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A "dangerous game of change": images of desire in the love poems of May Swenson

by Kirstin Hotelling Zona

What do we make of a self-identified lesbian's poetry that is often drenched by tropes of heterosexual desire? A poetry that swims in a myriad of possible pleasures while consistently marking the narrow terms of normative sexuality? The difficulty of reconciling these characteristics of May Swenson's poetry is reflected in the relative scarcity of critical work that explores her use of erotic imagery while giving voice to her lesbianism; in a poststructuralist climate currently rife with interrogations of sexuality and subjectivity, this absence is a noticeable one.(1) While the "beautifully... Sapphic" nature of Swenson's poetry has been admired (Schulman 10), an overwhelming number of Swenson's love poems employ blatantly heterosexual or stereotypically gendered tropes, a strategy that is, I will argue, central to the relationship between sexuality and subjectivity that shapes Swenson's larger poetic.

A lover of riddles, Swenson allows no easy answers: her careful constructions of oppositional desires seem incongruous with the polymorphous sensuality for which her work is known, and imparting her lesbianism into the picture seems only to complicate the puzzle. Conflations of author and text, or representation and reality, are confounded by Swenson, for if language is representative of an ontological or authorial reality, then a critical reconciliation, or mere recognition, of Swenson's use of ostensibly heterosexual imagery and her own sexual orientation as a lesbian is rendered problematic. From such a perspective her poetic eroticism can only be read at best as bashfully coded, and at worst as pathologized - fraudulent, confused, or masochistic. But these interpretations are easily challenged by even a cursory reading of her celebratory, spirited writing. As the brief biography in The Love Poems of May Swenson succinctly asserts, Swenson's poems are "love letters to the world, for she loved life and rejoiced in celebrating it." Focusing for the most part on poems in which sexual imagery is especially abundant, I would like to suggest an alternative reading: that Swenson's poetry radically refuses normative sexuality through a performative appropriation of gendered tropes, a process that redrafts the terms of desire and broadens our scope of subjectivity. It is not the purpose of this essay to read Swenson's lesbian identification in the terms of her poetry. Such a project would, I believe, contradict the lessons her work has to offer. But I hope that my reading will open up a space for critical discussions of her work in which her lesbianism is not silenced. Likewise, I hope it will incite opportunities to discuss her lesbian identification in which the stunning range of her eroticism is not necessarily foreclosed.(2)

Like her friend and contemporary Elizabeth Bishop, Swenson has proved a somewhat difficult poet for feminist critics. Coming to professional maturation during the late 1950s and 60s, when confessional poetry increasingly came to stand for the American feminist lyric, both Bishop and Swenson resisted forging reputations along gendered lines. Neither woman wrote poetry that fit the new feminist model, and neither sought woman-identified audiences in her work. Consequently, Bishop and Swenson were often overlooked by feminist critics while they were still alive.(3) But unlike Bishop, Swenson has not enjoyed a recent revival within feminist (or nonfeminist) scholarship, though she, too, garnered many prestigious awards during her prolific career and was, ironically, more openly gay than her friend.(4) The discrepancy between Bishop's contemporary popularity and Swenson's relative invisibility may be explained in part by Marianne Moore's recent recuperation by feminist critics and her role as committed mentor to Bishop.(5) But this explanation leaves untouched the nature of Swenson's poetry itself - an uncontained effulgence and up-front sensuality at play with an inherent love of riddled indirection - that both sets Swenson apart from Bishop and Moore and makes her particularly relevant within the currently shifting parameters of feminist criticism in this country.

As Sue Russell has noted, Swenson "did not go out of her way to ,disclose her lesbianism, neither did she go out of her way to hide it (131). Although Swenson gladly granted permission to Joan Larkin and Elly Bulkin to include her poem "To Confirm a Thing" in their lesbian anthology Amazon Poetry, she refused the same editors an inclusion of her work six years later in a more comprehensive collection titled Lesbian Poetry. In a letter to Larkin explaining her refusal, Swenson wrote: "I have not sent you any poems for inclusion in the proposed anthology - nor would I do so - anymore than I would submit any writing to a book titled, for instance, 'The Heterosexual Women's Poetry Anthology'" (qtd. in Russell 132). In a later letter she wrote that the term lesbian "strikes me as a label placed on a collection simply in order to arouse attention, and I believe it invites misunderstanding... People attracted to such a title would not, I think, be looking principally for first-rate poetry." Swenson would have preferred the title Amazon Poetry II because it is "suggestive" but not "crude" (qtd. in Russell 132).(6)

Richard Howard captures well the way in which this reluctance to be labeled figures into Swenson's work when he states that in her poetry there is an "impulse to identify" alongside a "reluctance to call a spade a spade; it is an impulse implicit in the very paradox supported by the word identification, which we use both to select an object in all its singularity, and to dissolve that 'identical' object into its likeness with another" ("May Swenson" 517). Thus, in "In The Yard," Swenson writes:

Fat-tailed she-dog grinning's thrasher- red. Oriole there by the feeder's cheddar under black bold head.

And later, as the poem ends:

You're back, barefoot, brought some fruit. Split me an apple. We'll get red, white halves each, our juice on the Indian spread. (Nature 94)

Distinguished by a singular color - red, cheddar, black, white - each entity - dog, oriole, apple, companion - is isolated and held apart, defined through visual contrast with that which comes before and after. Yet this isolation is introduced only to be confounded by an increasing overlap of specificity; a contiguous, not evolutionary process of identification in which the eye/I delimited by narrative distance is ultimately only given shape in the poem within the "we" of mingled colors and mixed-up halves.

It is precisely Swenson's paradoxical invocation of identity at the liminal site between bodies, between self and other, in the slippage between representation and reality, that marks her portrait of selfhood as antiessentialist, a view clearly suggested when she writes that "no one / can be sure / by himself / of his own being / and the world's seeing/ ... / is suspect" (Love Poems 41). Howard goes on to state that "the refusal, or the reluctance, to name in order to more truly identify is what we notice first about May Swenson's poetry" ("May Swenson" 517). But although Swenson's refusal to name is indeed an identifying mark of her work, this refusal seems to be more of a challenge to the constraining, representational power of the name itself than a "reluctance" to be trapped "within the numbing power of proper names" (Howard, "May Swenson" 518); a subtle distinction but an important one, because to resist the "numbing power" of the name in an effort to more truly identify is to imply the existence of an a priori, prediscursive identity that can only be numbed by the intrusive constraint of the name. Such a view, however, is regularly belied by the content of Swenson's work, as in "The Key to Everything," in which the power of naming is clearly called into question:

If I knew what your name was I'd prove it's your own name spelled backwards or twisted in some way the one you keep mumbling but you won't tell me your name or don't you know it yourself that's it of course you've forgotten or never quite knew it or weren't willing to believe it (Love Poems 50)

In an attempt to garner the love of the addressee, to fix his or her attentions, the speaker imploringly seeks a specific name, "your / own name spelled backwards." Different from merely "your name," it is the "key to everything" through which the speaker hopes to establish his or her control. But the explanatory power of this somehow more revealing name is rendered insufficient, indeed illusory - first forgotten, then its existence questioned. In a burst of disillusioned revelation, the narrator then exclaims, "Then there is something I / can do I / can find your name for you / that's the key to everything once you'd / repeat it clearly you'd / come awake you'd / get up and walk knowing where you're / going where you / came from." However, in the next and final stanza the euphoria is gone, replaced-by the sober realization that "no once you'd / get there you'd / remember and love me / of course I'd / be gone by then I'd / be far away." The "name spelled backwards" is no different after all from the public, unriddled one. The beloved is no more, but no less, than his or her representation. Swenson is not rejecting the name because of its power, thereby endowing it with the authority it assumes, but confronting the very integrity of this power itself.

Swenson's focus on the power of naming, on the act of representation, implies that the act of representation is just that - an action, a productive power by which subjectivity is not passively reflected but actively produced. To be inessential means that just as one does not preexist one's representation, one's representation does not preexist or statically predetermine one's subjectivity. In this way Swenson explores the generative, not merely prohibitive, functioning of the name, calling to mind Foucault's important critique of the repressive hypothesis (Foucault 15-17). He asserts that we ought to reconceive the law and its representations as productive, as creating the illusion of repressed desire as a way of naturalizing its own existence. By essentializing particular identities through the insistence of their repression, the law thus emerges as a natural inevitability, determined by the very identities it in fact works to engender. In this light, subjectivities are produced through the terms by which they are simultaneously constrained. In her latest book, Excitable Speech, Judith Butler expands on Foucault's premise as she attempts to account more extensively for this productive power of language. Going beyond her primary concern with the injurious force of hate speech, Butler complicates Althusser's notion of interpellation by asking how it is that language has the power to shape, constrict, produce - indeed, create - subjects. Central to her study is an exploration of the power of naming, since one "is, as it were, brought into social location and time through being named":

[One] is dependent upon another for one's name, for the designation that is supposed to confer singularity ... [The] name, as a convention, has a generality and a historicity that is in no sense radically singular, even though it is understood to exercise the power of conferring singularity. (29)

To name something is to endow it with individuality while simultaneously imprinting it with the social context from which that name gains its linguistic and historical meaning; it is to straddle the line between self and other, to reveal and conceal all at once. Just as names - whether proper names, descriptions, or "linguistic bearings (including silence)" (35) - confer meaning, they also tend "to fix, to freeze, to delimit, to render substantial, indeed [they] appear to recall a metaphysics of substance, of discrete and singular kinds of beings" (35). In this way, to name is to wield power in a most fundamental sense. Labeling with language is a means of literally making identities, so that the action of authorship is inextricable from this power: "I name / naming my / name," writes Swenson (Half Sun 94).

But of course a name, even so broadly defined, is not a substitute for power, and the gap between the two is just what allows an alternative process of naming to unfix, to unfreeze, to expose the mechanisms lurking behind what Swenson termed the "flat ground of appearances" ("Experience" 148):

Power does not arrive in the form of a name; its structures and its institutions are not such that the name seems perfectly suited to whatever power is ... a name is not the same as an undifferentiated temporal process or the complex convergence of relations that go under the rubric of 'a situation.' But power is the name that one attributes to this complexity, a name that renders manageable what might be otherwise too unwieldy or complex, and what, in its complexity, might defy the limiting and substantializing ontology presupposed by the name. (Butler, Excitable Speech 35)

In other words, the act of naming is an act of power, but it is precisely the power inherent in the act of naming that offers the possibility of turning that power against itself. To name is in part to create - not merely to reflect, express, or authorize what is already there. To think of naming as a form of power is to recognize this productive aspect of description, to understand that observations are never innocent.

Swenson was acutely aware of this paradoxical nature of naming, and her distinctive poetic is an expression of the degree to which she reveled in the challenges it posed. At once overflowing with descriptions and linguistic bearings (think of Swenson's early resistance to standard punctuation, her shaped poems or "iconographs," and her life-long fascination with blank space), her poetry abides by her conviction that when "experiencing the full reality of something alive, one does not to begin with, say its name" (Swenson, "Big My Secret" 23). Swenson wrote poetry that is marked by an intense thirst for exact, expansive observations and a simultaneous unwillingness to spell them out. If we approach naming as a merely descriptive, expressive act, then this poetic can only be seen as frustrated, masked, or reticent. But if we take into account the productive, performative power of language, as I believe Swenson asks us to, then such a strategy is not at all contradictory, and her "reticence" or love of riddles may instead be understood as an effort to more rigorously participate in the process of revelation.

This consideration of Swenson's reluctance to "call a spade a spade" is crucial to this study because it establishes her prolific use of gendered imagery as very carefully chosen; a poet so concerned with the nature of representation, a self-professed lover of riddles, would not employ such loaded tropes blindly or carelessly. Swenson's poetry asserts that the relationship between the name and the named is always unfixed and fluid, an interactive process that necessitates a responsible, careful awareness of one's own ability to represent and potentially revise. Butler's work on sexuality and desire (Bodies That Matter and Gender Trouble) helps illuminate the contingency between Swenson's take on "naming" and her sexual imagery, insisting that it is exactly the naturalized link between representation and reality, figured most clearly (and insidiously) in the opposition between identification and desire, that works to normalize what she calls the heterosexual matrix. The "heterosexual logic," observes Butler, "that requires that identification and desire be mutually exclusive is one of the most reductive of heterosexism's psychological instruments: if one identifies as a given gender, one must desire a different gender" (Bodies 239). The logic that seeks to construe heterosexuality as normal and homosexuality as aberrant is dependent on a view of representation - such as poetic imagery - as a mere reflection of the material, essential nature of things, a nature that is both located in and legitimized by those very representations. In this light, it becomes clear "why refusing to draw lines of causal implication between [gender and sexuality] is as important as keeping open an investigation of their complex interimplication" (Bodies 239), for such a refusal opens up the possibility of reading Swenson's manipulation of oppositional, often heterosexual imagery as strategic, rather than hopelessly confused or coded. As Butler explains,

if to identify as a woman is not necessarily to desire a man, and if to desire a woman does not necessarily signal the constituting presence of a masculine identification, whatever that is, then the heterosexual matrix proves to be an imaginary logic that insistently issues forth its own unmanageability. (Bodies 239)

It is with this understanding that I read Swenson's sexual imagery as not only nonpathological, but as subversive in its blatant appropriation, and subsequent reconfiguration, of the normative tropes it touts. Swenson's imagery often seems to reiterate familiar heterosexual codes, while the poetic content subtly subverts or revises the power dynamics that such imagery might otherwise naturalize. Take, for instance, "A Couple":

A bee rolls in the yellow rose. Does she invite his hairy rub? He scrubs himself in her creamy folds. A bullet soft imposes her spiral and, spinning, burrows to her dewy shadows. The gold grooves almost match the yellow bowl. Does his touch please or scratch? (Nature 150)

The feminized flower and the masculinized bee establish the conventional, binary roles of passive receptacle versus active desire: the bee "rolls," "scrubs," and "imposes" while the rose is determined by her "creamy folds," her "dewy shadows" - characteristics only illuminated by the hungry action of the probing insect. The interrogatives accentuate the voicelessness of the feminized rose, while further entrenching the poem's continuum of desire along an oppositional, active/passive axis. However, the poem then takes a turn as it ends:

When he's done his honey-thieving at her matrix, whirs free leaving, she closes, still tall, chill, unrumpled on her stem.

Although the interrogatives are left unanswered, the ending asserts their structural insufficiency; pleasure here is not found through a strict opposition, and therefore can't be contained within the diametrical map of active desire versus passive resistance, or acquiescence versus imposition. Her role is ostensibly passive and her pleasure remains ambiguous, yet her final act of closing intimates her ability to have done so all along, endowing her prior passivity with an active consciousness that complicates the victimized passivity that the poem seems to outwardly construct.

The structural progression of "A Couple" is echoed in "The Willets," in which "Her back to him pretended - / was it welcome, or only dazed / admission of their fate?" (Nature 117) again establishing normative binary desire. Then,

Lifting, he streamed a warning from his beak, and lit

upon her, trod upon her back, both careful feet. The wings held off his weight. His tail pressed down, slipped off. She animated. And both went back to fishing.

Although he treads upon her back, his feet are careful, and it is the strength of her wings that checks and orchestrates the weight of his desire. His tail presses down and she animates, yet, reminiscent of the unrumpled rose, consummation is ultimately consumed by indifference, as they both go back to fishing.

"Poet to Tiger" is an especially interesting poem, exploding with traditionally gendered imagery and the psychological processes of heterosexist manipulation: "You went downstairs / saw a hair in the sink / and squeezed my toothpaste by the neck. / You roared. My ribs are sore. / This morning even my pencil's got your toothmarks. / Big Cat Eye cocked on me you see bird bones" (Love Poems 32). Although there are no gendered pronouns in the poem, roles are playfully figured along the familiar lines of masculine and feminine identifications: "He" roars, "she" "snuggles in the rug" of his belly; "he" "bounds," "she's" getting "thinner"; "he" orders her gruffly, "she" pleads longingly. At the end of the poem an obvious assertion of feminized power seeks to dislodge the mainstays of the tiger's masculinized oppression, but it is arguable whether or not a mere inversion - "I'm going to / do the cooking /now instead / of you. / And sneak some salt in / when you're not looking" - effectively does so. More interesting are the simultaneous and conflicting plays on standard gender roles within the poem in and against which this inversion takes place. On the one hand, the masculinized tiger, bestial and gruff, stands in direct contrast with the feminized, willowy poet, reworking what is perhaps the most pervasive of all binary tropes: nature-as-woman and spirit-as-man, in which woman is coded as sensual, bodily, and material, while man emerges as cerebral, untethered by materiality, and indeed divine. Within the confines of this poem, the narrator-poet's physical presence seems to diminish in direct proportion to the tiger's increased vitality, a vitality that is in turn more raw and sensate with each stanza. Untamed and animalistic, the masculine tiger assumes the overwhelming "natural" presence traditionally reserved for woman, while the feminine poet inhabits the analytical, mindful role of man. On the other hand, this very reading can be used to show that Swenson's imagery relies on, rather than rejects, a different but no less insidious set of gender stereotypes, those of the bestial, sensual man versus the pure, refined lady. It is important to note that it is precisely this latter stereotype that has been historically used to legitimate and often excuse the abusive behavior of men toward women, behavior that is at least echoed in the actions of the tiger in this poem.

What is Swenson intending here? Is she revising or reifying these gender codes? What purpose do they serve in this context, and what is Swenson saying about sexual desire? Sue Russell notes that this poem was one of two that, in the year before she died, Swenson finally allowed into an anthology titled Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (Morse and Larkin, eds.). Although the question of why Swenson decided in the last year of her life to accept a title that she so sternly rejected in earlier years is an interesting one, it is of less relevance here than the fact that she obviously felt this an appropriate poem to be anthologized under the title Lesbian. And indeed, a careful reading of the poem reveals that the tiger is, after all, a female. In the first stanza of the last section of "Poet to Tiger" we encounter the solitary clue that gives away her sex: settling into a bath, the tiger "wet[s] that blond / three-cornered pelt" while lying back, her "chest afloat" (Love Poems 34). Nearly buried in the poem's profusion of binary tropes, these two telltale lines take on a layered, and typical, Swensonian luster; as they reveal the lovers in the poem to be women, these lines can't help but reemphasize the weighty presence of normative, often antigay codes through which this revelation takes place. For this reason, I am surprised by Russell's claim that "Poet to Tiger" is "one among many poems which communicate the nuances of domestic life in women's long-term partnering with more clarity than perhaps any other poet has done before or since" (134). What I find odd is not Russell's reading of this poem as describing a lesbian relationship in the absence of a more typically lesbian imagery, if there is such a thing, but rather that her praise of the poem as particularly sensitive to the depiction of lesbian life completely elides the heterosexist script through which this depiction is dramatized.

This juxtaposition of lesbian love and heterosexist imagery recalls an earlier poem of Swenson's called "Zambesi and Ranee." Written in 1955, this poem foreshadows "Poet to Tiger" (1970) in many ways, and may be read as its precursor. Inspired by an installment at the Bronx Zoo of two female cats - a tiger and a lion - who "were reared together by hand from early infancy" and "strongly resent[ed] separation," Swenson ends this more explicit poem with a bitter rebuke to the homophobic onlooker (or reader):

Refused to nurse them, simpering mothers read, and tighten the hold on Darling's hand: "Look at the pussy cats!" they coax, they croon, but blushing outrage appalls their cheeks - and this menage calls down no curse, not only is excused, but celebrated. They'd prefer these captives punished, who appear to wear the brand some captivated humans do. (Nature 152)

One of the "captivated" who shares the "brand" of lesbianism with the cats, the author of this poem is certainly upfront - more so than usual - about her intentions here. Moreover, this critical turn at the end of the poem highlights the stereotypically gendered way in which Swenson catalogs the cats at the start: "the tiger looks the younger and more male," while the "lion, square-bodied, heavy-pelted, less grand / her maneless, round-eared head held low," slinks around the cage "watchful and slow." Swenson's appropriation here of standard male and female tropes destabilizes the heterosexist presumption they often naturalize; though the visitors can successfully fit the cats into their conditioned ways of perceiving, they cannot align the animals with the heterosexuality that they believe such roles should signal. As a result, the visitors' ways of seeing and understanding are exposed as insufficient - hence the "blushing outrage" and visceral fear that makes mothers "tighten the hold" on "Darling's hand."

Like "Zambesi and Ranee," "Poet to Tiger" is a poem devoted at least in part to the depiction of two lesbian lovers - indeed, Swenson wrote it for her companion of nearly 20 years, Rozanne Knudson(7) - and when read alongside the earlier poem, we may conclude all the more confidently that Swenson's imagery in "Poet to Tiger" should be read as cleverly strategic. The directness with which heterosexist assumptions are condemned in "Zambesi and Ranee" prepares us to better appreciate the more subtle, and I believe more profound, degree to which the less explicit poem does the same: "Poet to Tiger" sets up the most obvious props used to signal heterosexual relations, but does so in such a way that ultimately pits one trope against the other. Rather than working in successive layers to strengthen the marriage of masculine and feminine representations, the simultaneous employment of the nature/culture and bestial male/pure female tropes turn in on each other, preventing a sense of progression or resolve between the two partners in the poem, while illuminating the precarious logic that lies at the heart of heterosexist assumptions of sexuality and gender. Contextualizing these intrinsic conflicts of the poem within the contours of a lesbian relationship furthers the sense of purposeful irresolve that this poem already implies. Although the lovers in the poem are both women, the poem offers no place beyond the reaches of its gendered imagery in which a resolution of their troubled relations can take place. Just as much a product of heterosexist culture as anyone else, the female lovers in this poem do not represent a purer, more idyllic life beyond the bounds of binary logic; indeed, part of what makes this poem more forceful than "Zambesi and Ranee" is the fact that the speaker is clearly complicitous in the very dynamic she critiques. At the same time, the pat, dialectical resolution that is traditionally figured through such oppositional tropes gives way to a lingering sense of unease in which the naturalized chart of gender codes proves useless in mapping the trials of love. By constructing an obvious opposition along gendered lines which Swenson then blurs by the absence of gendered pronouns and reworks through the manipulation of the very imagery on which these oppositions rest, "Poet to Tiger" indeed suggests the "imaginary logic" of the "heterosexual matrix" (Butler, Bodies 239), exposing its constructedness and thus the very possibility of its reconfiguration.

It is crucial that Swenson appropriates, rather than rejects, the mechanisms through which gender and sexuality are naturalized. While such a method insists on the constructedness of gender and subjectivity, it likewise suggests the impossibility of a pure or prediscursive identity that exists outside of, or apart from, the terms it seeks to subvert; the lovers in "Poet to Tiger" play out the terms of heterosexist naming in ways that parody its claim to truth, but there does not exist a truer, more "lesbian" space in which they can escape the troubled dynamics of their relationship. By reworking the tropes of normalized sexuality, as we've seen in the poems instanced above, Swenson exposes these norms as inessential, and in so doing, asserts the futility of any attempt to return to origins, to seek the articulation of a feminine - or masculine - "real," or to reject something on the grounds of heterosexist contamination; such a gesture would inevitably work to reinscribe those norms with the naturalized power they purport to inhabit.

Swenson's poetry insists that there is no such thing as a nonideologically saturated identity, that any attempt to explicate or dislodge the mainstays of the dominant cultural codes will always be somewhat entangled in the very terms they work to subvert. Given this view of sexuality as produced by the terms it seeks to resist, Swenson's poetic suggests that perhaps the most efficacious strategy of change is one that most blatantly flaunts the lawful apparatus it simultaneously works against. Butler puts it this way: "The resignification of norms is thus a function of their inefficacy, and so the question of subversion, of working the weakness in the norm, becomes a matter of inhabiting the practices of its rearticulation" (Bodies 237). This "working the weakness in the norm" is at the heart of Butler's theory of "performativity," a method of resistance that helps elucidate the workings of Swenson's erotic poetry:

Performativity describes this relation of being implicated in that which one opposes, this turning of power against itself to produce alternative modalities of power, to establish a kind of political contestation that is not a "pure" opposition, a "transcendence" of contemporary relations of power, but a difficult labor of forging a future from resources inevitably impure. (Bodies 241)

Performative writing, then, depends on language as a source of agency, a belief that language and personal power are interdependent, that one does not wholly determine or preexist the other:

We do things with language, produce effects with language, and we do things to language, but language is also the thing that we do. Language is a name for our doing: both "what" we do . . . and that which we effect, the act and its consequences. (Excitable Speech 8)

Butler's articulation brings to mind the remarkable degree to which Swenson treated poetic language as alive, as an organic entity. She repeatedly referred to her poems as tangible objects, as bodies of energy with lives of their own: "I think of a poem as a mobile, almost a construct, something you can look around, that moves, that is concrete . . . Poetry has to give more than one aspect, more than one dimension" (Hammond 66). "I want my poems to be like three-dimensional objects instead of just words on a page. I want them to have immediacy, as if you could walk around them, see them from several aspects, notice many facets" (Hudson 55). Not only did Swenson visualize her poems as physical entities, as possessing the ability to move through time and space, but she also saw poetry as a potentially transformative source:

Poetry is used to make maps of that globe, which to the "naked eye" appears disk-like and one-dimensional . . . It then enlarges and reveals its surprising topography, becomes a world. And passing around it, our senses undergo dilation; there is transformation of perception by means of this realization of the round. ("Experience" 149)

Poetry - language - has the power to change us: it asserts itself as a bulk around which we move, through which we may more clearly sense and understand, by which are revealed the relations that bond us to that which we may otherwise overlook or even disdain. Though Swenson never wrote poetry as a political enterprise, believing as she did that "it doesn't always lead to art to be a polemicist" (Draves and Fortunata 25), such insistence on the power of language and its impact on human consciousness renders her poems undoubtedly political in the deepest sense of the word.

The performative practice must draw from the old in order to make something new; in this way it can always only provisionally succeed. Its success depends on an ability to both "echo prior actions" and "break with prior context," so that ordinary language "takes on non-ordinary meaning in order... to contest what has become sedimented in and as the ordinary" (Butler, Excitable Speech 51, 145). However, we must be wary of the power of reiteration to subvert merely by means of a constant articulation, and thus exposure, of the mechanisms that naturalize behavior. When considering Swenson's sexual imagery, it is important to remember that there "is no guarantee that exposing the naturalized status of heterosexuality will lead to its subversion. Heterosexuality can augment its hegemony through its denaturalization, as when we see denaturalizing parodies that reidealize heterosexual norms without calling them into question" (Butler, Bodies 231). This kind of reification through reiteration is exemplified by the unfortunate choice of the front-cover photo by John Brooks on The Love Poems of May Swenson. The black-and-white photograph of a man and woman in bed, in a traditional about-to-be missionary position, is inappropriately misleading - not because it suggests a heterosexuality in the poetry that should be read as lesbian, but because in its soft-lit, antiquated glow, it renaturalizes the gendered constructs that Swenson's work calls into question. Obviously a marketing device, as all book covers are, this design works, however unwittingly, to suture the cracks in the normative terms that the poetry inside creates.

Once beyond the cover, however, we find that it is precisely the performative, self-conscious aspect of Swenson's erotic poetry that enables the recreation of "alternative modalities of power," an expanded continuum of pleasures. In these poems the limits of self/other, active/passive are exposed, reworked, and ruptured, allowing for a proliferation of desires and subject-positions in their wake. In "One Morning in New Hampshire," sensuality transgresses the bounds of corporeal sexuality, endowing the natural world with a questing eroticism that in turn refigures the speaker's own possibilities of intelligible pleasure:

In the sun's heart we are ripe as fruits ourselves, enjoyed by lips of wind our burnished slopes. All round us dark, rapt bumble-eyes of susans are deployed as if to suck our honey-hides. Ants nip, tasting us all over with tickling pincers. We are a landscape to daddy-long-legs, whose ovoid hub on stilts climbs us like a lover, trying our dazzle, our warm sap. (Nature 99)

The distinction between the narrator and the narrator's companion is subsumed within the distinction between the landscape of their bodies and the active explorations of the wild and its creatures. The dialectical relationship of self/other is reworked into a contiguous "we" whose desires are not opposed or even symmetrical but one and the same. There is an intense pleasure here in the act of being enjoyed; the active probing of the ants and spiders is not enacted at the expense of the lovers' desires - rather, they are energized, infused with "dazzle" and "sap" by the ostensible passivity of their pleasure. Erotic satisfaction is no longer confined or orchestrated by the anatomical axis of give/take, self/other, male/female, but polyvalent and simultaneous, continually opening up and branching out.

As naturalized boundaries of pleasure are transgressed, so the limits of subjectivity are likewise refigured. The inextricable relationship between sexuality and subjectivity is beautifully articulated in the poem "Untitled":

UNTITLED

I will be earth you be the flower You have found my root you are the rain I will be boat and you the rower You rock you toss me you are the sea How be steady earth that's now a flood The root's the oar's afloat where's blown our bud We will be desert pure salt the seed Burn radiant sex born scorpion need (New and Selected Things 139)

The lack of punctuation accentuates the contingency of being, where to be - "I will be" / "you be" / "How be" - is regularly redrafted in the shifting nexus of desire. "I" becomes "you" becomes "I" becomes "we" as the articulation of identity constructs subjectivity as contiguous, transitive, always specific but never isolated. The hand-drawn lines through the poem further underscore this sense of interweaving: crossing directly between "you" and "me," Swenson's careful scribbles separate self and other while uniting them as well. The lines both meet and diverge from this liminal place among subjectivities, suggesting the importance of the point of contact between identities, a place further emphasized by the exaggerated spaces between words. By drawing our attention to these boundaries, this poem, like many others, insists on the creative, active occupation of limits that are otherwise naturalized as fixed, inert, or invisible. It is perhaps in this vein that we can contextualize Swenson's notorious manipulation of poetic form: by introducing untraditional formats Swenson forces the reader to consider the function that form itself occupies in the production of meaning. As "Untitled" suggests, identity is always a negotiation, always contingent, yet ever specific; to be produced is not to be predetermined.

It is this attention to specificity that marks the material potential of Swenson's work, that asserts the practical possibility, the actual, livable, fleshy feasibility of the identifies in her words. Her poetry challenges the universality of heterosexuality while it stays grounded in the details of sensate experience. Swenson asserts the reality of culturally constructed selfhood, affirming that to expose the instability of identity is not at all to argue that identity is therefore less meaningful, powerful, destructive, or pleasurable. On the contrary, the intensely expansive effect of her poetry suggests that to view identity as nonessential is to render it all the more relevant as a site for theoretical signification and personal responsibility than can perhaps otherwise be imagined. To consider the constructedness of gender and selfhood is to be ever more conscious of the fine and shifting nuances of lived experience, not to be non-existent or hopelessly ungrounded. In "A History of Love," Swenson writes:

At last acquainted smoothed by contiguity sharpened each by opposite tempers we divined about our nacreous effigies outlined the soft and mortal other Under the body's plush a density awkward ambiguous as bone Real as our own (Love Poems 36)

It is through the drama of their relationship that the lovers construct, outline, their selves - selves not fixed or holistic, but rather "nacreous," as sculpted as "effigies." Although inessential, these selves are nonetheless vulnerable, "soft and mortal"; defined by and through the other - the "Other than self' of the poem's first verse - identity becomes "a density," and although selfhood is a result of"their amalgam mingled," it is nevertheless as "Real as our own."

Swenson's insistence on reappropriation is what gives her poetry such a celebratory effect. There is something intensely uplifting about her work, an unsettling courageousness that magnifies the beauty in life while simultaneously recreating the lenses through which we've come to view it: "the youngest nerve and keenest stem / in secret shade, reach up to meet / radiance, swell to make radiance; / as all pouting blossoms do, / I turn, as earth to its sky, to you" (Love Poems 72). Her work insists on the possibility - indeed, the necessity - of radical change within the parameters of lived, intelligible existence, and likewise suggests the futility of efforts which seek "new" subjectivities "outside" the confines of the dominant fiction. In "You Are," Swenson expresses this as she writes:

once I thought to seek the limits of all being I believed in my own eyes' seeing then to find pattern purpose aim thus forget death or forgive it

now I know beginning and end are one and slay each other but their offspring is what/s not was or will be. (Love Poems 42)

If, as Swenson's poetry asserts, sexualities are always products of the norms by which they are likewise constrained, then sexuality can never be disentangled from power, and power can never be disengaged from sexual pleasure. Thus, Swenson works through, and not around, the terms she attempts to challenge, reshaping those very terms in the process. The means by which sexualities are produced and policed are themselves reconstructed, allowing an expanded realm of desires and pleasures to unfold within her words. Consider, in particular, "Four-Word Lines":

Your eyes are just like bees, and I feel like a flower. Their brown power makes a breeze go over my skin. When your lashes ride down and rise like brown bees' legs, your pronged gaze makes my eyes gauze. I wish we were in some shade and no swarm of other eyes to know that I'm a flower breathing bare, laid open to your bees' warm stare. I'd let you wade in me and seize will your cager brown bees' power a sweet glistening at my core. (Love Poems 1)

In typical Swenson fashion, we once again have a feminized narrator constructed in seeming opposition to the masculinized look of "her" companion: the feminine flower is almost hypnotically "laid open" to the "pronged," piercing "gaze" of the lover; "she" is "breathing / bare" while "he" "rides," "wades," and "seizes." Significantly, the activity of the bees/eyes is figured within the field of "his" gaze, a trope that insistently calls to mind the school of psychoanalytic feminist film theory in which many contemporary feminist theories of female subjectivity and identification have arisen in the last 20 years. Inside this theoretical forum the cinematic apparatus is often analyzed as essentially sexist by way of feeding a masculine voyeuristic pleasure. By universalizing the gaze as masculine and the pleasure of looking as only male, female spectatorship is rendered extremely problematic, indeed incoherent.(8)

In "Four-Word Lines," however, the binaristic framework of masculine voyeur versus feminine fetish is restructured as the gaze is literally given shape by the narrator's feminized voice. "She" defines the ostensibly oppositional roles in the first lines of the poem - "Your eyes are just / like bees, and I / feel like a flower." It is "her" narrative power, "her" agency as author, that literally articulates "his" look, that enables it and directs it. Motivating the progress of consummation within the poem are the narrator's sensuous needs; at once an effect of "her" own assertiveness and of "his" "pronged gaze," her proneness is not an indication of desubjectification; rather, it marks an active desire, a desire that in turn enables "his" activity. The act of objectification becomes simultaneously passive and active, an intensely eroticized expression of desire in which power and pleasure are inseparable. The masculinized eyes are literally subject to the presence of the flower's proneness for their pleasure, a pleasure which in turn underscores the power of her passivity. Thus, the assertive and invitational "I'd let you" of line 18 does not contradict the preceding "I'm a flower breathing / bare, laid open to / your bees' warm stare." Rather, just as when Swenson describes female genitals as "carnivora of Touch" ("Organs," Love Poems 20), the active/passive, subject/fetish formula of desire is twisted out of shape. Lingering at once on either side of the binary divide, Swenson weaves a web of desire that, like her riddles and "iconographs," confounds expected answers and positions. As possibilities for identification are broadened, so are possible pleasures.

But while pleasure is enriched in Swenson's work, innocence is squarely sacrificed. Working from the conceptualization of phallocentrism as rigid but removable, Swenson's plethora of sexual identifications is no longer reducible to something like "false consciousness," in which women are seen as the unsuspecting thus unresisting victims of an impenetrable patriarchy. Quite the contrary: through a provocative - and often playful - appropriation of phallic privilege by subject positions construed as its victims, heterosexist representation is exposed as both irresistible and insufficient. The cost of this confrontation is, of course, the admittance of permanent impurities between the sheets. Thus, love will inevitably be "baptized in the cool font of evil" (Love Poems 58), a place in which we are constantly "Open to joy to punishment in equal part" (Love Poems 39).

Perhaps no poem of Swenson's illustrates this more clearly than "Strawberrying," whose speaker asserts at the start that "My hands are murder-red" (In Other Words 8). A richly decadent poem, "Strawberrying" shows Swenson at her most unsettling, and at her best: "Hunkered in mud between the rows, sun burning / the back of our necks, we grope for, and rip loose / soft nippled heads. If they bleed - too soft - / let them stay. Let them rot in the heat." Picking strawberries "near the shore," their "Fingers find by feel / the ready fruit in clusters." "Here and there" they discover the "squishy wounds" of "Flesh [that was] perfect / yesterday," "sweet hearts" that were "young and firm before decay."

From the first line to the last, when the speaker, "Red-handed," leaves the field, s/he is clearly a "marauder," like the blackbird in the opening stanza who, shrieking his "ko-ka-ree," has "left his peck in some juicy cheeks." Aligned in part with the masculinized bird, the speaker indulges excessively and forcibly in the feminized, sexualized crop of fruit. Groping, probing hands "rumple" under "rough-veined" leaves to find fruit so soft it might bleed at one's touch. And though such vulnerability is, in the end, left alone, it is not out of the speaker's sympathy or kindness: no longer "young and firm," these untouchables will only "rot in the heat"; their fate is that of the "clump of heart-shapes / once red, now spider-spit gray, intact but empty, / still attached to their dead stems" that determine the sated speaker's decision to "rise and stretch," and to leave - but not before eating "one more big ripe lopped / head." Sexual desire, imagined here as the ravaging of ready fruit, is aggressive and predatory, sensuous and egoistic.

The speaker's "murder-red" hands bespeak the fine line between danger and desire that the poem so gracefully traces; she knows she's guilty, but for what, or whom she has wronged, we are never to know for sure. Is guilt intrinsically wed to erotic satisfaction within the terms of Swenson's poetic? Perhaps, but only so far as innocence begs corruption. For, as we are told, a "crop this thick begs for plunder. Ripeness / wants to be ravished, as udders of cows when hard, / the blue-veined bags distended, ache to be stripped." Like the prone flower or the willowy Poet, sexual ripeness should not be left "to rot in the heat" - it wants to be consumed. So while the speaker shares the blackbird's intrusive position, she also shares that of the children in the poem who, despite their mother's warnings against overindulgence, are "Mesmerized / by the largesse," and "squat and pull and pick handfuls of rich scarlets, half / for the baskets, half for avid mouths," until "whole faces are stained." Ostensibly exemplars of innocence, the berry-picking children are indelibly marked with the juices of sexual gorging. Simultaneously ripeness and ravishers, the children provide the site in the poem through which innocence and corruption blend, one becoming inextricable from the other. In turn, the speaker's desire and ensuing pleasure cannot be entirely disentangled from the children's, the blackbird's, or the strawberries', though each occupies a clearly different position within the poem itself.

Typically, "Strawberrying" does not offer us revelations or guidelines; instead it eloquently reminds us of what we already know, but are often unwilling to admit. Like Swenson herself, this poem is not easy to compartmentalize, and perhaps this is why it was not included in The Love Poems of May Swenson. But love the poem certainly celebrates, in all its rawness, pain, urgency, and joy - a love, as Swenson once put it herself, "based on a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wider space of things as they are becoming" ("Experience" 147). And as Swenson shows us, such "becoming" - changing, growing - is often as disturbing as it is beautiful, so that forging new sites for sexuality and subjectivity can never not be a "dangerous game of change" (Love Poems 36). It is the effusive promise of Swenson's poetry, however, that profound rewards can only come from such risks.

NOTES

1 Although the fairly recent publications of The Love Poems of May Swenson (1991), Nature: Old Poems and New (1994), May Out West: Poems of May Swenson (1996), and the biographical project by R. R. Knudson and Suzzanne Bigelow, May Swenson: A Poet's Life in Photos (1996) suggest a revival of interest in Swenson's work, critical commentary is still relatively sparse, particularly with reference to her erotic imagery and sexual orientation. One exception to this claim is Sue Russell's article "A Mysterious and Lavish Power: How Things Continue to Take Place in the Work of May Swenson." Russell reads Swenson's poetry in the context of her lesbianism, suggesting, among other things, the ways in which her work is reflective of her sexual orientation. Richard Howard's compilation of correspondence between May Swenson and Elizabeth Bishop, concerning Swenson's poem "Dear Elizabeth," also offers an interesting opportunity for further discussion of these issues. See also Grace Schulman's essay.

2 This project is strictly limited to May Swenson's poetry and does not attempt to use her work as in any way representative of lesbian or gay male poetry in general, whatever such things may be. My claims concerning the scarcity of critical work on Swenson's erotic imagery are in no way meant to belittle, for instance, the critical work that does exist on the extensive gay male tradition of using heterosexual imagery. See, for example, Robert Martin.

3 A notable exception is the feminist poet-critic Alicia Ostriker, who has written enthusiastically about Swenson since the 1970s. In addition to her 1978 article "May Swenson and The Shapes of Speculation," see her more recent book Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America, throughout which are scattered several brief but adulatory readings of poems by Swenson.

4 Among Swenson's many honors are the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award; Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and Ford fellowships; the Bollingen Prize for poetry; a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts; and a MacArthur Fellowship. She was also a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and the recipient of an honorary doctor of letters degree from Utah State University.

5 For a sampling of some of the most exciting recent feminist work on Bishop, see Harrison, Goldensohn, and Lombardi. For an inspiring look at new feminist scholarship on Marianne Moore, see Miller, Taffy Martin, and Goodridge. Jerideth Merrin provides a provocative account of the relationship between Moore and Bishop.

6 Though Swenson generally resisted same-sex anthologies, her work did appear in a handful of women-only collections throughout the 1970s, many of which were edited by her friends. In 1972, her poetry appeared in Women Poets in English, edited by Ann Stanford; and in 1973 it was anthologized in collections of women's poetry edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass (No More Masks!) and by Laura Chester (Rising Tides). In the following years Swenson allowed her poems to be published in anthologies edited by Elly Bulkin and Joan Larkin; by Anca Vrbovska, Alfred Dorn, and Mildred Wiackley; by Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone; and by Carl Morse and Joan Larkin.

7 Phone conversation with Rozanne Knudson, June 14, 1997.

8 Although quite diverse for the most part, this body of work shares, as a starting point, Laura Mulvey's seminal 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in which her explication of the gaze-as-male seeks to expose the ways in which film reflects and encourages contemporary heterosexist constructions of sexual difference. It is beyond the purpose of this essay to directly interrogate the subsequent evolution of feminist film theories, but I do think it is relevant to this discussion of Swenson to note the ways in which this evolution still tends to refigure the equation of the gaze-as-male to mean that only males can gaze - thus leading to the inadvertent reification of gender codes in which women are figured as the passive victims of an inherently active male subjectivity. I think Swenson's work provides many possibilities for an interesting comparison of methodologies. For a sampling of the different theoretical projects that are commonly determined by this perspective, see Mary Ann Doane and Bad Object Choices. For an excellent analysis of the ways in which particular films have worked to contest this equation of the gaze-as-male, see Kaja Silverman's Male Subjectivity at the Margins, chapter 3, and The Threshold of the Visible World.

WORKS CITED

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Barnstone, Aliki, and Willis Barnstone, eds. A Book of Women Poets From Antiquity to Now. New York: Schocken, 1980.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge, 1993.

-----. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997.

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Chester, Laura, ed. Rising Tides: Twentieth Century American Women Poets. New York: Washington square, 1973.

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Draves, Cornelia, and Mary Jane Fortunato. "Craft Interview with May Swenson." New York Quarterly 19 (Fall 1977): 14-25.

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Harrison, Victoria. Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

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-----. "May Swenson: 'Turned Back to the Wild by Love'." Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950. New York: Atheneum, 1969.

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-----, eds. Lesbian Poetry: An Anthology. Watertown: Persephone, 1981.

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-----. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. Boston: Beacon, 1986.

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-----. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996.

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-----. "The Experience of Poetry in a Scientific Age." Poets on Poetry. Ed. Howard Nemerov. New York: Basic, 1966. 147-59.

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-----. New and Selected Things Taking Place. Boston: Little, 1978.

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KIRSTIN HOTELLNG ZONA is assistant professor of poetry at Illinois State University. She has published articles on Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop and is currently at work on a book about the feminist poetics of Moore, Bishop, and Swenson.