When Lance Larsen recently released Making a Kingdom of It, his sixth book of poems and fifth with the University of Tampa Press, I was lucky enough to get an early copy. I spent the weekend reading the book, and loving it. And taking careful notes. Then I was lucky enough to conduct an interview with Larsen over email, which we’ve since shaped together.
Making a Kingdom of It is a stunning, surprising collection, a series of odes and love poems to the world, equal parts numinous and sensory, if not outright sensual at times. An elk, looking up while chewing, meets the poet’s eye — “hello mystery, / hello hallelujah and kingdom come . . . ,” the poet thinks.
. . . she was eating
arrow leaf balsamroot like candy.
I will speak nothing but elk all day
In another poem, a body glides through the water of a rec center’s pool — and really it’s our poet swimming laps, stealing a bit of time for exercise, but it’s more than that, always more. Here dailiness is the subject of the poem and the portal through which the poem transcends the daily.
Bless today’s brave consortium of thrashing limbs.
Bless steamed-up windows and echoey tiles, and this recipe of stinks:
sweat, wet towels, deodorant, musky gym bags . . .
Bless how I throw myself in
I’d met Larsen years earlier at BYU, where he teaches in the English Department. At the time I was a dissatisfied journalism major who longed to write lyrically, and one day I just cold-emailed Professor Larsen, with the gumption to attach a short story of mine. What rare generosity possessed that busy writer-teacher not only to respond to me but to read the story in its entirety and include an incisive paragraph of commentary on it? It turns out that’s just Lance being Lance.
In Larsen’s latest book of poems, that same spirit of giving, that life-giving attentiveness to detail, goes out into the world and brings the world back to us a little newer, in new and glowing language.
—Ryan McIlvain
RM: Can I just start off by congratulating you on a beautiful book? And really I’m struck by how it all hangs together — not to suggest that there had to be a definite stylistic “on” button to let you know you were working in a new, thematically linked vein. Was there, though, and are you working in a new vein?
LL: My previous book, What the Body Knows, was a collection of prose poems, so Making a Kingdom of It represents, among other impulses, a return to what I love best — lineated verse. While I aim for charged language in all genres, line breaks and stanzas represent special affordances in concision and lyricism. More white space, more texture and potential lift, more oomph.
RM: What about thematically? Is this book a departure of sorts?
LL: If so, not a dramatic one. I’ve always been interested in documenting chance everyday moments that stand out in some way. In this book, maybe I’m exploring that impulse a little more deliberately, trying to celebrate the ever-shifting, messy now as its own reward. I definitely have a soft spot for Dickinson’s poem “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church.” As you know, this poem celebrates sweet surrender over anxiety, congregational collaboration over hierarchy, grace over justice. And the last two lines place the nowness of worship front and center, where it belongs: “So instead of getting to Heaven, at last — / I’m going, all along.”
RM: I love that notion of privileging the journey over the arrival, which seems to result here in a particularly sensory, maybe even sensual take on the kingdom of heaven on earth. We have an Augustinian ode to the pleasures of the body in a swimming pool, and there’s the cat licking salt off our poet’s legs after a five-mile run. There’s the title poem of the collection echoing Molly Bloom’s sensual soliloquy (I hear the echoes, anyway) in its heady unpunctuated rush —
warm me with this sputtery fire Lord or with your oh so fulsome breath like that Lord yes and like this
I’ve always loved the way your images access the senses, but here the poems appear to invite that sensory attention at a deeper level.
LL: I think that’s spot on. I’m drawn most to poems that make an appeal not just to the head and heart but to the body. Along these lines, I also favor poems that provide both order and chaos, even in a first reading. Why? Because that’s how we experience life, in all its awkward, minute-to-minute disappointments and surprises. I want to write a poem that rings true at that experiential level. If a poem is too abstract and orderly, it may come off as dry. If, on the other hand, it doesn’t have constraints of some sort, it may come across as word salad. So I want both qualities: order and wildness.
RM: I see that celebration of the everyday in so many of the poems here: “Triage,” “Making a Kingdom of It,” “Blessing the Sacrament in My In-laws’ Garage,” “Lap Swim at Rec Center Pool, 2:07 p.m.,” and I could go on. I don’t mean to put too fine a point on it, but are these poems from your everyday?
LL: All of them had a life trigger of some sort, but once I get started, I follow the words and rhythms, not autobiographical fidelity. As for the celebration, there’s a fair amount of Whitman in these poems, I’m sure, helped along by an impulse to de-center the narrator. I love the way so many female writers complicate and democratize and redefine desire and embodiedness, with Virginia Wolff as a key example. While I certainly make no claims towards jouissance, I think these poems blur boundaries with the aim of getting at something more primal, more somatic. I was conscious of using narrators that were more porous and vulnerable than usual, narrators interested in breaking down the Me / Not me divide.
RM: And how does that play out in individual poems?
LL: I was afraid you’d ask that. Well, let’s see . . . In “Lap Swim,” water brings strangers together and makes them partly amphibious. They have their separate lanes, yes, but the water knows no such boundaries. In “Blessing the Sacrament,” all the junky garage castoffs provide improvisational metaphors for how the Lord saves us. In “Triage,” several things come together — a dog, uncut grass, even ticks — to invite the narrator into a “rat’s star” celebration of everything around him. This happens, of course, after his wife kicks him out of the house while she’s cooking.
At the very least, these narrators are swept away from a strictly human realm. Creatureliness — is that a word? Creatureliness is very important in my poems. Call these an attempt to write the body electric. Whether the poems actually accomplish this, that’s a task left for each reader to decide.
RM: You could say something similar is going on with the complicated tenderness in “Why I Kissed the Dead Man.” Will you talk about that poem a little?
LL: Whatever else it is, this poem is an elegy for my father-in-law, who died after a series of mini strokes, with his family gathered around his hospital bed. John was a GE engineer whose complicated interiority was almost never deliberately on display. Not easy to get to know him, in other words. No surprise that my love for him is all tied up in my love for his daughter. The chief tension in the poem lies in the contrast between the title, which emphasizes distance, and the poem itself, which seeks to convert him from a flat character to a round one. And seeks to do the same for the speaker. Kissing my father-in-law after he died is the trigger that allows this to happen.
RM: That brings us neatly enough to the tender love poems about your wife Jacqui. I’m struck by how they approach an old and venerable tradition of poetry without ever feeling old or dusty, or sentimental. How — I guess it’s a sort of craft question — but how do you pull that off?
LL: Someone once said, maybe Ed Hirsch, “There’s no such thing as a happy love poem.” I hope this isn’t true. But as a writerly assumption, it’s not a bad place to start. Most of us need a good inoculation against sentimentality. When I was in grad school, everyone was reading Louise Gluck, whose signature poem at the time was “Mock Orange.” One could call it an anti-love poem. As you know, it ends with these devastating lines: “How can I rest? How can I be content when there is still that odor in the world?” I suppose that poem rubbed off on me. I’m certainly more inclined to celebrate than Louise Gluck, but I usually end up doing so in a freckled way.
RM: What do you mean by “freckled way”? I’m performing the dense prose writer a bit here, but can you say more about that?
LL: Freckled, mottled. A celebration that acknowledges messiness. Sometimes I give students this advice, which I picked up who knows where? “When you’re writing a particular kind of poem, whether love poem or elegy or psalm or war poem, think of all the tropes and language you associate with that genre, maybe even write it down for yourself. Then (and this part is crucial) use none of it.”
I certainly don’t claim to follow my own advice, but I try to. I try not to use language I’ve seen before. One quick example. I end my poem about holy places in Florence this way:
the taste of blood orange gelato at night on your wooing mouth The line break was accidental at first, then stayed. There’s love and amazement in this poem and awe at the world in general, but we’re at some distance from “let me count the ways.”
RM: Love and amazement also suffuse “I Caught an Elk Chewing,” maybe my favorite poem in the book. Here the poet (“you,” very tentatively) sees an elk in an act of everyday bodily pleasure, and you take that act and that beauty home with you and carry it around all day. It’s like a lover’s locket. Is it also like a poem in waiting?
LL: I love those moments when the human world bumps up against the kingdom of animals and everything feels fresh again, italicized, at least for a few hours. That’s the case here. Though I wasn’t consciously thinking about Frost or Bishop, it seems pretty clear in retrospect that “I Caught an Elk Chewing” shares some DNA with “Two Look at Two” and “The Moose.” Two poems I adore, especially the ending of “The Moose.”
RM: And do you know a poem has started when you witness something like that?
LL: I often know in the moment. I’ve been shown something, or a corner of something. I’ve crossed a threshold. I can taste the sparks. That doesn’t mean I have a poem. Usually I don’t. One can never simply transcribe such experiences. You have to translate, create a thing with a linguistic energy all its own. You have to tell it slant, find the objective correlative, that sort of thing. You have to harness the energy of the actual to create the energy of the possible.
RM: Also in “I Caught an Elk Chewing,” you say that the poet’s response to the elk is different from the hunter’s — and indeed it is. Again, it’s a lover’s response, but it’s acquisitive too, isn’t it, in its way? I say that like it’s an accusation, but I don’t mean it to be. It’s just made me wonder if poetry, like love, like hunting, isn’t on some level about capture . . .
LL: Absolutely. The difference, I think, lies in the fact that authentic capture requires humility, porousness, a speaker ceding control. Maybe we’re in the realm of negative capability. Let me mention another Bishop poem, “Filling Station,” that manages this skillfully. In the beginning the narrator adopts a dismissive tone in describing the mechanic father in his monkey suit along with his “saucy sons.” But something remarkable happens about halfway through, right after “grease-impregnated.” Her noticing deepens and she keys in on an unseen female presence that brings order and color to the chaos. Someone arranges the cans of oil just so. “Someone loves us all.” Her use of “us” is brilliant. To see what was at first invisible, the narrator has to drop down from her lofty observation point and become part of the scene. That kind of openness to experience is what I aspire to in my poems.
RM: How so? Or how does that work in the act of composing?
LL: I mentioned messiness. For me that’s almost always the key. Messiness and boundary crossing, taking notice of and celebrating what most people want to look away from. One quick example. In the last poem of the book, the narrator finds a quail egg on the ground and after a bit of hesitation pops it into his mouth for safekeeping. In real life I put two eggs into my mouth. It was a conscious decision. At that moment, I remember thinking, in a wry, self-serving way, I may eventually write about this. If it happens to be nonfiction, I want to say, without fudging, that I put two “dirty” eggs straight into my mouth. I was daring myself. I ended up writing a poem instead, so I lied and said it was only one egg.
RM: Messiness and boundary crossing as guiding principles — and what else? Do you have other tips and tricks you’re willing to share?
LL: One risk of poetry is that it can easily become precious and pretentious. You know what I mean: some hyper-sensitive guy looking at rainbows and thinking elevated thoughts. The same risk exists for novelists and essayists but not to the same degree. One tiny way to counter this stereotype is to have a speaker actually do something in the poem. Anything. Just get the body involved. Swim laps, mow a lawn, wash dishes, cut your thumb, make a snow angel when there isn’t any snow, cross something off a list, take out the garbage, dribble sacrament water on your son’s hand, dress a body for a funeral. Doing caps thinking. I’m usually not a big fan of sayings on T-shirts because they so quickly turn cliché, but here’s one that caught me by surprise, at least the first time I saw it: “I like poetry, long walks on the beach, and poking dead things with a stick.” The first two are gauzy romantic stereotypes, the third a clear example of a poet doing something, something a bit unsavory. Of course, this action is also true in some deep archetypal way: aren’t writers always poking the dead with a stick?
RM: Too true! And speaking of poking at dying or anyway changing things, I notice that a number of the poems here lack punctuation. What’s your thinking there?
LL: I was curious how many lack punctuation, so I went through and counted. Eight poems are unpunctuated and lower case, one has a couple of question marks for clarity, and two are held together by nothing but commas. This was relatively new terrain for me. I wanted to experiment with speed and rawness. Dropping punctuation seemed an obvious way to do this. I love the energy in W.S. Merwin and Lucille Clifton to name just two late 20th C practitioners and wanted to try out some of their magic poetry dust. I have a new rule for myself: if I can write a poem sans punctuation without introducing obscurity or distracting difficulty, then skip the punctuation.
RM: Do you have a sense of what a given book — or for that matter the poems in that book — will look like before you begin?
LL: Some poets have a very clear sense of their book projects before they sit down to write. I wish I was one of them. In my own experience, unfortunately, I’ve found that if I step in too early and try to control a poem or collection, I lose spontaneity. I lose the weird surprises that a dragnet brings to the surface, the wriggling mess of what’s down below. In other words, the poems know more than I do. And now to drop the trawling metaphor, I love what Blake says: “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” Horses of instruction work great for some writers, but not usually for me.
When it comes to explaining the importance of this principle to my students, I’ve started including a quote in my syllabus. A kind of epigraph, which is a weird thing for any syllabus. Also weird is that it comes from John Trimble, a composition specialist, not a poet. It helps that just about everyone finds it funny. “You have to let the madman out. The madman has got to be allowed to go wild. Then you can get the architect in and design the structure. After that, you can have the engineer come in and put it together. And then you let the janitor in to clean it up. The problem is, most people let the janitor in before they let the madman out.”
RM: You mention the dangers of stepping into a book too early, but of course you know you’ve stepped into one at some point, right?
LL: Absolutely, but that usually happens when I’m more than halfway done, after I’ve had a chance to look around and survey the raw material and see where it might go. Three questions drive what happens next. What poems do I include, which do I leave out, how do I arrange them? By the end, I might have 60 potential poems, many of them published (which is also part of the selection process), and I’m trying to whittle the number down to 40. Of course, I don’t do this in a vacuum. I’m getting advice from poets and editors. And I’m constantly shifting poems around, trying out section breaks. You know, trying to get a sense of flow.
RM: What else do you pay attention to in arranging a manuscript?
LL: I’m uber-attentive to every two-page spread. How does a pair of short poems play off each other? How do they look on the page? Do I want stanzas? Here’s a weird hobby horse that drives me: I try to avoid having to turn a page to finish a poem. Impossible of course with three-pagers. But with two-pagers you can place them in a manuscript so that they always start on the left page and end on the right. That way a reader has a clearer sense of pacing, how to spend their attention span.
RM: And in the end you hope all this adds up to . . . what?
LL: Put simply, I’m trying to cast a spell on a reader that will last from the opening page to the very end. It never works this seamlessly in practice, but that’s the goal, and I want to achieve the same kind of arc in each section as well.
RM: If you’ll bear with me just a little longer, I want to return to that perma-project of representing and celebrating the here and now. I’m struck by the way this wisdom and its various expressions — in poetry, in prose, in life generally — is so omnipresent as to risk cliché pretty much all the time. And yet we keep needing to hear it! And in these poems I never once have the feeling that you’ve strayed into the clichéd lanes or preached at us. I think I’m arriving at another craft question, but this time a negative one: how have you managed to avoid cliché, tired aphorism, empty preaching?
LL: First, I have to confess I have a soft spot for wisdom, which is why I love the work of Rumi and Hafez; the wisdom books in the Old Testament; certain Polish poets, especially Milosz, Szymborska, and Zagajewski; Jane Hirshfield; even writers like Linda Gregg and Jack Gilbert, who bring wisdom to the page through direct experience. And I love aphorisms from all periods. So no surprise I want wisdom in my own work. That said, I trust the image most of all. Years ago, I used to say, “Show, don’t tell” to my students. These days, I always qualify: “Mostly show, and when you tell make it count.”
RM: I tell my students the same thing, more or less. And yet I think what I’m trying to get at is that your poems do feel wisdom-inflected, sometimes wisdom-soaked. They’re often flirting with the dangers of homily and somehow they’re all the better for it.
LL: Years ago I learned a great lesson from Stephen Dunn. This happened in grad school, during a one-on-one conference. I gave him a sheaf of poems, including an over-earnest miscarriage poem, which ended with an abstract line mentioning “eternity.” He pointed to the line. Suddenly embarrassed at my own sentimentality, I interrupted: “Awful isn’t it, too preachy, I’ve already cut it. What else?” He paused for a moment, very patiently, then said: “Not a good line to finish with but you might be able to spruce it up and stash it three or four lines from the end.”
What? I’d never heard such advice. I thought a line was either good or bad. I started re-reading some of my favorite touchstone poems and noticed this pattern everywhere. You can often include an overt statement, especially if the poem contradicts or enlarges on it elsewhere. “Things fall apart.” “The prison, into which we doom ourselves, no prison is.” “Good fences make good neighbors.” Something pithy and truthy is almost always welcome in a poem. But a poem also benefits from lovely blasts of unruliness. You need both things.
Former poet laureate of Utah, Lance Larsen grew up in the West mowing lawns, delivering newspapers, and dreaming of catching Bigfoot on film. He is the author of five previous poetry collections, all but one from University of Tampa. His work appears widely, in New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Sun, London Magazine, APR, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, The Tampa Review Prize, The Jeffrey Smith Prize from Missouri Review, the Sewanee Review Prize, the Swamp Pink Prize, The Alpine Fellowship (England), and The Moth Poetry Prize (Ireland), as well as fellowships from Ragdale, The Anderson Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brigham Young University and likes to fool around with aphorisms: “When climbing a new mountain, wear old shoes.” He is married to the painter and collage artist Jacqui Larsen. Sometimes he juggles.
Ryan McIlvain is the author of two novels, most recently The Radicals. His other writing has appeared in print and online in The Paris Review, The Rumpus, Tin House, Post Road, The Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues. A former Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University, he now teaches in the English and Writing Department at the University of Tampa.