CHaSS breaks ground for house honoring poet’s legacy

The College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Utah State University broke ground Tuesday for the upcoming Swenson House, a student writing and events center dedicated to poet and USU alum May Swenson.

About 200 students, faculty and community members attended the ceremony. The center, which is designed after Swenson’s childhood home in Logan, will begin construction starting in the spring and is planned to include a café, reading nooks, a conference room and event space. It will be located at 669 E 500 N in Logan, toward the bottom of Old Main Hill.

“We reimagine the Swenson house as a place that might foster the next May Swenson,” said Joe Ward, the dean of CHaSS. “Perhaps, many years down the line, he or she might return to this place to lead a writing workshop or conduct a reading on subjects familiar to readers of Swenson, such as the intricacies of the natural world, the thrill of scientific discovery, or the anchor of family and community.”

The English department recognized the finalists of this year’s Swenson Legacy Poetry Contest. The first place winner, graduate student and instructor Staci Denetsosie, read her winning poem “Granddaddy: The Glowing Man,” which was inspired by lines in Swenson’s poem, “October.”

“The thing that touched me in ‘October’ was the way Swenson wrote about her father, and the role he took on,” Denetsosie said. “There’s so much attention to detail and it really encapsulates that familial relationship. I chose to write about my grandfather because family is really important to me.”

CHaSS Student Senator McKenna Dowdle said she hopes the house will encourage creativity and unification in the community.

“The spirit of CHaSS is to challenge students to be creative and to be the best students they can be,” she said. “This will be a place for students, faculty and community members to come together.”

As USU pays homage to the famous poet, some recall a time when the university was more reluctant to claim Swenson’s work and legacy.

Paul Crumbley, USU English professor and author of “Body My House: May Swenson’s Work and Life,” said before her death, Swenson wanted to place her collection of papers and work at Utah State. However A.J. Simmonds, then director of Special Collections, was not interested in working with Swenson and turned them down, Crumbley said.

Swenson placed her papers at Washington University in St. Louis under the encouragement of poet and Washington University employee, Mona Van Duyn, said the curator of the WU Modern Literature Collection, Joel Minor.

“May was indeed solicited by Mona Van Duyn to add her papers to WUSL, appropriately so as other major American poets were doing likewise, so as to build a major source for scholarly work,” said Carole Berglie, the executor of Swenson’s literary estate.

However, contrary to Crumbley’s story, Berglie believes Swenson never considered USU at all when deciding where to place her work.

“To suggest that she might have previously offered them to USU is fanciful; May was only too aware of the importance of the selection and she would have known that USU was not appropriate,” Berglie said.

The papers remain in the Modern Literature Collection at WU today.

Simmonds died in a home explosion in 1995 and Swenson died in 1989. Whether she offered her papers to USU first or took them directly to WU is unproven.

Katie Miner, a junior studying political science and art history, worked on a project about Swenson last December titled “Welcome Home May.” Pictures and poetry from Swenson’s life were hung in a gallery where viewers were encouraged to leave responses.

Miner said she was interested in how people might respond to her work today and how Swenson’s legacy is viewed in the Logan community.

“If we’re going to claim May, I wanted to know how people feel about her work,” she said.

Miner said the responses were largely positive. Though a large collection of her work is housed in Missouri, some of her belongings and work are currently residing in an atrium on the fourth floor of the Merrill-Cazier library, in the library archives, and in the May Swenson room in the Ray B. West building.

“May was a CHaSS graduate and we’re really proud of that,” said Natalie Smoot, the assistant to the dean.

@naomiyokoward

– naomiyokoward@aggiemail.usu.edu