In honor of National Poetry Month, 15 Bytes editor Shawn Rossiter sits down with Utah poet Lance Larsen to discuss his newest collection, Making a Kingdom of It. In this intimate conversation, Larsen reads from the collection and reflects on the nature of poetry, memory, and emotion. Together, they explore themes of loss, tenderness, and the creative process—how poems begin with tension or a haunting image, and how the poet shapes experience into language. The discussion also touches on the personal and universal in religious imagery, poetry’s modest power, and the stories still waiting to be written.

Making a Kingdom of It
Lance Larsen
University of Tampa Press
December, 2024
86 pp.

A rough and abbreviated transcription of the conversation is below:

Shawn Rossiter:
Hello, I’m 15 Bytes editor Shawn Rossiter. In honor of National Poetry Month, we sat down with poet Lance Larsen to discuss his newest collection, Making a Kingdom of It. Lance is a longtime professor at Brigham Young University and a former Poet Laureate of Utah. Making a Kingdom of It, published by the University of Tampa Press, is his sixth collection of poetry.

In this conversation, recorded at the end of March, Lance reads two of the pieces in the collection, and we discuss the nature of poetry, the poignancy of the present moment, and the nature of his craft.

Nice to have you with us, Lance.

Lance Larsen:
Thanks. Great to be here.

Rossiter:
We’re going to start with you reading the first poem in your most recent collection, Making a Kingdom of It, and it’s titled Having My Back Erased.

Larsen:
Thank you. [Reads poem: find it at The Missouri Review]

Rossiter:
So why did you choose that to introduce this body of work?

Larsen:
When I was arranging the collection—initially, I think it was the second or third poem. But after I read the collection and tried to create an arc, I thought, no, let’s bring this one up. I was happy that it fit on one page. I’m always trying to write shorter poems. But I like the way this poem introduces themes that show up later in the collection—the idea of hurting and tenderness, the idea of art. Here’s a mother and son collaborating on this little game they have, using their imaginations to create images. I’ve always liked playing this game as an adult and as a child, so I thought, yeah, this is a good way to introduce the making of art—because that’s what we’re always doing. And maybe the canvas is our larger life.

Rossiter:
So the initial setting of this is, the ER, a moment of damage?

Larsen:
Just after, yeah. Driving home.

Rossiter: There’s a lot of damage going on. There’s one poem where you’re kissing your father-in-law on his deathbed, and you say something like, it’s hard to get along with fathers; it’s even harder to get along with fathers-in-law. And another remembering a car accident involving an old friend. Is that because, at this point, you’re old?

Larsen:
I’m sure that’s part of it, but I think even young poets are celebrating—or confronting—these things. Maybe in a slightly different way, but we’re always sort of dancing with corpses. Maybe that’s putting it a little too bluntly, but there’s always the backdrop of loss, and that’s what makes the current moment so poignant and temporary.

Rossiter:
Do you think about loss now differently than you did as a young poet?

Larsen:
I think I do. It’s less theoretical, if that makes sense. You look at friends you’ve lost. We’re holding this interview just after I came from a funeral of a writer friend of mine who died in her seventies or eighties. It was kind of a celebration—she had lived larger than life. I didn’t attend a lot of funerals when I was in high school, but now…a few every year.

Rossiter:
Not to harp on how long you’ve been around—but how long have you been around? Do you know how young you were when you wrote your first poem?

Larsen:
I wrote some really bad poems in my early twenties. I finally took a poetry class in my mid-twenties. That’s probably where I’d date myself as someone who got serious about this. So, probably 25. I’ve been at this 40 years. Four decades.

Rossiter:
In that time, have you learned something about poetry—what it can do, what it should do, or what it does for you?

Larsen:
Yeah. It doesn’t compete well with Netflix or a symphony. Doesn’t compete well with a hip-hop song or even a vivid painting. It might comment on the vivid painting or on a hip-hop song. But I see it as a great genre for celebrating the modest, the intimate. A professor of mine, Richard Howard, once said—when asked how to celebrate Poetry Month—something like, “Poetry has always been a private art. Let’s just keep it a secret.” He was being facetious, of course, but there’s something to that. Poetry does small really well. Think of haiku. Think of the gorgeous, intimate quatrains of Emily Dickinson. A good lyric poem is a machine for thinking, remembering, and feeling. If we try to explode it into something larger than that, it loses its bearings.

Rossiter:
It’s interesting that poetry is an intimate, private thing—and our private lives are becoming so small. So many of us live a performative life online, an a way you or I wouldn’t have done as kids. When when hiked a mountain it was to hike a mountain.

Larsen:
Not to do a podcast about it?  Or make sure we got the perfect shot at the summit?

Rossiter:
Do your students relate to poetry differently now?

Larsen:
They do. And for those who make sense of it, they find it a kind of refuge—a nod toward the authentic, the unrehearsed, the improvisational. It’s unnerving for them at times, to just read poems aloud in class and have them celebrated and picked apart by friends and colleagues. But it’s a learned skill, and they find its value partly because they can’t find those kinds of intimacies elsewhere. I think it was more intuitive for earlier generations, but there’s certainly a need—and they can feel that need acutely if they allow themselves to.

Rossiter:
A lot of your poetry happens in or relates to nature. Is that another place of refuge?

Larsen:
Yes. I walk and run—run badly. I go outside, face the elements, usually for half an hour or an hour. Longer hikes sometimes. I’m kind of a junkie for finding my way into the natural world.

Rossiter:
Do you ever have to stop your runs because a great line comes to you?

Larsen:
Not really. I usually get the lines afterwards, thinking about something. Once in a while, a line comes to me and I try to remember it. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. But I just know that if I give myself enough opportunities, the well won’t go dry.

Rossiter:
Do you think of a theme or idea and then reach into your life to find something that attaches to it—or does the memory surface first?

Larsen:
I think it’s the latter. You’re describing a deductive approach; I’m more inductive. There’s usually an autobiographical trigger, and that sets me going. I might read other poets, look for a certain kind of language—but the trigger often comes first.

Let me give you one instance. Last spring, we had recently moved into a new house, and I looked out the basement window and saw a deer lying down, right near the window. Odd, because it’s not sheltered. Just hard scrabble dirt. And then I noticed—it had six legs, not four. I looked closer: two smaller legs coming out of the tail. A doe, trying to give birth. We locked eyes. She spooked and ran for the trees. Later, we found out she died on someone else’s property. The fawn was probably dead already. I haven’t written a successful poem about it yet, but I’m trying. I’m looking for a moment of tension, some kind of drama—something perplexing or troubling. That’s what I want. That’s usually where poems begin.

Rossiter:
So on that note, tell me about this next poem. If you’ll read it for us—And Also, I Ran—I’d like to hear the story or the backstory, and also when it came back to you, what was behind it.

Larsen:
[Reads And Also, I Ran: read it at Rattle.com]

Rossiter:
To the extent you want to talk about the experience—your friend, the one described in the poem—at what point did that memory resurface? How did it become a poem?

Larsen:
I think I tried to write this poem several times and never could find the right language for it. There are two main images that drove it. One was sitting on the hospital floor so I could talk to my friend after this terrible accident. I really did sneak in late one night. We were going on a family trip the next day, and here was my best friend, essentially paralyzed from the waist down.

The second image was me going home afterward. There was no reason for me to run—I could’ve walked—but I felt compelled to run in a way I didn’t understand. Those two images had been bouncing around in my head, creating a kind of cognitive dissonance. A couple years ago, I gave the poem another try and found a way to talk about it. I don’t fully understand it even now, but writing the poem brought some insight, some tentative clarity—at least in terms of imagery. Not conclusions, but images.

Rossiter:
So that second part, when you’re running—did that actually happen? Or is that something you invented to make the poem work?

Larsen:
The running actually happened. I wasn’t a runner at the time, but I remember doing it. That parking lot—it was a stadium lot—I had walked across it many times. And yes, you could get three shadows from all the overhead lights. That always fascinated me as a kid. I think the poem helped me explore what that meant: these three perspectives, these three shadows. That’s probably the “new” part the poem brought me.

Rossiter:
So that element had existed in memory but hadn’t yet come to the surface of a poem?

Larsen:
Exactly. I struggled a lot. Earlier drafts just came out as flat narrative—“this happened, then this happened”—and it didn’t go anywhere as a poem. It wasn’t until the third or fourth or fifth draft that I found language that could carry more weight. I began to use repetition, variations in syntax, and that gave it some lift. I was about to abandon it entirely.

Rossiter:
Would you be against inventing something for a poem?

Larsen:
No, not at all. If part A of the poem happened in my living room and part B is completely fictional, that’s fine. I don’t know the percentage, but I’d say most of my poems have some autobiographical trigger. That helps me believe in the poem as I’m writing it. I feel more confident.

Marianne Moore once described poetry as “imaginary gardens with real toads.” The imaginary garden is the vision or scaffolding of the poem. I’m not very taken with poems that exist at that level alone. I always want the toads. I’d say my poems are maybe 20–30% imaginary garden, but there are a lot of toads. When I can sneak an animal into a poem—literal or metaphorical—it anchors the poem. Makes it more believable, more authentic.

Rossiter:
Have those real-life “toads”—people in your life—ever called you out on the details?

Larsen:
Yes. My family often tells me, “It didn’t happen that way.” I say, “Well, it’s close enough.” More often than not, I collapse two or three events into one. I compress time. That’s what I usually do.

Rossiter:
How many unwritten poems are you carrying around right now?

Larsen:
Unwritten? That number would be infinite. But unfinished—hundreds. I start a lot of pieces, and then they clamor for attention. I pay attention to the ones that clamor the loudest.

Rossiter:
Is there anything you won’t write about? That you shy away from?

Larsen:
Wow, that’s a great question. I’m sure there are things. I’m just not sure what they are yet. I’d say what drives a poem for me is attention—curiosity. If there’s nothing I’m curious about, the poem will be dead on the page. It might be technically good, but it won’t hold interest—mine or anyone else’s. Robert Frost said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” It’s not about writing sentimental things—it’s about the writer being emotionally invested.

Rossiter:
So how do you approach the emotional content? Are you crying at the desk? Or are you detached, but trying to reach something real?

Larsen:
I’m not crying when I write a poem, but I am interested in the emotion. T.S. Eliot talked about the “objective correlative”—the better the poet, the better they are at separating the person who suffers from the person who writes. You’re looking for a concrete equivalent of the emotion. If I just follow the emotion, the poem often goes nowhere. So I step back. I use image, metaphor, disjunction, line breaks. You want to create something that moves someone who doesn’t know you and doesn’t care about you—unless you earn it in the poem.

Rossiter:You’ve probably read student poems that just gush on the page.

Larsen:
The best poets don’t write out of their emotional self, but try to create something that they would be moved by if the poem weren’t theirs.

Rossiter:
Have you ever gone back and looked at one of your old poems and thought, “Damn, that’s good”—like you forgot it was yours?

Larsen:
Yes—it’s great when that happens. Usually it’s the opposite: “Why did I put that one in the book?” But occasionally a poem surprises me. I think, “Okay, I was onto something there.”

Rossiter:
How many years do the poems in this collection span?

Larsen:
About six years. Most of them are from the more recent end of that span.

Rossiter:
You mentioned writing about religion, spirituality, philosophy. How do you think about using imagery from your own (LDS) religious background—particularly when it might not be widely known or understood?

Larsen:
That’s a great question. I read widely—Dickinson for her repressed Protestantism, Whitman for his cosmic reach, Jane Hirshfield (you could call her a California Buddhist), Polish poets like Zbigniew Herbert and Adam Zagajewski. When I write religious poems, I’m in their company. Or trying to. They’re my audience.

I don’t always use my local idiom. And if I do, I try to universalize it—find ways that readers, religious or not, can connect. That’s always the challenge. How does T.S. Eliot write for a broader audience while still being profoundly Christian? I try to do what he does—or what Dickinson does.

Rossiter:
Are you willing to describe a poem you’re currently struggling with?

Larsen:
Sure. About 25 years ago, a professor at BYU—Hal Black, in the zoology department—was doing research on black bears. My son and I went with him on a trip, and I ended up holding a black bear cub that was still in hibernation. It weighed maybe five or seven pounds.

I tried to write an essay about it back then but never finished it. Just this morning, I thought—maybe there’s something there. What is it like to hold a bear? It’s pretty singular. The narrative isn’t enough by itself—I have to find a language that reflects the experience. And that’s where I am. I have a rough draft. It’s broken, stapled together. But maybe it’ll become something. That’s the struggle: finding the language to contain or reflect that experience.

Rossiter:
All right, our job is to look for the poem with the black bear.

Larsen:
Now you’re putting pressure on me. Give me two years.

Rossiter:
Fair enough. Can we publish it?

Larsen:
Nice invitation. Thank you.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.