May
Swenson was born Anna Thilda May Swenson on May 28, 1913 in Logan,
Utah. Her parents were Swedish immigrants, and her father was a
professor of mechanical engineering at Utah State University. English
was her second language, her family having spoken mostly Swedish in
their home. Influenced early on by Edgar Allan Poe, she kept journals as a young girl, in which she wrote in multiple genres.
She attended Utah State University, Logan, and received a bachelor's
degree in 1934. She spent another year in Utah working as a reporter,
but in 1935 relocated to New York, where she remained for most of her
adult life. In New York City, she worked in various jobs while writing
and publishing her poetry, including employment as a stenographer,
ghostwriter, secretary, manuscript reader, and, in 1959, she became the
editor of New Directions Press.
Since her first collection of poems, Another Animal, was
published by Scribner in 1954, Swenson's work has been admired for its
adventurous word play and erotic exuberance. Her poems have been
compared to those of poets E. E. Cummings and Gertrude Stein, as well as Elizabeth Bishop, with whom she was engaged in regular, often frequent correspondence from 1950 until Bishop's death in 1979.
Swenson's other collections of poems include A Cage of Spines (1958); To Mix with Time: New and Selected Poems (1963); Half Sun Half Sleep (1967); Iconographs (1970); New & Selected Things Taking Place (1978); and In Other Words (1987). Posthumous collections of her work include The Love Poems (1991); Nature: Poems Old and New (1994); and May Out West (1996).
She is also the author of three collections of poems for younger readers, including Poems to Solve (1966) and More Poems to Solve (1968); a collection of essays, The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic (1964); and a one-act play titled The Floor, which was produced in New York in the 1960s. As translator, she published Windows and Stones: Selected Poems of Tomas Tranströmer (1972), which received a medal of excellence from the International Poetry Forum.
She left New Directions Press in 1966, having decided to devote
herself fully to her own writing. During the late 1960s and early
1970s, she served as poet-in-residence at several universities in the
United States and Canada, including Bryn Mawr, the University of North
Carolina, the University of California at Riverside, Purdue University
and Utah State University. She then moved to Sea Cliff, New York, where
she lived for the remainder of her life.
About her work, the poet Grace Schulman said, "Questions are the
wellspring of May Swenson's art... In her speculations and her close
observations, she fulfills Marianne Moore's formula for the working artist: 'Curiosity, observation, and a great deal of joy in the thing.'"
Swenson's honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ford,
Rockefeller, and MacArthur Foundations, as well as a National Endowment
for the Arts grant. She received the Shelley Memorial Award from the
Poetry Society of America, the Bollingen Prize from Yale University,
and an Award in Literature from the National Institute of Arts and
Letters.
In 1967, she received a Distinguished Service Gold Medal from Utah
State University, and in 1987 an honorary doctor of letters. She served
as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1980 until her death. She died in
Oceanview, Delaware, in 1989, and is buried in the city she where she
was born.
Four months before her death, Swenson wrote: "The best poetry has
its roots in the subconscious to a great degree. Youth, naivety,
reliance on instinct more than learning and method, a sense of freedom
and play, even trust in randomness, is necessary to the making of a
poem."
A Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Another Animal (1954)
A Cage of Spines (1958)
To Mix with Time: New and Selected Poems (1963)
Poems to Solve (1966)
Half Sun Half Sleep (1967)
Iconographs (1970)
More Poems to Solve (1971)
New and Selected Things Taking Place (1978)
In Other Words (1987)
The Love Poems of May Swenson (1991)
Nature: Poems Old and New (1994)
May Out West (1996)

Prose

The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic (1964)