GLR January-February 2026

BOOKS

May Swenson’s ‘Devastating Passion’

I N THE FALL OF 1970, fresh out of college, I was teaching at a private girls’ school in Kansas City. The head mistress required the seniors to attend a poetry reading given by May Swenson. Although I’d majored in English, I had never heard of Swenson, then 57 years old with five books of poetry to her credit. Swenson, “a little walnut of a person,” according to one of her friends, was at the

spondence, autobiographical pieces, and in terviews, Brucia has written what is, ac cording to Paul Crumbley and David Hoak, two Swenson scholars who contributed a foreword to the book, “the most intimate study of the poet’s life to date.” Publicly Swenson was guarded about her sexuality. Growing up in “a bubble of Mormonism,” she was expected to live a pure, righteous, and heterosexually married

P HILIP G AMBONE

THE KEY TO EVERYTHING May Swenson, A Writer’s Life by Margaret A. Brucia Princeton University Press 288 pages, $29.95

life. Nevertheless, by her teenage years, she felt a “devastating passion” for other women. While studying at Utah State Agri cultural College, she drifted away from the church, started smoking, used profanity, and quietly embraced her lesbian iden tity. Soon after she graduated, the restless would-be poet found herself yearning for “glory, every kind,” as she wrote in her diary. New York, the city of Thomas Wolfe and Walt Whitman, was “ferociously awaiting” her. In 1936 Swenson moved there, rented a typewriter, and got to work. By her own admission, she “came at poetry back wards,” never having studied prosody or “acquired a back ground in what had already been done by others.” The lack of a firm poetic grounding did not deter her. Nor did her workaday life, which floundered in a series of menial dead-end jobs. Swenson plunged into New York’s literary and social life, hang ing out in Greenwich Village and reading lesbian fiction. She was looking to connect with artists and writers. Instead, in 1937, she met Arnold Kates, an advertising executive. She shared some of her poems with him and was delighted to see that “he knows and feels what I feel.” Kates became a major presence in Swenson’s life, accompanying her on “raucous evenings spent studio hopping and drinking with young artists.” Brucia says that Swenson loved Arnold and enjoyed him sexually, but the conventional life he offered could never satisfy her. “In rela tionships with women, May saw no threat to her ability to grow, flourish, and remain her own person.” By 1938, Swenson had landed a gig as a fieldworker with the Federal Writers’ Project, conducting interviews with immigrants and native-born Americans. One of those interviews was with Anca Vrbovska, a Czech Jew, ardent Communist, and poet with whom she soon began an affair. “And now again,” Swenson recorded in her diary, “the thing electric and dreadful and un willingly desired—but desired. I have never really loved any man.” By December she and Anca were living together. Although she was now in a satisfying lesbian relationship, Swenson continued to hide the gender of her inamorata in her love poems. When the affair ended in 1948, she wrote an auto biographical work—Brucia calls it “her heady novelette”—in which she explored “the whirlpool of [her] innermost thoughts.” She was also exploring her “look.” “The problem of Fem or Butch,” she wrote, “wanting to be both at once—excruciating conflict.” In 1949, Swenson met Pearl Schwartz, who would become

top of her game that night. I remember being delighted by the wit and humor in the poems she read, their coy wisdom and crisp imagery. What I most remember, though, was Swenson’s haircut, close-cropped and boyish. In New England, where I hailed from, her look wouldn’t have attracted my attention. But in Kansas City, where women and girls groomed themselves for maximum “feminine” appeal, Swenson was an outlier. MyGod, I thought. She’s a lesbian! Swenson’s lesbianism is at the heart of Margaret A. Brucia’s new biography, The Key to Everything: May Swenson, A Writer’s Life. Making use of the poet’s extensive diaries, corre

Philip Gambone recently published his seventh book, Zigzag (Rattling Good Yarns Press), a collection of short stories about older gay men.

January–February 2026

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