Photo from Poets.org/Jacqui Larsen
About Lance Larsen
Former poet laureate of Utah, Lance Larsen grew up in the West, mowing lawns, delivering newspapers, and dreaming of catching Bigfoot on film. His sixth poetry collection, Making a Kingdom of It, appeared in December 2024 with Tampa. His honors include a Pushcart Prize, an NEA fellowship, first place awards from Missouri Review, Sewanee Review, Swamp Pink, The Moth (Ireland), and inclusion in Best American Poetry. He teaches at Brigham Young University and likes to fool around with aphorisms: “A woman needs a man the way a manatee needs a glockenspiel.” Sometimes he juggles.
A Profile of the Author
Notes on the work
A few years ago, hiking a nearby trail, I met a lovely black lab named Clare. She wagged and wriggled and licked. Had she been running for the Senate, I would have canvassed for her. I knew immediately she was going in a poem. Her owner too (or did she own him?). He had a slightly bizarro philosophy for tackling mountains: “Gregorian chants on the way up, Pink Floyd on the way down.” His words. Though I’m not a fan of boomboxes on the trail (how presumptuous to inflict wailing voices on quakies, for instance), I found his musical tastes not half bad: a good way to conjure the mysteries. If he had said Barry Manilow on the way up and Britney Spears on the way down, I’d be suspicious. What I remember now, three years later, is the temporary community we formed, Clare and I one with the clouds, a certain treeness dusting all three of us in green. We were ourselves but more than ourselves. Wherever we’re headed, in other words, we often manage to find other misfits magnetized in the same direction. We might hold acquaintances at arm’s length, as I’m doing here, but Lord, how we need each other. Somewhere Wendell Berry says that we can’t know who we are till we know where we are. This holds true not just for Kentucky farmers like Berry but hikers, kids in their cabals, adults chasing eclipses, women doing water dances. I like to let a thing eat at me before I write about it. Some call this incubation. Eventually, though, certain characters, both flat and round, get dragged, kicking, into the light. These strange and wonderful accidentals will always have a place in my poems.
Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.
(specifically on buying a dresser off of Facebook Marketplace)
So, my daughter Melody bought the dresser, then Kaycee (who sold it to her) and I wrestled that behemoth into the truck. Then I found out that Kaycee wasn’t a farmer but a bronc rider. Not just any bronc rider either but a six-time world champion. When I asked if he trained, he said he used to when he was young, but now he has to get paid every time he gets on a horse, too much risk otherwise. I try to stay limber and lean, he said, that’s my training. Right now I’m about fifteen pounds heavy. The more muscle the more there is to tear, so I’ve got to slim down. And then he explained how to take the scenic way back to I-15, turn right and then right, and that will take you around West Mountain. This time of day, he said, you’ll get a nice reflection off the lake. So that’s how Melody and I went home. Lots of shore ice and gray water and reflection and here and there a car pulled over and an osprey nest and one osprey diving. What would it be like to be a world champion? I mean, of anything. I had no idea. Then I asked Melody if someone threw you into that water and you had to swim to the other side or die, could you? No, she said, that’s eight miles. More like two or three, I said, could you do two or three? Nope, she said, I’d seize up. Me too, I said. I’d be lucky to make it a mile. And for the next ten minutes driving along the lake, I kept drowning. Over and over, in ten feet of water. It wasn’t pleasant, that drowning, but I was glad it was only ten feet of smothering wet and not 300. A piece of idiocy I couldn’t talk my body out of.
