SOURCE: "Important Witness to the World," in Parnassus, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1990, pp. 154-56.

In the following essay, Van Duyn, who was a friend of Swenson, offers a tribute to Swenson, reflecting on both Swenson's personal attributes and on her poetry.

May Swenson twice warmly introduced me from the reading platform, but I never had the privilege of introducing her. When I was invited to write a "blurb" for her last book, my eager pen moved on and on, writing, I knew, too long a response to be useful; passages were, however, taken from that tribute and printed on the book, along with praise from some of her many other admirers. I will begin by repeating those relatively condensed feelings of mine about her work, with the already printed parts indicated by quotation marks:

"May Swenson's is an art that comes as close as I know to what I like...