Posted by:
Human
(
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Date: March 15, 2023 12:18PM
Reading poetry aloud is my lifelong delight. A few lucky ones have an instrument to play around with, I have only my voice.
I read aloud an hour or so in the middle of insomniac nights, which are many. I read a short thing or two in the morning before work. And when I have the evening to myself, once or twice a week, I revel in something long and sustained. Like the good Mormon with their scriptures, I read poetry every day. My teacher along the way has been the late Harold Bloom, whose fascination for old-school Mormonism comforted me on the way out of LDSinc (23 years ago!)
I want to share here Harold Bloom reminiscing about May Swenson. I posted about her before. From Possessed By Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism:
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I BEGAN READING MAY SWENSON in 1954, but intensively only from 1963 on. Our mutual friend John Hollander introduced us in 1965. After that, she and I occasionally would drink coffee together at Chumley’s in Greenwich Village. We remained amiable acquaintances, as she seemed rather shy. Our conversations concerned friends in common but usually not her own work.
As a poet, May Swenson derives from Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop; she and Bishop formed a strong friendship. After her death in 1989, I made a number of attempts to stimulate the publication of her collected poems, but failed until my former student Langdon Hammer edited her for a Library of America edition (2013).
She is an authentic original whose genius is for surprise. Born in Logan, Utah, in 1913, she was the oldest of ten children of Swedish converts to the Latter-day Saints. Though she remained close to her family and respected their religion, her faith was in poetry alone. At twenty-three, she moved to Greenwich Village, and returned to Utah periodically for the rest of her days to see her family.
She realized early that her sexual orientation was lesbian, which remains unacceptable to the Mormon Church. But she would have left Utah in any case, as her passionate vocation was literary.
“The first poem by May Swenson that I fiercely loved was her homage to her father, “Big-Hipped Nature”:
Big-hipped nature bursts forth the head of god
from jungle clots of green
from pelvic heave of mountains
On swollen-breasted clouds he fattens and feeds
He is rocked in the crib of the sea
…
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The Library of America’s volume of May Swenson:
https://www.loa.org/writers/255-may-swensonShort bio:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/may-swenson