“Then she showed me what she saw. Faces in the patterns of the bark, angle of the sun on the leaves, shapes in the tree’s shadow on the lawn,” Eyre said. “I didn’t realize it, but she was trying to get me to see like a poet.”

Eyre has since gone on to publish books on family life with some of the nation’s top publishers and travel around the country giving presentations to major organizations. His “real desire,” though, is to become a poet like his Aunt May — and his first volume of poetry will come out next year.

For now, Eyre and his extensive family are involved in a project helping to preserve Swenson’s legacy — rebuilding Swenson’s Logan childhood home, which used to be located near the base of Old Main Hill, 669 E. 500 North, until it was demolished by USU years ago. The project would likely house visiting scholars, writing workshops and artifacts from the Swenson family.

The home reconstruction project is just one more step in an effort on the part of the Swenson family and scholars to raise awareness in Cache Valley of the woman who graduated from USU, went on publish 11 volumes of poetry, receive numerous prestigious honors and influence generations of poets after her.

Paul Crumbley, a USU English professor and Swenson expert, said while Swenson is well-known in academic circles, what’s not well known by the general public is that she is from Logan.

“Many people who know May’s work don’t think of her and Logan,” Crumbley said. “They imagine her on Sea Cliff, Long Island, where she lived for many years. But we’re really the point of origin.”

Star Coulbrooke, Logan’s poet laureate, also noted Swenson’s obscurity in Logan despite prominence in the poetry world.

“They don’t know her work like they do Robert Frost because they didn’t study her in school,” Coulbrooke said. “She’s still missing from Logan in a big way, and part of my job is to promote May Swenson and help people understand how important she is to the poetry world and that they have a very famous person from their town who’s internationally renowned.”

Recent/proposed Swenson projects

Before the idea of recreating Swenson’s childhood home was proposed, a number of projects centering around the Logan poet have popped up in recent years.On May 28, 2011 — what would have been Swenson’s 98th birthday — a plaque at the Bear Lake overlook on Highway 89 was unveiled featuring her poem “Above Bear Lake.”In 2013 — the year Swenson would have turned 100 — a May Swenson symposium at USU was organized, featuring Katharine Coles, a professor at the University of Utah and NPR’s Garrison Keillor reading their favorite Swenson poems.

That same year, The Library of America released what many scholars for years had been hoping for — a complete volume of Swenson’s work in one publication. The book, “Swenson: Collected Poems,” includes her first poem, “Another Animal” in 1954, to her final work, “In Other Words,” in 1987. Swenson died in 1989.

“Before that, there was no single volume that contained all of her poems,” Crumbley said. “Until you get a single volume, it’s very difficult for professors at universities or English teachers in high school to really incorporate her into the curriculum. This is a centralized clearinghouse that lets you see early, middle and late works. It’s taken us far too long to get to this point.”

In addition to these projects, USU has had quite a few long-standing ways it recognizes Swenson.

There are several “May Swenson Room(s)” for scholars and students to study, which also contain artifacts related to Swenson, including the typewriter she wrote on.

There’s also a May Swenson Poetry Award in her honor.

Room for more

But still, Crumbley would like to see more, including a biography about Swenson.“This is a fascinating woman, and so I think it would excite a lot of interest,” Crumbley said.The closest publication to a biography is “A Poet’s Life In Photos,” by R.R. Knudson and Suzzanne Bigelow, which gives a comprehensive overview of Swenson’s life and includes quotes and photos from the poet.

For now, the focus of recreating the Swenson childhood home is one way of raising her profile in Logan.

“Not just because she deserves it, but I think associating May Swenson with Logan, Cache Valley and USU does a lot to both increase the sense of personal possibility for students and community members — in the arts and, more particularly, as poets,” Crumbley said. “Young people, if they know growing up that someone achieved excellence in a particular field in their own town, it makes that seem more possible to them.”

Chris Eyre, a venture capitalist in Palo Alto, California, who is a nephew of Swenson’s, said the home rebuilding is critical.

“I would think there would be multiple rewards for those that are studying, particularly poetry and literary education,” Eyre said. “This would be a wonderful and peaceful place to gather.”

Swenson legacy

Once people in the valley get to know who Swenson is, scholars say, there’s plenty to dwell on as far as the legacy she left to poetry. Swenson, by all accounts, was not afraid to write about any subject.According to a booklet created by USU detailing the Swenson home project, the MacArthur Foundation praised her for her “inventiveness with sounds and shapes, technical capacity and sense of human sympathy.” Swenson received the prestigious fellowship grant from the foundation.Coulbrooke credited Swenson with her sense of possibility in poetry writing.

“I didn’t know you could put dialogue and humor and riddles and questions in poems,” Coulbrooke said. “She gives voice through a lot of different things I didn’t know you could in poetry.”

Coulbrooke points to a favorite Swenson poem of hers, “Bleeding,” where a cut — a bleeding wound — and a knife are having a dialogue with one another. Spacing within the poem creates white space resembling a cut through the block of text from the first line down to the last.

“It made a huge impression on me,” Coulbrooke said, recalling an English class she took at USU where she was introduced to Swenson’s poetry. “I could feel the knife and the cut as we read the poem.”

Eyre said Swenson’s work definitely set her apart from other poets.

“I always feel a raw honesty in her verse and a physicality that is palpable,” Eyre said. “She saw so much that others missed, and always saw it uniquely.”

In her own words

Swenson talked about her approach to her work in an interview with The Herald Journal in 1987, when she came back to Logan accept an honorary degree from Utah State University.“I don’t feel I have to follow certain rules or write a certain way,” Swenson said. “Poetry writing lets you lead a very selfish life which I should feel guilty about, but I don’t.”Swenson emphasized she was self-taught in poetry writing.

“I allow each poem to indicate, during its making, its individual directions and organic form,” Swenson said. “Believing that content and structure tend to fit together naturally with the poet alert to all of the riches and nuances of language, while taking care to recognize instinctive hints from the subconscious along with providing intellectual acuity.”

Writing poetry was never a struggle for Swenson, she said.

“When you write a poem it has surprises in it,” Swenson said. “It tells you things you never knew you knew and there is no obligation in it.”