Two Collage Poems & an Essay

May Swenson (1913–1989), a leading twentieth-century poet, published hundreds of poems, gave numerous readings, and won many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is well known for her work exploring topics ranging from sensuality to the natural world and science. According to Eloise Klein Healy, “correspondences among all life forms pour from [Swenson’s] work, confirming that nothing is meaningless. The universe’s basic beauty and balance is the stuff and soul of her poems.”¹ 

The following are two of Swenson’s tandem collage poems tackle the nature of the universe in a visually dynamic way. 

May Swenson's Tandem Collage Poems

by Brook Haight & Christine Cooper-Rompato

The two tandem, visual poems were discovered in the archives at Washington University in St. Louis. Swenson’s papers are held primarily at Utah State University Special Collections and Archives and Washington University Archives, with the latter holding the bulk. “Box 223” in the Realia Series is described in the catalog as containing “artwork by Swenson.” The box contains these tandem collage poems.² 

By “tandem poems” in this context we mean poems by one author appearing on two sides of a specific medium; the term “diptych” may also be used, although this usually indicates two pieces of artwork displayed side by side. Brook Haight first discovered these poems after completing an archiving class with Dr. Christine Cooper-Rompato at Utah State University and then pursuing a research project in spring 2025 on Swenson’s art funded by the Cache Valley Historical Society. Haight contacted Washington University about Box 223 and the curator of Swenson’s manuscripts, Joel Minor, sent several images of Swenson’s drawings, including the two tandem poems. 

The tandem poems showcase Swenson’s interest in the natural world and science. They are primarily composed of newspaper and magazine clippings augmented by personal drawings and underlined with pen and crayon. Throughout her published work, Swenson explored the shapes of words on the page, as she created many concrete or shaped poems. These two collage poems are an extension of her interest in how words and visual art interact. Swenson wrote about the process of composing poetry and the value of poetry, which she likened to the exploration of science. In her essay “The Experience of Poetry in a Scientific Age,” Swenson writes, “Science and poetry are alike, or allied, it seems to me, in their largest and main target—to investigate any and all phenomena of existence beyond the flat surface of appearances.”³  

It is not clear which collage poem is meant to be read first (i.e., which is the front and the back). For the ease of discussion, we have selected the visually less complex image, “Recommended Reading” (with the photograph of the earth), to be the recto and “We will get the future we learn to expect” to be the verso. Whereas the reading orientation of the recto side is clear, the reading orientation of the verso side is not immediately clear. 

The poem “Recommended Reading” features a magazine page with a view of the earth from space with a caption below describing the image. This particular color image of the earth was photographed by the unmanned Applications Technology Satellite-III on November 18, 1967 and published in an article titled “Weather Satellites: II” by Arthur W. Johnson.⁴ The purpose of the photographs was to reveal the earth’s “air-mass motion, cloud heights, rainfall, pollution and natural disasters”⁵  so that humankind could work toward “precisely modifying the weather for the benefit of man.”⁶ At the top center of Swenson’s page are the words “tempts to eradicate its species” with the words “yet is almost unbelievably” half covered. These appear to be purposefully folded over onto this page from the verso side. On the top right of the page are the words “Recommended Reading”; this is also folded over from the verso side.

In this poem, Swenson calls out the passivity of those people on earth who can view the planet as a whole but are unwilling to protect it from themselves. The title “Recommended Reading” enhances this feeling of inertia and/or acquiescence by suggesting that the destruction of the planet is something recommended (but not necessary) to pay attention to. As Swenson described in her essay “The Experience of Poetry in a Scientific Age,” “On the one hand–and virtually with the same engine–man prepares to fly to the stars, while on the other he seems intent on annihilating himself along with his sole perch in the universe.”⁷ The poem invokes similar reactions to the iconic “earthrise” photo (1968), which attempted to propel people to care for the planet.

“We Will Get the Future We Learn to Expect/Spaceship Earth” is a complex visual and word arrangement that challenges the viewer to see the fantastic designs of the natural world from the micro to the macro. Having spent some time with the poem, we believe it is approached by starting either at the “top” with “We will get the future we learn to expect” or at the “bottom”  with “Spaceship Earth”—the orientation of top and bottom being determined by the location of Swenson’s signature and the date 1969. The collage can then be rotated in a counterclockwise motion. The images and words on this page are taken in large part from the New York Times, April 20, 1969 issue, specifically from Hugh Kenner’s review of two books, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by R. Buckminster Fuller (Southern Illinois University Press) and The Future of the Future by John McHale (George Braziller).⁸ 

The poem focuses on the patterns of nature and connects the smallest creatures (radiolaria, ocean crystals, and so forth) with both the human senses and human innovations such as the geodesic dome. As the article quoted by Swenson asserts, there is no distinction between what humans create and what is “natural”: “Man can do nothing nature does not permit.”  Swenson is fascinated by the replicative power of the images: the geodesic dome replicates the shape of the earth; the radiograph of the snake is mirrored by the lines of the senses pulsating from the naked human body; the small circles in the magnification of the crystal virus are mirrored in the electron diffraction of zinc oxide. “Man’s intelligence is part of Nature, and its activities part of the evolutionary process,” Swenson underlines, emphasizing that the human and the natural can not be separated. Thus, “Spaceship Earth” is dependent on humans’ nurturing and integration with nature, not their opposition to and overcoming of it. “Life is a mystery,” Swenson once explained to Roy Swenson, her brother. “We must not give ourselves airs. We are not the apex of creation. It is all evolving. We don’t know what the answers will be.”  Swenson’s collage poems emphasize that “we will get the future we learn to expect”—we must see our place within nature and not above it. 

¹ Klein Healy quotation is from poetryfoundation.org. Original quotation from Eloise Klein Healy, “Book Review: Language that Looks into Vision,”  Los Angeles Times. March 22, 1979, p. 81. 

²May Swenson, “The Poet as Anti-Specialist,” was first published in Saturday Review, January 30, 1965. It was reprinted as “The Experience of Poetry in a Scientific Age” and included in Poets on Poetry, edited by Howard Nemerov (Basic Books, 1966). It was later reprinted in Made With Words, edited by Gardner McFall (University of Michigan Press, 1998) and in May Swenson: Collected Poems, edited by Langdon Hammer (Library of America, 2013). See also the radio interview conducted by Howard Nemerov for Library of Congress’ Voice of America Forum Lectures, 1963/64. This article came to be written as a result of that interview. 

³May Swenson, “The Experience of Poetry in a Scientific Age,” 147-159, in Poets on Poetry, edited by Howard Nemerov (Basic Books, 1966), p. 153.

⁴Arthur W. Johnson, “Weather Satellites: II,” Scientific American, vol. 220, no. 1 (1969), pp. 52–72.

⁵Kris Belden-Adams, Photography, Temporality, and Modernity: Time Warped, (Routledge, 2019), np, discussing figure 5.1.

⁶Johnson, “Weather Satellites: II,” 68.

⁷Swenson, “The Experience of Poetry in a Scientific Age,” 152. 

⁸Hugh Kenner, “Review: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by R. Buckminster Fuller and The Future of the Future by John McHale,“ New York Times, April 20 (1969): BR 33, BR 43. 

⁹Kenner, “Review,” referencing Bucky Fuller, 33.

¹⁰Kenner, “Review,” referencing Bucky Fuller, 33.

¹¹Paul Crumbley,  “May Swenson and Other Animals: Her Poetics of Natural Selection,”pp. 138-56  in Body My House: May Swenson’s Work and Life, edited by Paul Crumbley and Patricia M. Gantt (University Press of Colorado, 2006), p. 145.