May Swenson, 1913-1989

Everyone knows cigarettes are evil, but they are still powerful symbols of both sophistication and febrile intelligence. The very fine African-American painter Beauford Delaney (1901-1979), did this pastel drawing of his friend, the poet May Swenson in 1960 back when everyone smoked but the addition of the cigarette enhances the edginess of the portrait. 

Just as Delaney was a realist painter in an age of abstraction, Swenson, not unlike her contemporary Elizabeth Bishop, was interested in conveying depth through an intense evocation of the surface of things.  She wrote that the desired “to get through the curtain of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming.”

Her tone could range from the brutal straightforwardness with which she described her mother in the mortuary— “My dumpy little mother on the undertaker’s slab/had a mannequin’s grace”—to the whimsical word play in  “Analysis of Baseball:”  “Bat waits/for ball/to mate./Ball hates/to take bat’s/bait. Ball/flirts, bat’s/late. . .” A westerner, born in Utah to a family that spoke Swedish at home (she has translated Tomas Transtromer), Swenson became especially well known for her landscape poems and love poems in which her lesbianism registers but does not restrict their impact.

David C. Ward is an historian at the National Portrait Gallery and also a poet and critic. His friend and editor Michael Schmidt, who runs Carcanet Press in Manchester (England) is a fan of the NPG’s and very kindly agreed to devote a page of his literary journal PNReview to reproducing a portrait of a poet from the Gallery’s collection, accompanied with a short description. PNReview  is devoted to poetry of the English speaking world and Schmidt is delighted to be able to introduce American poets and their portraits to an English and indeed world-wide audience. The next poet to appear in the series will be Edgar Allen Poe.

Visit the PN Review online at: http://www.pnreview.co.uk/