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October 2005 from an AP story published by The Advocate May Swenson may not be known by most folks in Logan, Utah, the town where she grew up riding stick horses among the poplars at the bottom of Old Main Hill, scrubbing floors for her large Mormon family, and writing in her adolescent diary. Nor does Utah take much notice of Swenson, who died in Delaware in 1989. And yet, her portrait will soon hang in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, a distinction shared by Brigham Young and Robert Leroy Parker, aka Butch Cassidy, among other Utahns. After graduating from USU, Swenson worked briefly as a reporter for the Deseret News in Salt Lake City. At 22, she borrowed $200 from her dad for a trip to New York City. Thereafter, she made only occasional visits back to Logan. She had hoped to be a newspaper writer but had to settle for odd jobs that barely paid the rent on a series of small apartments. At night, she wrote poetry. After dozens of rejections, she was finally published in The Saturday Review of Literature, 13 years after she arrived in New York. Though she continued to work at secretarial jobs, Swenson scrimped so she could take long writing breaks, including several at artists' colonies, according to her partner of 25 years, Rozanne Knudson. By the time Swenson died of a heart attack brought on by asthma and high blood pressure at age 76, she had published 11 volumes of poetry and had been awarded many top cultural honors, such as the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship worth $380,000. She was a chancellor for the Academy of American Poets. Along the way Swenson stopped practicing the Mormon religion of her youth, once explaining that she couldn't have faith in what she couldn't see. She loved the music but was not a believer. She also was bothered by the discrepancy in the roles of men and women in the church and all of society, says Knudson, executor of Swenson's estate and an author herself. Swenson remained devoted to her parents—they visited her twice in Greenwich Village as they traveled to and from Sweden for a Mormon mission—and she and her siblings were close. She shared her MacArthur prize money with her brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews. Swenson's obscurity, says Spooner at USU, surely has to do with poetry's small place in American society. "People just don't know poetry." His own university once overlooked opportunities to put the spotlight on its distinguished graduate. Though USU granted Swenson an honorary doctorate in 1987 and earlier had her teach a summer workshop, the university demolished the home where she was raised and a former curator, now deceased, rebuffed an offer for the university to keep some of her papers. Washington University in St. Louis, instead, has 5,000 of her letters and working papers. Utah's other universities did not invite Swenson for workshops or readings, although she crisscrossed the country, visiting college campuses for such occasions. Knudson believes there are reasons Utahns, unlike easterners, do not know Swenson and her work. Poetry is about comfort, and Mormons, she says, find comfort in their own scriptures and inspirational writing rather than in poetry. Knudson was raised LDS in Virginia and was educated at Brigham Young University in Provo. Though Swenson's siblings adored her, they have been reserved about publicly trumpeting her poetic genius, says Knudson. Not only did Swenson drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes for much of her life-both proscribed by the LDS Church-she was a lesbian. Of all the nieces and nephews, not one has May's name, Knudson notes.
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www.affirmation.org