M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

The Poet Responds:
Meridian Interview of Lance Larsen
As questioned by Doug Talley

Lance Larsen teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University and is the poetry editor of Literature and Belief, the school’s literary periodical. His poems have appeared in Paris Review, New York Review of Books, New Republic, Shenandoah, and Kenyon Review, among other journals. His collection, Erasable Walls, a finalist for the coveted Yale Younger Poets Prize, has been favorably reviewed and is available through Amazon.com or any local bookstore. The following Meridian Magazine interview, to which Mr. Larsen graciously consented, examines a number of the poems in the book and covers a variety of others topics of general interest to reader and writer alike. The interview will continue periodically in subsequent issues.

MERIDIAN:
One senses in the poems of Erasable Walls a pervading wistfulness. You note, for example, in the beginning of the poem “Walking Around”:

Sometimes its loss I want, a slow acid eating
my bones, wife and son gone forever,
loss that would color this moon a sad yellow
and give these houses voices beneath their paint.

Do you see yourself as tending toward melancholy, and if so, why?

LARSEN:
I don’t see myself as being melancholy, at least not unusually so. G.J. Nathan once said, “Show me an optimist and, almost without exception, I’ll show you a bad poet.” Why? Because bad poets don’t usually wade into trouble; they don’t dive. If the scriptures and classic literature can be trusted, and I think they can, only trouble is of much interest. At heart I’m a romantic---but a romantic who believes that visions aren’t worth much if they aren’t tested by everyday living. It’s probably worth quoting the ending lines of the above poem, since it ends affirmatively. The narrator is trying to feel the wonder of his own life afresh:

and try to invent

the darkness where we dream, the three of us,
like plants bedded in a window-box, so intertwined
we no longer hear the song of our leaves,
or feel the tangle and sprawl of our roots.

MERIDIAN:
Of course, in reading the poems, the reader is tempted to attribute all the emotions of the narrator to you, the author, specifically. Is this a fair reading? Do you, yourself, see the poems as largely autobiographical, or were you trying, instead, to speak from a persona, a fictionalized voice?

LARSEN:
I love what Philip Levine says about this: “Why be yourself, if you can be someone interesting?” Like Levine, I’m always making things up in my poems. Exaggerating, telescoping, cutting and splicing. Some of the poems are dramatic monologues, and even announce themselves as such: “A Philanthropist Speaks to His Lawyer.” Very few of the poems are wholly autobiographical, though most begin with an autobiographical trigger. I want my poems to sound informal and quotidian, even off handed, as if they’re straight from life, even if they’re not.

MERIDIAN:
What in your upbringing directed you toward poetry in the first place? What were the defining moments?

LARSEN:
I grew up in a home where making things was valued: my mother was a seamstress; my father took pictures and tied flies. But it remains a mystery why I turned toward writing, and a bafflement as to how I settled on poetry. I can think of four defining moments. First, the nervousness I felt whenever I was assigned to write a story in grade school. Not because I was scared, but because I wanted to write better than anyone in class. Since I didn’t know what good writing was, I opted for writing the longest, weirdest, funniest or most gory story. A second moment: the day in ninth grade when five or six of us were chosen to read our essays at a Veterans’ Day assembly. I felt this incredible endorphin kick—not when I read my predictable piece on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, but when my friend read a terrifying, first-person account of being a bullet. Three, the day when my older brother asked me, “What do you really want to do?” Write, I told him. “Then scrap your business major,” he said, “and major in English,” which I eventually did. A fourth moment: seeing Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Stalker for the first time---a layered and imagistic film that taught me what real art was about.

MERIDIAN:
What have been your principal literary influences? What authors do you return to and why?

LARSEN:
I’m not sure who has influenced me, but I can name poets I admire, which may be a different thing: Coleridge, for his conversation poems; Dickinson, for her mercurial nature and her search for a commensurate language; Frost, for his elegantly colloquial New England voice; Elizabeth Bishop, for the homemade quality of her poems; Czeslaw Milosz and Adam Zagajewski for their religious vision. Of course, I’ve said nothing of the hundreds of novelists, short story writers, essayists, filmmakers, jazz musicians, and visual artists I admire. I would be remiss not to mention Jacqui, my wife, an oil painter and collagist, who has been a second set of eyes on all matters aesthetic for the last sixteen years.

MERIDIAN:
The reader also senses in Erasable Walls a recurring focus on, and a deeply felt compassion for, awkward, uncomfortable situations. “February 1922: My Father’s Conception” imagines an unsanctioned union leading to pregnancy. In “Dreaming Yourself Pregnant” you cite the moment of a young girl’s first menstrual period. “Fisherman’s Rant” is a litany of the frustrating, impossible aggravations a father might endure while fishing with a young son. Why are you drawn to these awkward situations as a subject for art? What do you feel is their artistic interest?

LARSEN:
Some contemporary critics have discussed plot as a temporal syllogism---that is, a logical structure in time that reveals who we are. I want the stakes to be high in my poems. I want to ask the difficult question. I want to ratchet up emotional, narrative, and linguistic pressures, so that the reader is forced to watch and perhaps identify with the protagonist, even under difficult circumstances. Sublimity, I believe, is just a few half steps away from awkwardness.

MERIDIAN:
Tell us about your writing habits. Do you work at it every day? Do you have a particular schedule or discipline to stay at the work, even when it’s not going well? Do you have any “tricks” for working through the blocks?

LARSEN:
I write mornings, and prefer big chunks of time, but I also try to grab moments whenever I can. I keep an on-again, off-again journal, which helps me observe the drama of the everyday, which I then convert into sentences—or at least fragments. If a poem isn’t coming, I put it aside. I recently finished a poem I started nine years ago. This new version has become a different poem, but I wouldn’t have written this version had I not started the earlier one. Sometimes I write essays, which taps a different part of me and is a nice change-up. I also try to practice what Samuel Beckett preached : “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

MERIDIAN:
What advice do you have for the aspiring writer?

LARSEN:
Four things: become a hungry and discriminating reader, perfect the craft, remain diligent, and learn how to eavesdrop on the cosmos. Not necessarily in that order. Other advice? Turn off the television. Keep a journal. Try to be honest about what you know and don’t know. Listen to Miles Davis. Immerse yourself in good writing. Don’t plan on making a lot of money. Show your work to the best readers you can and listen to what they say.

MERIDIAN:
Tell us how your faith, and anything about Mormon beliefs in particular, has influenced your poetry and your approach to your work.

LARSEN:
At times I have written very directly about my Mormon experience. I’ve written at least four poems about the sacrament, a poem about collecting fast offerings, and poems about a church court, baptism, and a baptismal interview. More often, however, my poems are infused with my beliefs in a more subtle way. In a review of Erasable Walls, one reviewer refers to this belief as “the gravitational pull of the divine” one can feel “along the margins of the text.” Nicely put, I think. This is how most poetry makes its argument, through the back door, as it were. Not by pounding the pulpit, or lecturing, or proof texting from the scriptures. Other genres work better in this regard—the sermon and essay, for instance—genres I greatly love, though for different reasons. I feel, too, that my love of scripture has influenced my poetry, at least at some subliminal level. I love the scriptures as a Mormon who believes in prophecy and saving graces. But I also love them as a writer—for their cadences, their imagery, their rich tensions. And I try to memorize whenever I can. Here are two recent favorites: “From henceforth let no man trouble me: for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus” (Galatians 6:17). And from Isaiah: “Beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they might be called trees of righteousness.”

From ERASABLE WALLS by Lance Larsen

WALKING AROUND

Sometimes its loss I want, a slow acid eating
my bones, wife and son gone forever,
loss that would color this moon a sad yellow
and give these houses voices beneath their paint.

I would sleep by day, and my grief,
the thinnest of shirts, would hide me
from nothing. At night: the shrieks of birds,
my wife’s heart thrumming in the trunks

of the thickest trees, my son buried
somewhere or falling asleep to voices he’s never
heard, pajamas white as baby teeth,
the birthmark under his chin a closed flower.

And maybe before following the night’s meanders,
I would glance up at these windows furred
by porch light and frost, where my wife
and son are sleeping now, and try to invent

the darkness where we dream, the three of us,
like plants bedded in a window-box, so intertwined
we no longer hear the song of our leaves,
or feel the tangle and sprawl of our roots.

 

A PHILANTHROPIST SPEAKS TO HIS LAWYER

I don’t mind giving it away – the estate,
the refineries, the beach front in Bermuda,
my Shakespeare folios and Rothko rectangles.
Stipulate that no one touch my organs.
When my heart gives, pack me in dry ice
and ship me south – Lima or Santiago.
Hire a driver, pay him twice what he asks.
Drive until you find a hobbling woman
with veined calves. If she turns down a lane
thick with squealing pigs, if her house
puts on a scrubbed glow when she opens
the gate, follow her to the door. Check
for sadness braiding her hair, evenings
pressed into her heavy skirt, then ask her
to bury me. Tell her I’m a vagrant or amnesiac,
anything. Humming softly, she will rub me
with scented oils, then lay me between
her sofa and a broken radio. Children
will feel my blood pooling in the rain.
For three days let mourners kiss the glass
Over my face, then drop me into a hole
with the indigents – my bones, their bones.
It’s enough if hyacinths mark us. Or a fig
tree, so that if I rise, I will first smell
heavy sweetness. A sullen morning it will be,
birds slower, toads dreaming in the ferns.
I’m tired. I feel it most in the afternoons.

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