May Swenson and The Poetics of Letting Go
Sara Eliza Johnson
During my MFA in poetry in the late aughts, when I was twenty-two and still coming into myself as a poet—stumbling into the world of real adulthood with the awkwardness of a newborn foal—one of my professors introduced me to the poem “Question” by May Swenson. I had never read a poem that moved with such raw force, that made my breath catch in my throat as it did:
Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt
Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead
How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye
With cloud for shift
how will I hide?
I wasn’t sure then why the poem resonated with me so profoundly, why it drew me so deeply inside it, but I internalized it as a poetic kinship. As a poem about the body, it was flush and alive and present in its movement—seemed to breathe and beat as a body would—but it had internal disruptions and grammatical interruptions that defied predictability, creating hitches in the rhythm of its breathing. The language held so much grounded presence in its sonics, and such vocal momentum, yet was almost panicked in its unpunctuated and enjambed restlessness, unstable in identity and associative in logic. The poem somehow holistically generated both centrifugal and centripetal movement within me. It was a poem living in liminality, as I was in my early twenties, both as a poet and a person who felt psychoemotionally pulled between implosion and explosion.
At the time, I was such a lonely, sad thing, but had no words for why. I had no words for my pain, because over the years I had so profoundly dissociated from my body, which was still continually suffering traumatic assaults at the time of reading. I had no words for “I” or “me” that made sense. So I wrote poems in the voices of others, looking for my own, and ended up writing my own poem in response to “Question” for my thesis, which became my first book, Bone Map.
I understand now how, as someone who has been a repeat victim of sexual violence, I would relate intensely to the poem, and in particular to the turbulent state of the body that it simulates. Sometimes the chronically traumatized body feels like a series of unanswered questions. Sometimes the body is too much chaos painfully contained. Sometimes it disappears on you, blinking out of existence. Sometimes it feels as if my body itself has fragmented, exists but as too many things at once, too many names or states of being, so that I can no longer identify it as me and mine, as tangible and real. And then sometimes, out of nowhere, the fog of dissociation will dissipate, and my body will become too real, and I can feel the pain my brain had anesthetized to protect me.
The final line in “Question”—“with a cloud for a shift/ how will I hide?—marked the first time I realized you could end a poem with a question that wasn’t a gimmick, revealing that the end of the poem could be an opening, like an eye or a mouth half-ajar, letting the light out or the light in, or both simultaneously. It remains an important question for me, who still often feels terrified of being seen.
It took me a long time to return to Swenson. I finally did so after fifteen years hiding in the shift of my own cloud, afraid. By then, I had explored much of my trauma history in therapy, and come to a deeper understanding of why I experience my body and the world with such instability and restlessness. Therapeutic processing in turn revealed to me the disordered mechanisms behind my poetry and its many faces over the years. The trauma had found ways to subconsciously communicate itself despite my attempts to hide from it. The more I tried to bury it, the more insistent it became on revealing itself in the poetry, leading to work with expressions of violence that alarmed even me. I continued to silence it through vicious revision.
At a crossroads, I realized I needed a poetic intervention, and turned to Swenson. Upon revisiting her body of work, I was impressed by how often and deftly she navigates the liminal spaces between disordered and taut, violent and gentle. The poems’ states of being are constantly pushed and pulled in multiple directions at once, generating an existential complexity, even anxiety, that is also characteristic of that first poem I loved of hers at twenty-two years old. I was also struck by the same breathless wildness, the unsettled aliveness. How the poems often seem to burst through their containment, and this overflow is not always graceful or conventionally beautiful. The poetic excess is not always like wildflowers overgrowing symmetrical fences, for example. Sometimes it feels more like the smell of the corpse flower leaking through a window, or, to use an image from the poem “November Night,” the ocean that “scoot[s]” like “Pale vomit out/ On a moonless shore.” And indeed, despite their persistent loveliness, the poems often feature vomit, belching, scabs, teeming rot, and other “unpoetic” signs of life. Her poems can at times turn ugly or grotesque, monstrous and violent, and even “perform” harm or self-harming. These qualities are enacted in both form and language.
Sometimes Swenson’s poems tap into the necropastoral, infusing landscapes with the porous liminality of decay or the abject, a state of experience familiar to the complex trauma survivor. The necropastoral, according to Joyelle McSweeney’s essay at The Poetry Foundation, is “a strange meetingplace for the poet and death, or for the dead to meet the dead, or for the seemingly singular-bodied human to be revealed as part of an inhuman multiple body.” A striking example of such strange meetingplace in Swenson’s work is “Strawberrying,” where the strawberries are “squishy wounds,” which are sometimes like the “udders of cows when hard,/ the blue-veined bags distended” that “ache to be stripped.” After they bleed out, they are “spiderspit-gray, intact but empty,/ still attached to their dead stems—/ families smothered as at Pompeii.” I marvel with disgust at this poem. I keep it with me as a reminder of the power of disgust. It is so carefree and curious in its display of rot and putrefaction, which due to the lushness of the language we can’t help but think, for at least a moment, of trying a taste of ourselves.
In another poem that navigates the threshold between loveliness and disgust, “Unconscious Came a Beauty,” Swenson meditates on a butterfly that lands on her wrist as she writes, deforming its beauty after naming it so. The form of this poem is like two wings twisting away from one another, as if a child is pulling it apart. It performs a squirming or contorting motion at its center, so that the second half of the poem echoes a warped reflection of the first. The butterfly described so delicately in the first half becomes almost alien in an event of grotesque mirroring:
I sat arrested, for its soot-haired
—body’s worm
——shone in the sun.
——It bent its tongue long as
——a leg
——black on my skin
——-and clung without my
——-feeling,
——–while its tomb-stained
———-duplicate parts of
————a window opened.
————–And then I
—————-moved.
Disgust and a resultant sense of alienation are central to my experience of my body and identity after complex trauma. Sometimes I do not recognize myself in the mirror. Sometimes I do not want to, and Swenson teaches me to look.
Many of Swenson’s poems also feature a disorientation of form, as enacted through dissociative mechanisms like blank space—particularly gaps that disconnect portions of the poem from one another in radical ways—and visual sprawl or distortion, and these mechanisms become entangled with imagistic and emotional viscerality. As a result, the poems feel at times existentially anxious on a formal as well as imagistic level. I have found inspiration in the tension created in such poems that employ fragmentation of form and dissociation of voice at the moment of violence. I have seen myself in such dissociative poems, and felt both the comfort and horror of familiarity. The destabilization of the speaker reminds me that my voice, too, can falter, that the speakers of poems can be complex and multiple, bleed into each other. In “Bleeding,” for example, the speakers are the knife and the cut; the person cutting is absent, a ghost who performs the conversation upon the body, and a white gap carves itself through the poem, indicating the language itself is wounded:
Stop bleeding——–said the knife.
I would if I———-could said the cut.
Stop bleeding——–you make me messy with this blood.
I’m sorry——–said the cut.
A similar crisis of identity, a fragmentation of body, defines the speaker in “Cause and Effect,” which begins “Am I the bullet/ or the target/ or the hand/ that holds the gun?”
“Am I _____?” is a common question with which I wrestle in my own “wounded” language, and too worms its way into my poems. The accumulative experience of complex trauma, such as long-term abuse, is one of perpetual powerlessness and identity confusion. As a defensive response to this powerlessness and confusion, I have always held a great subconscious need for my poems to be neat, both visually and syntactically tight, without much room for “excess.” Poems became a way to exert control over my disordered brain and sense of self, and I practiced a hypervigilant poetics of what I now consider over-control. MFA workshops encourage such over-control, or at least mine did, asking always what “excess” could be cut from a poem, and even what emotional expression is “earned” or not, according to the language and logic of capitalism. A significant task of developing my own poetics has been determining how to relinquish some control in my poems, how to let my poems fall even briefly into disorder despite my pathological need for order and symmetry, as I have also had to do with issues surrounding my body and its own messes.
The frictional states of Swenson’s poems engender a reading experience that is not only dynamically relatable for me—as someone who still lives with a volatile sense of both body and identity, still slips and shifts in post-traumatic haze—but also serves as a more practically applicable lesson for the self-conscious perfectionist poet to resist manicuring, over-pruning, and the tyranny of economy. She proves that the poet can embrace disharmony and “ugliness,” even disgust or the abject, without sacrificing elements of beauty and tenderness and emotional connectivity.
From Swenson, then, I have learned the poetics of letting go, and the relief of release after confinement. I have learned to trust the poem to breathe off the respirator—to teach it to breathe, in fact, rather than force its conformity to measure. Developing a less constrictive relationship with my poetics has, in turn, helped me to build a relationship with my body and its own “disorientation of form.” Writing into wildness after many years of conditioned over-control is like learning how to untame a horse that submits so exhaustively to commands because it has been conditioned to do so. That is not a body anyone wants to have, or a poem anyone wants to read. It is forever a challenge to resist the urge to constrain the poem visually and grammatically, to trim it with tweezers, to carve away its flesh so obsessively it becomes mannequin. I try to remind myself that the poem can be a question that is not required to answer itself, like a child in trouble. Likewise, it is okay to be a question of a person. It is okay to be forty-years-old and not know who you are, to learn your body for the first time.
It is okay.
I still often seem unable to allow my poems to make messes, to take up space, to transgress, but through reading and rereading poets like May, I am growing and learning to let my poems have more wildness, to loosen their bloodied ropes, so to speak, and allow them—and, by way of them, my body—to breathe raggedly, let them pant and scream if they must, if that is their truth, and mine.
Sara Eliza Johnson is the author of Vapor (Milkweed 2022) and Bone Map (Milkweed 2014), which was a winner of the 2013 National Poetry Series. Her poetry and nonfiction has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, New England Review, Boston Review, the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day program, Bright Wall/Dark Room, AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Adroit Journal. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a residency from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She currently teaches at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
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