Maud Lavin, known for acclaimed titles such as Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (Yale UP, named a New York Times Notable Book); Push Comes to Shoeve: New Images of Aggressive Women (MIT), and three anthologies, has a new poetry collection out with Tulipwood Books. The imprint, started last year by Lynne Ellis (formerly of Papeachu Press), centers collaboration —a fitting home for Swim Lessons, which extends themes Lavin explored in her debut novel Mermaids and Lazy Activists. That book follows a woman of a certain age who loves to swim and meets Evelyn, a mermaid—feral, strapping, rule-breaking—in Lake Michigan.
Lavin is Professor Emerita at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was the 2020 recipient of the Distinguished Feminist Award for scholarship from the College Art Association of America.As a key pioneer in feminist art history and visual studies. her attention to the personal and political continues to weave together in her latest work.
Swim Lessons was fittingly released the first week of September; when the brightest rays of summer are slowly dimming and Chicagoans are resting on the horizon line of a calming Lake Michigan. While summer is when most engage in worshiping the Lake, Lavin’s debut poetry collection showcases the custom of worshiping the lake year-round.
Swim Lessons is a love letter to Lake Michigan that combines poetry and personal essays. The work explores swimming as a gesture for being, loving, making, and understanding with the world around you. With striking imagery and lyrical storytelling, Lavin’s book sits nicely in conversation with many other poets who explore the meaning behind our waters, our bodies, and our larger world.
Lavin frequents 57th Street Beach, nestled between Jackson Park and the highly-coveted Promontory Point. Every morning, South Side swimmers gather here and create community through the shared ritual. This nexus provides most of the inspiration of Swim Lessons, along with connection to other Midwestern spots like Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Southwest Michigan, and Stark County, Ohio.
The book is organized into two parts — “The Lake” and “The Flows” — with both halves exploring the intersection of water, earth, and air. The subjects of the poems are often buoyant, floating between activity and rest, introspection and observation, lightness and darkness. The speaker contemplates what it means to “flow” through life: “I wade way out to swim, plunge into breaststroke, frog kick, as if I could go forever.”—while echoing a question from Anne Carson’s Plainwater: Essays and Poetry: “What does a lake dream?” Lavin paints that dream for us throughout this collection as “The Lake breathes with hope.”
A deep sense of pleasure permeates Swim Lessons. Its introduction states that “water is generous” declaring its mission to expand on that generosity. The pleasure of the Lake has the power to “blow up boredom like a balloon.” Lavin’s commitment to the water shows us how, these days, joy is a radical act.
The power of joy propels the subjects of the poems forward and the water charges them with vitality. This joy emanates to the point of divinity. In “Recipe for Self-Care” Lavin introduces “…two actual mermaids, ages approximately seven and ten. Sure, they look like little girls sticking their legs out together / while their friends cover the leg-tails with sand. / They say they are mermaids. Believe them.”
Lavin includes “deep-sea monsters” and mermaids that “don’t always want to swim with fish” in the waters of this collection. They symbolize the unknowable strangeness and mystery of water and its undeniable beauty and seduction. Lavin, being an expert on how women are depicted in visual culture, uses mermaids as the sacrosanct symbol for how the water transforms us inside and out.
In “Page of Cups” the speaker administers a tarot card spread and asks the cards: “What is water? / what is water and swimming?” Throughout the book, the act of swimming is precious, and Lavin acknowledges it as a privilege to know, feel comfortable with, and engage in—especially in Lake Michigan, which has a temperament all its own. Not all swimmers can effectively negotiate with it.Lavin’s understanding of the Lake shows us that the water can be read, and it takes time and love to have it love you back.
The desire to understand water extend to managing its healing properties of water where “dull ankle pain disappears.” The speaker mentions needing walking sticks due to spine damage. Water reduces pressure on joints, helping people with arthritis or injuries. In “When the What Ifs Turn into Nows” Lavin confirms that having a relationship with the lake is a life priority because “life is friable and [what if I] devote mine to love, Lake Michigan, cocoa powder, friendship, laziness, writing, readings.”
The sensuality of water and swimming dances throughout the collection, where the speaker asks, “What is swimming if not trading caresses.” In “Bodies, Water,” sex is as playful as water. On a date in Central Park, “we decide we want to fuck under the bushes. Like a dare.” The nearby Reservoir seduces the characters into union. The sensuality of being in or near water is applied universally as a way of being. Writing itself is seen through the senses and the exuberance of it is equated to “having control, and then letting it go.”
Swim Lessons also explores the presence of water in traditions. In “Seder” Lavin writes “I wanted to eat. Still, / the prayers were wonderful, and the songs, and the rituals, the parsley/ dipped in salt water, / the bitter maror / the songs, Dayenu.” The concept of “Dayenu” rings throughout the collection, celebrating acts of deliverance and kindness. The Dayenu is a song consisting of a list of miracles, with each stanza beginning “if only [this one thing] had been done,” followed by the refrain “Dayenu!” —which the speaker says after experiencing fireflies within the farm hills of Ohio.
Lake Michigan and its importance to Chicago and the Midwest region provides another dimension for the book. Water can remind us of previous generations who also lived in the same water. Reginald Shepherd hints at this sense of totality in “Geology of Water,” asserting that “Water is a memento they’ve thrown back.” Lavin interrogates who the “they” might be. In “Craters” this question starts with: “If there were ancient civilizations / and they blew it, then when we blow it, / a few humans can rebuild in glory, deep in the sea.”
The book embraces the beauty of the Midwest in all its colorful layers. As Nelson Algren’s profile, Chicago City on the Make, confesses that “…maybe it’s a poet’s town for the same reason it’s a working stiff’s town…” The “lesson” in Lavin’s “Generous Chicago” with “a Lake that’s an inland sea” is that the work of Chicago, the work of swimming, and the work of poetry all amount to the same thing: to connect, love, and embrace our larger world and each other.
