Lance Larsen

 

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Lance Larsen: Samuel Beckett says, I suppose about revision, but also writing in general, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” I love the terseness of that, and I think it values process and just continuing to plug along. There’s no magic to it, or the magic is in the process…

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Starly Pratt: Lance Larsen is the former poet laureate of Utah and a current professor at Brigham Young University. He is the author of six poetry collections. His work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Southern Review, The Sun, Harvard Review, Brevity, and elsewhere. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, an NEA fellowship, and first-place honors in recent contests sponsored by Missouri Review…

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Pratt: …Sewanee Review, and Swamp Pink. He’s made the notables list six times in Best American Essays. Join us today to discuss his most recent poetry collection, Making a Kingdom of It.

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Pratt: Okay, Lance, thank you so much for being on our podcast today! 

Lance Larsen: It’s a pleasure. Thank you. 

Pratt: Yeah, of course. So I just kind of want to get started kind of in the middle of it. And I actually want to start with kind of an unfair question. Or, at least, I presume it to be an unfair question.

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Pratt: As I’ve been studying poetry throughout my undergraduate and now my graduate degree, I have found that different people use various different definitions for what poetry is. Some call it attention, some love, some prayer, some song. If you had to define poetry, how would you define it?

Larsen: Well, there’s so many definitions. I like to lean on other poets. The one that I’ve been leaning into lately is Marianne Moore’s definition. She called poetry “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” I love the way that that privileges not only the imagination, but the way that we corroborate it with everyday experience. And if you lack either imagination or gritty, honest, persuasive detail, the poem is probably going to fail in some way.

Pratt: Yeah, but there’s, like you said, imaginative play in it as well. It has to have a spark to it.

Larsen: Right. Absolutely. 

Pratt: Yeah, I love that. And I feel like there are various definitions of poetry, even in your collection, Making a Kingdom of It, which is just beautiful. I particularly thought of your poem “Lap Swim at Rec Center Pool, 2:07 pm”—I think it’s towards the end. It’s a uniquely constructed poem, in that I found it kind of similar to a prayer or scripture in a way. Was that something that came after? Like, did the poem come to you and then the structure came to you, or did the poem come from the structure?

Larsen: Yeah, that’s a great question. Is it content chasing form or form chasing content? 

Pratt: Right. 

Larsen: I’d have to go back and look at the manuscript evidence. I’m not really sure, but at some point I became aware of the fact that swimming laps has a kind of repetitive, prayer-like dimension to it. And there’s a beautiful poem by Maxine Kumin about swimming that is written in couplets. So at a certain point, I realized I wanted the line to have its own integrity, and that I wanted anaphora, because maybe each line is a lap or something like that. 

Pratt: Right.

Larsen: And I’m very fond of list poems. They are narratively freeing, or they’re a way to free oneself from narrative. And so, I said, “Well, what would happen if the first word were blessed? What limits would that put on the poem, and how would it allow me to find a certain rich and repetitive rhythm, and a thought at the end of each line, and then start over?”—that sort of thing.

Pratt: Yeah, I love that. I actually kind of noticed a cyclical theme throughout a few of the poems, at least certainly in the beginning. There’s a poem, “Let There Be Birds.” You know, migration is kind of a cyclical movement. Similarly, “And Also, I Ran”: he runs away and runs back. “Triage:” mowing a lawn is kind of an up and down and back movement. And “Having My Back Erased,” which is one of my favorite poems from the collection, is also cyclical in that there’s an image created, and it’s wiped away. So do you think this cyclical nature is especially evident in poems that are similar to prayers?

Larsen: Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say that a number of these poems are prayerlike in one way or another. Poets are always looking for forms that will free them to say certain things or say them more intentionally or more intensively. And I find the repetitions are a quick way to dial into that. And they also provide a kind of structure so that you’re not just writing a sentence that goes on for three or four stanzas. I love it when a sentence does that effectively, but it can also—a long sentence can get out of one’s control, to the detriment of the poem.

Pratt: Yeah, certainly. But I don’t necessarily feel that. In fact, I kind of actually want to read “Having My Back Erased” just because I think it’s so beautiful. Do you mind if I read it? 

Larsen: No, please. 

Pratt: “Having My Back Erased”

A miracle, that ride home from ER: me leaning

    forward in the passenger seat, eyes closed,

             my mother driving and drawing pictures

    on my back with her finger. Anything to distract me

from the throbbing stitches under my puffed eye.

 

Now a windmill, now a giraffe. I was in third grade 

    and felt each gangling thing assemble, tremble 

            by tremble, on the terra incognita 

    of my skin. Even wrong guesses were a revelation in texture

and touch, not a comb but a rake, not a swing set

 

but an octopus. Then the marvelous erasing:

    just the broad warm flat of her hand. Like someone

            swabbing a deck. Or polishing it maybe. I was pure

    palimpsest, ions and vectors, a swirling energy

I hadn’t yet grown into. How she turned

 

me into nothing. Was I floating up 

    into sky, were migrating birds passing through me?

             I was ready to become whatever the sutured

    world needed me to become. Hairbrush,

T. Rex, stethoscope, praying mantis, blue canoe.

 

Pratt: I just love that imagery that you have throughout this poem. What was it that brought you back—I’m assuming this is autobiographical—what about this moment brought you to create this beautiful poem? 

Larsen: I think the physicality of it. One of the things that I tell my students in class is that poems are almost always more interesting when the poet is doing something, you know, or the protagonist is doing something, rather than just thinking thoughts or observing.

Pratt: Right. 

Larsen: And so this was a tactile poem, and it’s a way to connect, in this case, a child and a mother. So I try—that’s one of the litmus tests of a poem, is, can the poet or the speaker do something in a poem? It always makes it more interesting. And the task is also a way of asking questions and engaging with the world.

Pratt: Yeah, I love that, because it’s true. We experience the world through the physicality, through the materiality of it. And so, a poem that lacks that materiality would somehow also lack humanity, in a way, because it’s not grounded in reality.

Larsen: Absolutely. Absolutely. 

Pratt: Yeah, I love that. And I feel like you do that throughout this collection quite well. You put loving attention on something that I hadn’t even really thought of. You know, growing up, when I would go to church with my mom, my mom would draw on my back. And it was one of my favorite things. 

Larsen: I think it’s everybody’s favorite, right? 

Pratt: And we’d always complain when she would stop. So, it’s just wonderful to see different poems that draw attention to things that are a part of my life, and I didn’t even necessarily realize I loved. Which, in a way, I guess you could call poetry “loving attention.” Which reminds me of something that you include in the acknowledgments section of your collection. You say, “all love poems, real, imagined, or accidental, are dedicated to Jacqui Larsen,” who is your wife.

Larsen: Right.

Pratt: I think that’s so sweet to include, but it made me wonder: Are all poems love poems, in some way or another? 

Larsen: That’s a great question. I think that most poems are, and maybe are, and maybe all of them are if you stretch the definition of love. Certainly, there are poems that are, there are poems of great brutality in World War I. One thinks so. 

Pratt: Yes. 

Larsen: Wilfred Owen, is there love in that poem? I think there’s love for truth. And so we’re always in pursuit of something. Beauty and truth. If that constitutes love, then I would say, yeah, most successful poems would be love poems in one way or another. But many of them are more directly love poems, love for a particular person, or a thing, or an idea, or an ideal, whatever it might be. So we’re always in pursuit of that in one way or another. 

Pratt: Yeah, it makes me think of, like, all the “ode to” poems.

Larsen: Sure, absolutely. 

Pratt: Those certainly fit into that category. But are any of your poems in this collection more intentionally love poems for an object, person, or something else? 

Larsen: I think there are lots of love poems for my wife, Jacqui. Sometimes the love sneaks in between lines. It’s not the complete focus, but “Triage,” “After the Miscarriage,” “After Reading the Song of Songs, I Take Out the Garbage.” Those are all love poems. And then there are love poems for objects. The last poem of the collection is called “Quail Egg.” I suppose that’s a love for the natural world. This happens to be autobiographical. One day in my backyard, I found—actually, it’s partially autobiographical—I found two quail eggs. And I thought, “I may want to write an essay about this. And if I do, I want to be able to say that I put them in my mouth.” So I put two eggs in. But in a poem, no one would believe that. So I took one of them out.

Pratt: Isn’t that so funny, that that’s what actually happened, but you think that no one would believe it? 

Larsen: Well, it complicated it. Why do you need two? One does the job. So, yeah. So there, I’m blurring the line, I suppose, between autobiographical truth and some larger artistic truth.

Pratt: Yeah. That’s super interesting. I’m glad you mentioned “After the Miscarriage.” It is such a beautiful but heart-wrenching poem. Would you mind reading it? And then I have a question to ask. 

Larsen: Oh, I’d be happy to. What page is it on? 

Pratt: It’s on 52.

Larsen: 52. Okay. 

“After the Miscarriage”

We grew more baby hungry than ever—
and more deliberate. More like junior 

scientists converting their ratty bed 
into a lab than like lovers trying to chase 

stars across the sky. Call it coupling 
by calendar and clock. We still had room 

for musk and mist and licking breezes 
lit by jazz, but we were makers now, gene 

splicers driven by the braille and breath 
of what if the slippery abracadabra of we.

Pratt: Thank you so much. So this poem, and many poems in this collection, really stuck out to me because of the last line. I think a lot of poets, especially novices, aren’t 100 percent sure what to do with their last lines. It’s one of the hardest—that and the first line they think, they just stress over, myself included. So when it comes to you approaching the last line, what goes into it? How do you know when you’ve reached it? 

Larsen: You know, it’s a great question. I studied with a poet named Leslie Norris, a Welsh poet who is well-connected to this world. He was friends with the great poets. He was friends with Seamus Heaney and knew Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. He said to write a poem and then cut the first five lines and the last five lines. For the very reason that you alluded to, sometimes they’re too intentional. And so he wants a line that comes to the table without an agenda, I suppose. But what do I want from a last line? E.M. Forster—or someone in his generation, an early 20th-century British writer—said that a successful line should be inevitable and surprising. He’s talking about stories, mostly, or fiction novels, but I think it holds true for poetry as well. You want something that follows from what has come before, but also recalibrates the poem. Casts a light back over what you’ve already written. So it’s not just coming to an end, but they make you reread in a sense, almost, unconsciously or collaboratively, what has come before.

Pratt: Certainly. I mean, I see that in this poem, the last line “of what if, the slippery abracadabra of we”—prior to that, the poem refers to scientists, schedules, breezes, makers, all kinds of, scientific, rudimentary imagery. And the last line, “the slippery abracadabra of we,” is a lot more magical. 

Larsen: Yeah. 

Pratt: It evokes a sense of magic, a sense of spirituality that casts a different light, I think, on the poem than it previously had.

Larsen: Yeah, I think that’s right. Thank you.

Pratt: No, I love that. Okay. I’m kind of curious, actually. You mentioned a lot of other poets—Leslie Norris being one of your mentors, I’m assuming?

Larsen: Right. 

Pratt: I kind of felt throughout the collection, almost a Wordsworthian Romantic feel in that the mundane is cast in a special light. Was that an intentional inspiration, or are you thinking of other poets or other mentors that are influencing you? 

Larsen: Certainly, I love Wordsworth. I’m not sure that I thought of these poems as being Wordsworthian, but to the extent that they celebrate the mundane, then absolutely, I’ll take him as a mentor, along with lots of other poets. But I do gravitate towards the poets who celebrate this world rather than ask thorny theological questions about the next world. I’m not against those poems, but I always want them to be grounded. That’s a term you used earlier, and that’s sort of my sweet spot when I’m starting a poem. I feel as if, if I can get the details right, then I can believe in making the poem, and my reader may believe in the things that are difficult to believe, you know? The willing suspension of disbelief is easier if you can ground the poem first. 

Pratt: That makes sense to me. Are there some poets that you think do that especially well? 

Larsen: Oh, lots of them. Lots of canonical writers. Emily Dickinson and William Wordsworth, of course. I’m a big fan of Elizabeth Bishop, mid-century poet, who is always celebrating the world and usually in its quirkiness and in its dirt and majesty at the same time. So I go back to her quite frequently. 

Pratt: I love that. I’m wondering if those influences have maybe changed throughout your career. You’re quite a distinguished poet, and I’m sure the types of poems you have written have changed drastically over the course of your life. How do you think your identity, then, as a poet, has changed alongside your work?

Larsen: I’m not sure about identity. In my early work, I colored inside the lines. I was maybe a little more obedient. By that I mean, I was beholden, I suppose, to biography to some degree—what happened to me in one way or another. And the poems tended to be more narrative. I think now I’m willing to take more chances and let form chase content, as it were, and try things out. And I’m more interested in form, and more confident that the form will deliver the content, whereas before I thought, “Oh, I have to write about the right thing.” I’m probably less worried about that now than I used to be.

Pratt: Interesting. Is there a poem in this collection where you were experimenting with form that drove the content, especially? 

Larsen: I think several of them, just with the repetitions. I actually went through and checked how many poems rely on repetition. There are quite a few, eight or nine of them. There’s kind of a crazy poem here, if I can find it. I’m not even sure where it is. But it’s a poem that uses the word “kiss” or “kisses” 27 times. 

Pratt: Oh, yes, I remember that. 

Larsen: I can’t remember the title. It’s here somewhere… “Is Any Morning Sky Getting In?” Page 16. And so that became an experiment. You know, “What would happen if I repeated this word?” Because it’s a borderline cliché or sentimental word. So I thought, “How can I reinvent it?” And my mentor, Leslie Norris, used to say that, only use an adjective if it reinvents the noun. And so in nearly every case, there is an adjective, a quirky adjective associated with the word kiss. And so I thought, “Well, how would you make a poem out of this? I’ve never done that before. It seems like a potential dead end—a risky endeavor in any case. What would happen? How would I go about this? And how would I weave a story into this?” And so that was a result. 

Pratt: Well, I certainly think it was successful. I underlined the last little bit of this poem. It reads:

“there are kisses we’ve never 
dreamed of, and later we invented 
them, the peach kiss, the Ouija board kiss, 
the wade under the bridge barefoot kiss,
the kiss until the dead say to stop kissing kiss.”

And I just thought that was so beautiful. And I actually wrote in my margins—I asked, “Is every kiss a new invention? Or are the same ones floating around?” I don’t know if there’s an answer to that, but—

Larsen: I don’t think there’s an answer to that. 

Pratt: But it’s wonderful. I think that’s one of the things that poetry does. It asks questions that I don’t really think that there are answers to. And that, maybe, is how you know you’ve written a successful poem, is those questions are floating around and haunting the poems, so to speak. 

Larsen: No, I think you’re right. And what happens, I think, with beginning poets, is that they think they have to have answers, and so they jump to the answer, and the answer is usually inadequate. But more seasoned writers—not just poets, but any writers—realize that the real task is in formulating the question with some accuracy and bringing in all the thorniness implied. And if you can just do that, you don’t necessarily have to provide an answer because there aren’t easy answers. 

Pratt: Yeah.

Larsen: But you just want to reframe the question. 

Pratt: Certainly. And the answer isn’t necessarily the point.

Larsen: Right. Exactly. 

Pratt: It’s the living, the question, that is what matters. 

Larsen: I like that, living. That’s good—living the question. 

Pratt: That’s humanity. 

Larsen: Yeah.

Pratt: Okay. I was wondering if you had any favorite poems in this collection. I know that that’s a rude question, but if there were one or two that are especially meaningful to you, even now?

Larsen: I like one particular layout. So a pair of poems, if you want to think of it that way—pages 48 and 49. These are two elegies, one for my mother and one for my father, and they are both written as pantoums, and they are both 24 lines long. I didn’t set out to do that—it happened sort of accidentally—and the one for my father initially was 28 lines, but I wanted it to fit nicely on the page and parallel the first one, so I found a way to distill the poem further. And I think it’s a better poem, actually, by taking away four lines. But with a pantoum, you’re really only taking away two because each line gets repeated twice. So I mean, that’s a kind of interesting math problem, that every time you take out one line, you’re taking away two of them. So, anyway, I’m happy about the layout, and I like the way that they sort of speak to each other over the page. 

Pratt: Yeah, that’s really cool. Actually, this is the first time I have encountered a poem formulated this way, and I asked another question in the margin. I said, “What is the repetition accomplishing in this poem?” It was a math problem I could not piece together, but certainly enjoyed reading. Would you mind reading one of them or both of them? 

Larsen: Sure, I’ll read one of them. Let’s see. Let’s read the first one, “Dutch Woman Riding a Tandem by Herself at Night”—and this doesn’t really need background, but this grew out of the experience of being in Amsterdam and seeing a woman ride a tandem bike by herself. If you’ve been to Amsterdam or The Hague, you know that bicycles are everywhere. That was really illuminating. So I thought, who is riding this bicycle with her? And that was the trigger and led to the poem. 

“Dutch Woman Riding a Tandem by Herself at Night” 

is darkness her escort is she ferrying God 
no one seated behind her but a scrape of wind
ghost pedals pedaling under a brimming sky 
tomorrow my mother will be dead one year. 
this empty seat a reminder this frieze of rain

I’m an orphan on vacation a son heavy with home 
I carry stories disguised as Gouda and bread 
this empty seat a reminder this frieze of rain. 
I forgot the bananas should I buy more tea

I carry stories disguised as Gouda and bread
she has turned the corner vanishing into mist. 
I forgot the bananas should I buy more tea 
the canal burbles on all purl and slosh. 

she has turned the corner vanishing into mist
is a lover waiting or a child with a broken arm
the canal burbles on all purl and slosh 
a glistening hymn I’ll hum all the way home 

is a lover waiting or a child with a broken arm
ghost pedals pedaling under a brimming sky
a glistening hymn I’ll hum all the way home
is darkness her escort is she ferrying God

Pratt: Thank you so much. It is such an intriguing poem, to say the least. And I think a lot of poets would feel, or at least I guess myself—not that I’m a very good poet, I dabble at best—but approaching this kind of a poem would make me feel like each line, because it’s repeated twice, would have to be some sort of on the nose mic drop moment, but that’s not necessarily the case. I mean, here we go, “I forgot the bananas. Should I buy more tea?” I would pass over something like that. But you decided it needed not just once, but twice. So how do you go about finding the lines for a poem like this? 

Larsen: Well, fortunately or unfortunately, you don’t have the luxury of repeating a line once in this poem, because every line does get repeated. So that’s a virtue, but also a demand. One thing that I was after is a concrete line. I think in some ways, concreteness is one’s friend. So when you repeat it the first time, when you say the bottom of a line the first time, it has a literal meaning. But when you say it a second time, it picks up meaning from the words around it and maybe gets charged slightly differently or has a metaphoric effect. So you want the lines to bear repeating. I think they ought to be concise and chiseled and flexible. And then, in a way, you give up control of the poem to some degree because you’re following the form, but as a result, you get unexpected results. So I think a good pantoum will always take turns that you didn’t intend, and also as a circular organization, because the first line is also the last line. And the third line is the third-to-last line. So by the time you get to the end of the poem, you’ve returned to the beginning, but you’re not in the exact same spot. 

Pratt: Yeah, you’re different than how you started.

Larsen: Right.

Pratt: I love that. Thank you. I’m curious: This kind of made me think about your writing process just in general. Some authors or writers wake up at 5 a.m., and they write for the first two hours, and then that’s all they do. Or some wait until Saturday. Do you have a particular schedule or process or place?

Larsen: I’m an early riser, which I don’t necessarily celebrate. I just wake on my own, usually early—5:30 or 6—and I try to write for an hour or two and maybe do that four or five times a week. I like to read other writers just to put myself in the realm of poetry and see what happens.

Pratt: Yeah, I like that. I wish I was an early riser. I think I will one day…

Larsen: It’s not anything I aspired to. 

Pratt: It just kind of happened accidentally. 

Larsen: Yeah. 

Pratt: Well, I’m sure that it’s nice to start your day with poetry, whether you’re reading or writing. It’s certainly a great way to go. That makes me think: do you have any writing advice for our listeners? Or maybe a better question—what’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

Larsen: Well, it wasn’t advice per se, but it’s a quote, and this is a familiar one. Samuel Beckett says, I suppose, about revision, but also writing in general, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” I love the terseness of that. And I think it values process and just continuing to plug along. There’s no magic to it, or the magic is in the process. And you just try to get a little bit better and fail, and you don’t curse the failures, you incorporate them into the process and celebrate them.

Pratt: Yeah, that reminds me of Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done. I don’t know if I got his name right, but that book I read for Dr.  Hyde’s creative writing class that I took, I don’t know, four years ago. And it was a great book. I mean, that was essentially the message of it: you can’t be a quitter because writers aren’t quitters. Writers don’t give up when they are putting something together. I even heard, Shannon Hale’s Newbery Medal that she received—the Newbery Honor that she received, for… Oh, I’m totally forgetting. 

Larsen: It’s not Goose Girl. 

Pratt: No, it’s not Goose Girl. It’s the one with the quarry in the mountain. That book she wrote, and no one, I think, wanted it, or she didn’t feel like it was ready. I think her editor told her it wasn’t very good, but she just kind of waited on it, and she didn’t give up. And at that point, she had done pretty well. But I don’t think that she was very critically acclaimed. And then she decided to not give up. She kept writing it. She wanted to make it work. And then it got published, and she got the Newbery. 

Larsen: Wow, that’s a great story. 

Pratt: I think it’s a great message to writers: you’re a writer if you don’t give up, otherwise you’re not a writer. Okay, well, last question. Thank you so much for this, by the way.

Larsen: Sure. 

Pratt: Lance, you know, Inscape as a journal, our motto is “bizarre, believing, and beautiful.” So my question is: is there anything bizarre, believing, and/or beautiful that you have read recently that you’d want to recommend? 

Larsen: Sure. So someone once said, “Whenever a new book is published, read an old book.” Maybe this is along those lines. In a literature class I’m teaching tomorrow, I will be reading a story called “The Falling Girl” by Dino Buzzati, an Italian writer. So I’ve only read it in translation. This is sudden fiction, but it’s a bizarre story. A girl climbs to the top of a building that’s over 150 stories tall and jumps. And the story lasts five and a half pages, and she never reaches the bottom. But she ages from being a young girl to an old woman by the time she gets close to the ground. So that’s the sort of plot of the story, but it’s a celebration of the human spirit. It’s an indictment of the way that women are portrayed in the media. It explores paradoxes of time and all sorts of different things, and people watch out their windows, and they like to see the falling girls. But anyway, it’s a really terrific story and checks some of the boxes you mentioned. 

Pratt: Oh, that sounds interesting. I can’t wait to check that out! Well, thank you so much for coming on here today, Lance. I really appreciate it. And thank you for writing such a wonderful collection. 

(Music starts.)

Larsen: Thank you for the invitation.

(Music Playing.) 

Pratt: Hello. I’m Starly Pratt, and I want to thank you for listening to this episode of The Author’s Inscape, a podcast hosted by Inscape, a literary journal. We’d like to give a special thanks to the English department at Brigham Young University, our host institution, and to Alia Alexander for writing and producing the music in this episode. If you are interested in more episodes or want to learn more about our journal, please head to our website, inscape.byu.edu. Thanks again for listening.