Swann Read Online Free PDF

that I am more or less—he is endlessly equivocal in the best scholarly tradition—
more or less
the discoverer of Swann’s work. He has even committed this fact to print in a short footnote on page six of his 1983 paper “Swann’s Synthesis,” naming me, Sarah Maloney of Chicago, the one “most responsible for bringing the poet Mary Swann to public attention.” This mention on Willard’s part is an academic courtesy and no more.
    Ah, but Willard’s kind of courtesy amounts to a professional sawing off, a token coin dropped in a bank to permit future withdrawals. Willard Lang’s nod in my direction—“S. Maloney must be cited as the one who”—is a simple declaration of frontier between authority and discovery, Willard being the authority, while S. Maloney (me) is given the smaller, slightly less distinguished role of discoverer.
    In truth, no one really discovers anyone; it’s the stickiest kind of arrogance even to think in such terms. Mary Swann discovered herself, and therein, suspended on tissues of implausibility, like a hammock without strings, hangs the central mystery: how did she do it? Where in those bleak Ontario acres, that littered farmyard, did she find the sparks that converted emblematic substance into rolling poetry? Chickens, outhouses, wash-day, woodpiles, porch, husband, work-boots, overalls, bedstead, filth. That’s the stuff this woman had to work with.
    On the other hand, it’s a legacy from the patriarchy, a concomitant of conquest, the belief that poets shape their art from materials that are mysterious and inaccessible. Women have been knitting socks for centuries, and probably they’ve been constructing, in their heads, lines of poetry that never got written down. Mary Swann happened to have a pen, a Parker 51 as a matter of fact, as well as an eye for the surface of things. Plus the kind of heart-cracking persistence that made her sit down at the end of a tired day and box up her thoughts into quirky parcels of rhymed verse.
    It was an incredible thing for a woman in her circumstances to do, and in the face of so much implausibility I sometimes chant to myself the simple list that braces and contains her. Girlhood in Belleville, Ontario; schooling limited; nothing known about mother; or father; worked for a year in a local bakery; married a farmer and moved to theNadeau district, where she bore a daughter, wrote poems, and got herself killed at the age of fifty. That’s all. How Jimroy intends to boil up a book out of this thin stuff is a mystery.
    My own responsibility toward Mary Swann, as I see it, is custodial. If Olaf Thorkelson hadn’t badgered me into near breakdown and driven me into the refuge of northern Wisconsin where Mary Swann’s neglected book of poems fell like a bouquet into my hands, I would never have become Swann’s watchwoman, her literary executor, her defender and loving caretaker. But, like it or not, that’s what I am. Let others promote her and do their social and psychoanalytical sugarjobs on her; but does anyone else—besides me that is—detect the little smiles breaking around her most dolorous lines? Willard Lang, swine incarnate, is capable of violating her for his own gain, and so is the absent-minded, paranoid, and feckless Buswell in Ottawa. Morton Jimroy means well, poor sap, but he’ll try to catch her out or bend her into God’s messenger or the handmaiden of Emily Dickinson; or else he’ll stick her into a three-cornered constellation along with poor impotent Pound and that prating, penis-dragging Starman. Someone has to make sure she’s looked after. Because her day is coming. Never mind what Willard Lang thinks. Mary Swann is going to be big, big, big. She’s the right person at the right time for one thing: a woman, a survivor, self-created. A man like Morton Jimroy wouldn’t be bothering with her if he didn’t think she was going to take off. Willard wouldn’t be wasting his time organizing a symposium if he didn’t