May Swenson, who died in 1989 at the age of seventy-six, was a lover of riddles. She liked to write them as well as to solve them—the harder the better. Like the riddle poems she assembled in two books for young readers, all her poems have the capacity to tease and delight. “A poem is a thing,” Swenson tells us in her introduction to one of these collections, More Poems to Solve (1972).1 Often based on intricate mechanisms that are not easily replicated, Swenson’s poems seem more to have been constructed than composed. Excerpting them is an extreme disservice, as it limits the reader’s perspective of the overall design. The poems often take up space in every direction on the page, asserting their identity quite literally at every turn. Individual poems have the kinetic ability to spill over diagonally into stanzaic receptacles, embody the shape and spirit of paintings by De Chirico, and spin like a top around a still center. Although Swenson was clearly engaged in the experimental enterprise to a degree that would charm any scientist, her poetic experimentation was more a means than an end. A language poet before the phrase was coined, she surely would have disdained the label, for her poems are clearly “about” more than the words themselves.
If, like Dickinson, Swenson “tells it slant,” that slantwise logic is as much a part of her identity as any political or aesthetic affiliation. Riddling, like role playing, is made up of art and craft, and the critic or biographer must rise to the challenge. The poem, “Her Early Work,” with its overt reference to Elizabeth Bishop’s 1933 poem, “A Word with You” (Bishop 218), anticipates the biographer’s task:
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