Lance Larsen

[MikeWaters]

Poet. LDS. BYU.

http://www.meridianmagazine.com/poet...3responds.html

I like this man, this poet, quite a bit.

Here is some advice from him:

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.

This is his first book, Eraseable Walls.

And his second book, In All Their Animal Brilliance.

Eraseable Walls is a very good book. I very much admired the craft contained in it. (The linked interview was before Animal Brilliance was published). However, when I read Animal Brilliance, I was really blown away by how much better he had become. It was no longer craft, it was a the pure voice of a mature poet. Instead of "that was pretty neat how he did that" it became organic poetry, veritable beasts, sustained of themselves, separate from the writer. Lance had disappeared from the poems. The fingerprints that were present in Eraseable Walls had disappeared in Animal Brilliance.

I actually know Lance. Not well. I don't know that he knows me, but he was once acquainted with me. I made some comment to him about the occasional efforts of some to "popularize" poetry, and he said that like some other poets, he had no desire to participate in such efforts. Let it be our secret. Like monks or nuns, of some arcane order, living in their private universes.

A good poem is a way, for just a moment, to see the world anew. Your synapses cross in novel ways, and the spark of it brings a smile to your lips. In a world of blather, distraction, confusion, triviality, sports controversy, message board flamewars, political infighting, and all the other bullshit that we literally pour into our heads, it would be a shame if there were no poets. And a shame if poets were to exist, but were never to be heard.

A poem from him (I am taking the liberty of posting the poem that is published in the Meridian Article. Lance, or representative of Lance, if you are reading this, we will gladly take it down if you wish):

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.

Both books can be purchased used at the above links for about $5 + shipping.