Lance Larsen’s poetry inhabits a surreal backyard, blooming with zucchini, peonies, hooves and bones, sheet music by Chopin, and God the Father, loping through a vineyard. In 2012, Larsen was named the Utah Poet Laureate, a post he describes as “a kind of itinerant preacher of the word (lower case), or a Johnny Appleseed of the literary artifact.” Fortunately, he has a gift for making words grow. His poems often begin with quick affirmatives (“True…. yes”), as if they first sprouted in casual back-porch conversations and then wheeled off into their own expanding lives. Larsen is married to painter and mixed-media artist Jacqui Larsen, who is the first reader of his poetry. Many of his poems are soaked with a painterly multiplicity of images, frequently from the animal kingdom. In his poem “Why do you keep putting animals in your poems?” he explains, “There comes a time you just have to wiggle your pinfeathers, wag your ghost tail, feel your teeth grow long as the ragged salmon throw their bodies upstream.” Like running salmon, Larsen’s metaphor tumbles out, ardent in its hunger. It examines everyday paradoxes: the gifts and burdens of the body (“the body, tired mule, / pushes the grocery cart through Perishables”), the love and responsibility left to Adam and Eve once God “folded the garden and hid it / deep inside the woman, but commanded / the man to tend it.” There’s a slantwise echo of the garden in all of Larsen’s poetry. In its fascination with the natural world, both domestic and wild, there’s a longing to connect with the creation, with the other, and with God.

Some of Larsen’s work is featured in Image issue 72. Read a poem by Larsen here.

Biography

Lance Larsen has published four poetry collections: Genius Loci (Tampa, 2012), Backyard Alchemy (Tampa, 2009), In All Their Animal Brilliance (Tampa, 2005), and Erasable Walls(New Issues, 1998). He grew up in Idaho and Colorado, volunteered in Chile for two years as a Mormon missionary, and eventually landed in Texas, where he completed a PhD at the University of Houston. He collects antiques, plays a scrappy game of basketball, hikes and bikes but rarely swims, occasionally walks on his hands, and loves Pad Thai. He sometimes collaborates with his wife, Jacqui, a painter and mixed-media artist. His work appears widely, in such venues as Southern Review, Georgia Review, Poetry, Image, River Styx, Paris Review, New York Review of Books, Orion, Raritan, and Best American Poetry 2009. His nonfiction has twice made the Notable Essay list in Best American Essays. He has won several awards, including the Tampa Review Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from Sewanee, Ragdale, the Anderson Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Since 1993 he has taught literature and creative writing at BYU, where he currently serves as a member of the graduate committee, advising MFA students. Whenever given the chance he directs study abroad programs, most recently in Madrid and London. In 2012, he was named to a five-year term as Utah Poet Laureate. His writing springs from bafflement and gratitude as characterized by these lines addressed to the Lord by John Berryman: “Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake, / inimitable contriver, / endower of Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring Moon, / thank you for such as it is my gift.”

Current Projects
July 2013

As usual I have several projects brewing at once, which feels less chaotic than it appears. I’m revising a collection of personal essays called Seventeen Ways to Float. This collection brings together short pieces (including griping about what makes me tired), a medium-length memoir (changing my grandfather’s underwear in a bathroom cubicle at 37,000 feet between San Francisco and Honolulu), and longer meditations on various subjects (including what happens to miscarried children in the next life). A second project gathers short specimens that worry the smudgy line between prose poetry and lyric essay, with pieces about the secret lives of angels, about Pablo Casals landing in Barcelona but refusing to touch foot in it, and about longing to kiss my absent beloved in a London cemetery. I’m also trying my hand at a new addiction, the aphorism, which James Richardson compares to eating literary cheese puffs. I write them on trains and buses, in tedious meetings, in waiting rooms—a project that may or may not go anywhere, though it brings great pleasure. Some of mine are straight, but most I would characterize as oblique, cracked, or otherwise a little left handed, like this one: “Gesundheit!— as close as I’ve come to Nietzsche and Heidegger in months.”