Writing is “based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming.” ~May Swenson
Creativity Prompt #24: Tracing the Edge of Great Shadow | 30-Day Creativity Challenge
With umbrella (1939) painting by Paul Klee
My dearest creatives, as we enter day 24 of our creativity challenge, I find myself … very tired! I have written thousands and thousands of words in these short essays and instructions so far in April, probably more than thirty thousand words total, which of course far exceeds what I was imagining at the outset of this adventure, back in March, when I impulsively and naively conceived of and announced this grand idea!
And in truth I am nothing other than thrilled, for—as many of you know—I am certainly working on a craft book that will include both writing philosophy, personal essay, and structured prompts, and with this bounty of material I have now created far more than an outline and architecture for such a book, I have begun to fill its chapters.
I am thrilled at the thought of it, for I know now that while one can benefit from working with some aspect of these prompts every day for 30 days, the best creatively enriching results will come from a lifetime of immersing in this way of being, from an ongoing practice of living the questions, befriending the unknown, and learning to see through things like a window, so that the mundane becomes more consistently miraculous. And of course we also need to marinate in the words and work of brilliant writers who have done and are doing just that.
One such writer is the poet May Swenson. In today’s creativity prompt, we will study Swenson’s short poem, “Question” as inspiration for a simple but never easy multi-step prompt exploring the intersection of metaphor and question—and what a potent intersection that is for creative growth!
Sarton opens her short, powerful poem with a mixed metaphor of the body:
Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
I have more to say about the craft and imagery in this poem, but first, a bit about Swenson herself, who is in so many ways a model for not just seeing, but in fact creating wonder from ordinariness, and articulating that alchemy in language. I found a brief biography for Swenson on Poetry Foundation, and was intrigued to learn that while she was born in Logan, Utah, her parents were Swedish immigrants, and she grew up speaking Swedish at home. The fact that English was her second language feels evident in her poetry to me, in the same way that I am at times starstruck by the beauty of things my Chinese-immigrant son-in-law says to me in English. Once, for example, when we were speaking of something we would soon be doing, a special occasion as a family, I said, “I realize it isn’t accurate to say it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but it feels very special nonetheless.” And Tao, looking thoughtful, said, “You could say that it is countable, because some things are so rare you can count how many times they will occur.” His observation wholly changed my experience of the meaning of the English word “countable.” I loved it then and love it still.
So, May Swenson spoke English as her second language, and perhaps that was an asset to her in her playfulness with language, as evidenced in this, my favorite image from the short poem “Question,” when Swenson refers to the hound of her body as a “good bright dog” who will die:
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead
More on Swenson from her bio on Poetry Foundation just further underscores so much of what we have spoken of, and attempted together, during this creatively rich and challenging month of April:
[Swenson’s] careful attention to the suggestiveness of objects, persons, and events of ordinary life could recall Elizabeth Bishop, with whom Swenson corresponded for decades. …
Swenson’s poetry was widely praised for its precise and beguiling imagery, and for the quality of its personal and imaginative observations. Taking inspiration from daily events, ordinary rituals, and the natural world, Swenson revealed “the larger, warmer energies of earth,” according to poet Richard Howard.
What a gorgeous observation, one only someone who sees with a poet’s eyes could make: the larger, warmer energies of the earth. Swenson herself said that the experience of poetry is:
…based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming. This ambition involves a paradox: an instinctive belief in the senses as exquisite tools for this investigation and, at the same time, a suspicion about their crudeness.
Also, this:
“The poet, tracing the edge of a great shadow whose outline shifts and varies, proving there is an invisible moving source of light behind, hopes (naively, in view of his ephemerality) to reach and touch the foot of that solid whatever-it-is that casts the shadow. If sometimes it seems he does touch it, it is only to be faced with a more distant, even less accessible mystery. Because all is movement—all is breathing change.”
And her bio on the Poetry Foundation site gives additional inspiring insight into how this poet saw and sensed the word, as observed by her contemporaries as they reviewed her work:
As Priscilla Long commented in the Women’s Review of Books, “Swenson was a visionary poet, a prodigious observer of the fragile and miraculous natural world.” And in the Los Angeles Times Eloise Klein Healy described how “correspondences among all life forms pour from her work, confirming that nothing is meaningless. The universe’s basic beauty and balance is the stuff and soul of her poems.”
The poet William Stafford once observed: “No one today is more deft and lucky in discovering a poem than May Swenson. Her work often appears to be proceeding calmly, just descriptive and accurate; but then suddenly it opens into something that looms beyond the material, something that impends and implies… So graceful is the progression in her poems that they launch confidently into any form, carrying through it to easy, apt variations. Often her way is to define things, but the definitions have a stealthy trend; what she chooses and the way she progresses heap upon the reader a consistent, incremental effect.”
Swenson’s ability to draw out the metaphysical implications of the material world were widely commented on; but she was also known for her lighthearted, even joyous, take on life in decades characterized by febrile “confessional” verse. Riddles, chants, and calligrams—experiments in typography and layout—dot Swenson’s oeuvre. Reviewing Half Sun, Half Sleep Karl Shapiro wrote: “The whole volume is an album of experiments… that pay off. It is strange to see the once-radical carmen figuratum, the calligraphic poem, spatial forms, imagist and surreal forms—all the heritage of the early years of the century—being used with such ease and unselfconsciousness.”
For today’s structured prompt, we will channel the experimental, inventive spirit of May Swenson, opening ourselves to her yearning for the “tracing the edge of a great shadow”—the one that shades that elusive but astonishing intersection of metaphor and question. This is a simple prompt you can try numerous times with different combinations to see what you might (again, in the spirit of Swenson) deftly discover.