.

She died December 4th, 1989.

As a poet May Swenson is as original as she is obsessive in her typographical games. At her best, which is most of the time, she’s a stupefying technician whose lines dazzle and dance, whose poems never cease yielding up new meaning, no matter how many times you reread them — a writer you admire, envy, and applaud all at the same time.

She was friends with the Canadian-born poetess Elizabeth Bishop — a phenomenally  talented writer as well, who’s more cautious and restrained, however, not unplayful  or unwilling to experiment, but who lacks May Swenson’s sense of free-spirited, almost reckless energy, her sense of unbridled, unsupervised youth, wonder, joy.

May Swenson didn’t treat poetry as a tragic mode of expression or medium of despair. She wrote as one who delighted purely in language as much as she delighted purely in life — as if at every waking moment thinking: how strange this life is, how surprising and fantastically beautiful, how fun!

The best of her poems — and there are too many to count — are among the most startling and closely observed pieces of literature I’ve ever read. They are often erotic, yet always in subtle, unexpected ways:

A Couple

A bee
rolls
in the yellow
rose.
Does she
invite his hairy
rub?
He scrubs
himself
in her creamy
folds.
A bullet soft imposes
her spiral and, spinning, burrows
to her dewy
shadows.
The gold
grooves almost
match
the yellow
bowl.
Does his touch
please
or scratch?
When he’s
done
his honey-
thieving
at her matrix,
whirs free
leaving,
she
closes,
still
tall, chill,
unrumpled on her stem.

And this:

Four-Word Lines

Your eyes are just
like bees, and I
feel like a flower.
Their brown power makes
a breeze go over
my skin. When your
lashes ride down and
rise like brown bees’
legs, your pronged gaze
makes my eyes gauze.
I wish we were
in some shade and
no swarm of other
eyes to know that
I’m a flower breathing
bare, laid open to
your bees’ warm stare.
I’d let you wade
in me and seize
with your eager brown
bees’ power a sweet
glistening at my core.

Yet it was the first poem I ever read by her — stumbled upon by chance, not quite twenty-two years ago, in an old anthology of American poetry — which for personal reasons that are only partly nostalgic remains my favorite:

Dream After Nanook

Lived savage and simple, where teeth were tools.

Killed the caught fish, cracked his back in my jaws.
Harpooned the heavy seal, ate his steaming liver raw.
Wore walrus skin for boots and trousers. Made knives
of tusks. Carved the cow-seal out of her hide
with the horn of her husband.

Lived with the huskies, thick-furred as they.
Snarled with them over the same meat.
Paddled a kayak of skin, scooted sitting over the water.
Drove a skein of dogs over wide flats of snow.
Tore through the tearing wind with my whip.

Built a hive of snow-cubes from the white ground.
Set a square of ice for a window in the top.
Slid belly-down through the humped door hole.
Slept naked in the skins by the oily thighs
of wife and pup-curled children.

Rose when the ice-block lightened, tugged the chewed boots on.

Lived in a world of fur — fur ground — jags of ivory.
Lived blizzard-surrounded as a husky’s ruff.
Left game-traps under the glass teeth of ice.
Snared slick fish. Tasted their icy blood.
Made a sled with runners of leather.

Made a hat from the armpit of a bear.

May Swenson, 1913–1989, who crafted her literature with the care of a clockmaker, whose clocks will forever keep time, RIP.

(Note: until I just now typed the three poems above into this post, they were nowhere to be found online.)