239“Why is your mouth all green?”
Something Alive in May Swenson
“
Maybe, somehow, after the New Year we
can get together. We ’d love to see the Blue-Footed Boobies on your slides,
and hear about the Galápagos Islands. What luck to have been there!” The
slides belong to Elizabeth Bishop, the “we” is May Swenson (1913–1989) and
her partner Rozanne Knudson, the blue-footed boobies are gooselike tropical
seabirds living on arid islands off South America’s Pacific coast, with five-foot
wingspan and powder-blue webbed feet.
It ’s no surprise these poets were friends, exchanging over 250 letters during
thirty years. Enthusiasm for the makings of poetry kept them close, and for
vivid flora and fauna. The blue-footed booby also signals their love of Marianne
Moore ’s odd creatures and “audacious, hypnotic peacock display of language”
(Swenson).
Professional candor marks these letters too. Swenson says about Bishop’s
recording of “The Fish,” “You couldn’t ruin it, even with that awful reading
that sounded like a stock market report” (which is a fair description). Bishop
cautions her against unorthodox punctuation and “low-brow” grammar. Their
suggestions about unpublished poems are advanced firmly, gratefully acknowl-
edged, and seldom taken.
In a house with no indoor plumbing and a boardwalk to the outhouse, Swen-
son was born in 1913, eldest among ten children of Swedish Mormon immigrants
to Logan, Utah. Helping her mother with the kids and endless chores, she ’d