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Lesbian Poet Herstory Page Manager:
Trish Shields
bard@subee.com
Please contact Trish
with your questions or suggestions for
this section.
Elsa Gidlow
Audre Lorde
Hilda Doolittle
Michael Field
(Kathryn Bradley
and Edith Cooper)
Amy Lowell
Muriel Rukeyser
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Under the able
direction of poet/novelist Trish Shields,
these pages of Just About Write will introduce Lesbian
poets from
the past, a little
about their herstories, and a sampling of their works.
These women were pioneers, and
they left a remarkable legacy for
us all. We urge you
to take the time to learn something about them
and their lasting
impressions of life, love, and the world around us.
May Swenson
1919-1989
Anna Thilda May Swenson was born in Logan, Utah, May 28, in 1919(1913?), the first child
of Margaret and Dan Arthur Swenson, and was brought up in the Mormon
faith. Both English and Swedish were spoken in her home with Swedish
being the primary language. She went to Utah State University,
obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree there in 1939. She taught poetry
at a succession of universities, most notably Bryn Mawr, the University
of North Carolina, the University of California, Purdue University and
Utah State University. May was an editor at New Directions publishers
from 1959 to 1966. Her poems appeared in Antaeus, The Atlantic
Monthly, Carleton Miscellany, The Nation, The New Yorker, Paris Review,
Pamassus and Poetry.
Her first book of poems was Another Animal, published in 1954. A
second book of poems, A Cage of Spines, was published in 1958, with To
Mix With Time - New and Selected Poems, and Poems to Solve, both
published five years later in 1963. She translated the poems of six
Swedish poets in 1970, called Iconographs, Translations of Six
Contemporary Swedish Poets. She followed this publication with Windows
and Stones: Selected Poems of Tomas Transtromer, in 1972, introducing
this fine poet to American audiences.
During her lifetime, May Swenson received grants and fellowships from
Guggenheim, a Ford Foundation Poet-Playwright Grant, an Amy Lowell
Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and the Robert Frost Fellowship grant.
Seen as one of the top female poets of the 20th century, May Swenson
held many awards: American Introductions Prize, 1955; William Rose
Benet Prize of the Poetry Society of America, 1959; Longview Foundation
Award in 1959; The National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in
1960; Brandeis University Creative Arts Award, 1967; Lucy Martin
Donnelly Award of Bryn Mawr College in 1968; and the Shelley Poetry Award in
1968. She once said poetry is "based in a craving to get through the
curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into
the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming." Her task in
life, as quoted by her, was a lifelong quest to interpret "the vastness
of the unknown beyond one's consciousness." She was a member of the
National Institute of Arts and Letters and served as chancellor of The
Academy of American Poets from 1980 until her death in Oceanview,
Delaware, in 1989. Poet Rozanne Knudson was her partner for 23 years.
More
information can be found at:
http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/May-Swenson
http://www.usu.edu/usupress/individl/may_swen.htm
Kiwi
Fruit without a stone, its shiny
pulp is clear green. Inside, tiny
black microdot seeds. Skin
the color of khakiImagine
a shaggy brown-green pelt
that feels like felt.
It's oval, full-rounded, kind
of egg-shaped. The rind
comes off in strips
when peeled with the lips.
If ripe, full of juice,
melon-sweet, yet tart as goose-
berry almost. A translucent ring
of seed dots looks something
like a coin-slice of banana. Grown
in the tropics, some stone
fruits, overlarge, are queerly
formed. A slablike pit nearly
fills the mango. I
scrape the fibrous pulp off with my
teeth. That slick round ball
in avocado (fruit without juice) we call
alligator pear:
Plant this seedpit with care
on three toothpicks over a glass
of water. It can come to pass
in time, that you'll see
an entire avocado tree.
Some fruits have stones, some seeds.
Papaya's loaded with slimy black beads.
Some seem seedlesslike quince
(that makes your tastebuds wince.)
Persimmon will
be sour, astringent "until
dead ripe," they say. Behind
pomegranate's leathery rind,
is a sackful of moist rubies. Pear,
cantaloupe, grapefruit, guava keep their
seeds hidden, as do raspberry, strawberry,
pineapple. Plum, peach and cherry
we know as fruits with big
seedstones. And fig?
Its graininess is seed. Hard to believe
is prickly durian. It's custard
sweet and smells nasty.
But there's no fruit as tasty,
as odd, or as funny
none
as fresh-off-the-vine New Zea-
land kiwi.
May Swenson
Courtesy of the Literary Estate of May Swenson
That The Soul May Wax Plump
My dumpy little mother on the undertaker's slab
had a mannequin's grace. From chin to foot
the sheet outlined her, thin and tall. Her face
uptilted, bloodless, smooth, had a long smile.
Her head rested on a block under her nape,
her neck was long, her hair waved, upswept. But later,
at "the viewing," sunk in the casket in pink tulle,
an expensive present that might spoil, dressed
in Eden's green apron, organdy bonnet on,
she shrank, grew short again, and yellow. Who
put the gold-rimmed glasses on her shut face, who
laid her left hand with the wedding ring on
her stomach that really didn't seem to be there
under the fake lace?
Mother's work before she died was self-purification,
a regimen of near starvation, to be worthy to go
to Our Father, Whom she confused (or, more aptly, fused)
with our father, in Heaven long since. She believed
in evacuation, an often and fierce purgation,
meant to teach the body to be hollow, that the soul
may wax plump. At the moment of her death, the wind
rushed out from all her pipes at once. Throat and rectum
sang together, a galvanic spasm, hiss of ecstasy.
Then, a flat collapse. Legs and arms flung wide,
like that female Spanish saint slung by the ankles
to a cross, her mouth stayed open in a dark O. So,
her vigorous soul whizzed free. On the undertaker's slab, she
lay youthful, cool, triumphant, with a long smile.
May Swenson
Courtesy of the Literary Estate of May Swenson
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