{"id":35716,"date":"2018-05-20T15:13:35","date_gmt":"2018-05-20T21:13:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=35716"},"modified":"2023-11-20T15:43:41","modified_gmt":"2023-11-20T21:43:41","slug":"corporeal-perception-lance-larsens-what-the-body-knows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/corporeal-perception-lance-larsens-what-the-body-knows\/","title":{"rendered":"Corporeal Perception: Lance Larsen’s What the Body Knows"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The epigraph to Lance Larsen\u2019s new collection of prose poems is attributed to Paul of Tarsus: \u201cEverywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and suffer need.\u201d<\/p>\n

Evoked, of course, is the ever-famous notion of negative capability gifted us by Keats, where one is \u201ccapable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, [and] doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.\u201d Amateur poets ever-strive and often-fail to dwell in, delve into, or exercise this capability in any meaningful way in the space of a few stanzas. Aesthetic theorist John Dewey in his Art as Experience<\/em><\/a> might chalk this up to inexpert huntsmanship of the muse, where one\u2019s creative impulse \u201cmay be stirred, and yet be as irrelevant to the act of perception as it is to the action of the hunter seized by buck-fever.\u201d<\/p>\n

Furthermore, Dewey attributes a certain physicality to the writing of good poetry. Only experienced poets who do not permit the muse \u201cto diffuse itself at random through [their] whole [bodies],\u201d but rather control and monitor their physical response to inspiration, are able to avoid confused and distorted perceptions that will prevent their treating an intended poem with the complexity of thought that it deserves. In this way, writing is more than the metaphorical flexing of a practiced muscle, but the steeling of one\u2019s self in states of uncertainty. All of this to say that, lucky for us, Larsen is an experienced poet, and the musculature binding the collection is obvious.<\/p>\n

But two things should be made clear about these outings into academics:<\/p>\n

First, that they should not be assumed to be derivative of Larsen\u2019s work, which unlike all things scholarly, transforms the ways we associate inspiration with the intellect. In fact, the wonder of this collection comes not from artifacts of knowledge, but in the exhibition of differing modes of processing knowledge\u2014both mental and physical.<\/p>\n

Second, that it is easy to hide behind jargon, and perhaps I am trying to shield myself from any accusation of taking the title too literally, which is typically an obtuse way of thinking about poetry collections. Nevertheless, it\u2019s true\u2014I think physical knowledge is the shining star of What the Body Knows<\/em>.<\/p>\n

(This revelation surprised me somewhat, since Larsen as Professor tends to edge around discussions of poems containing topics intimate or carnal, often coyly proclaiming his pure-mindedness as justification. Not enough to say that the poet, former Poet Laureate of Utah, is a prude or moralist, but enough that the deeply sensual nature of this collection raised my eyebrows once or twice.)<\/p>\n

Of course, the mental and verbal play we have come to expect from modern poetry is anything but absent in these prose poems. In \u201cAlmanac of Sighs,\u201d the very first poem in the collection, Larsen\u2019s dexterity in this intellectual-linguistic mode of knowledge is on full display: \u201cArm chairs sighing, old cars and young mothers sighing, graves sighing both before they devour the dead and after,\u201d capture the reader\u2019s ear in the best way\u2014not with a shout, but a whisper. The lines work as monuments against vain repetitions, the sighs of beets somehow never being the same as the sighs of crucifixes.<\/p>\n

This mastery of repetition and nuance extends to different ways of looking at scarecrows, water, and, in \u201cLadder Poem,\u201d the metaphorizing of progress: \u201cClocks are a ladder we lean against tomorrow today. Lay a ladder over a chasm, you have a bridge.\u201d If you further ladder Larsen\u2019s technical skills, tonal regulation reigns in \u201cValentine Poem Written After Learning of a Tragic Mishap in a Local Cave,\u201d in which the speaker loves his valentine \u201clike the country rescue team using oils domestic and lubricants industrial, not to mention a portable winch, which also failed, breaking ribs and almost snapping [a] neck.\u201d Somehow he wrangles catastrophe into deliberation of the fortitude required by, and resulting from, a union. And while form is a rung considered less often in the technique of prose poems, of note are the four Q&A poems, which are used to great effect to deliver anecdotes and delineate interrogations, and sometimes, to interrogate again.<\/p>\n

Nothing will be missing for the reader who picks up these pages wanting to fill out some of their gray matter. Larsen is clearly expert in and worshipper of the versatility of language. But like all good linguists, he is also quick to acknowledge the limits of knowing and communicating verbally. Early on in the collection, \u201cTranslation 101\u201d juxtaposes words said with words meant, introducing a sort of futility into a sincere prayer for forgiveness. A sad summation of linguistic speech act theory, that except in the case of practiced scripts\u2014\u201cWill you pass the salt?\u201d\u2014we aren\u2019t guaranteed any capability to interpret each other\u2019s desires. This is dramatized in \u201cDriving the West Desert at Night\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cTell me a story, she said, meaning don\u2019t you dare drift off, I need a voice to help me keep my hands on the wheel, a little narrative to convert breaths into miles. Shall I add a deer, he said, meaning an iconic buck on a cliff. Deer are clich\u00e9s, she said, how about birds, meaning the way they keep re-inventing their wings.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is easy, perhaps because it is hopeful, to assume that the driving companions will understand the implicit utterances shared with each other. Later in the poem, one of them speaks, \u201cmeaning he knew not what,\u201d and loses his own understanding of their conversation. So how is the other to know? She does not. He does not. Whatever they might have disclosed in secret is cut, vulnerable as a single thread.<\/p>\n

Even in instances with clear contextual cues, like a religious pulpit, the intellectual-linguistic mode of knowledge is easily contaminated, easily misinterpreted. The phrase \u201cAll Puffy and White, Goldish, Harpy and Angelonic,\u201d as one narrator points out, could be a description of heaven, or a \u201cwhite hell in which [a man is] forced to sacrifice his own sled dogs.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Larsen gives us in many of these poems an antidote to the failures of intellectual knowledge and all miscommunications of that knowledge. For Larsen, that antidote lies in the physical.<\/p>\n

All poetry relies on sensual reference. Poets are meant to \u201ctranslate the world through their bodies\u2026 [to] reinvent it in language,\u201d according to poet and critic Kim Addonizio<\/a>. But Larsen invites the reader not only to feel with the body, but to know with it. This act of directing a poem by <\/em>physicality rather than through<\/em> it, of attributing reason and knowledge to the body itself, is a radical expansion of the sensory center we desire of modern poems.<\/p>\n

Larsen\u2019s narrators gain and display physical knowledge with great frequency. The \u201cyeasty amens\u201d of a horse\u2019s nibbling a hand makes a man invincible (\u201cHorse Hands\u201d). In \u201cGirls in Trees,\u201d worries of what the \u201cde-girlization might do to this planet\u201d consume. (Spoiler: just because the girls sit in trees doesn\u2019t mean that they, too, are a renewable resource). A \u201cGreen Hut from Topaz\u201d has its own muscle memory from its time in a Japanese internment camp\u2014it \u201chas never heard of Hari-kari or kamikaze pilots, but can taste honor in the air.\u201d A mother forms \u201call contracts maternal\u201d while nursing her newborn (\u201cBlood on the Ceiling\u201d). Voodoo\u2014most earthly of spiritualities, that touch-and-be-touched deal, appears in several poems where characters inflict and are inflicted. We are reminded that it cannot be denied that our bodies contain knowledge, which we often misattribute to the pathways of firing neurons. Severed at the stem we would still know some things\u2014to jump at something that looks like a snake in the grass. To protect a small thing. To lie down when it\u2019s dark and rise up with the sun.<\/p>\n

It is in this mode of knowledge that a new form of negative capability is created, where what the body knows and what the mind knows are at odds. \u201cBecause we can process the same bit of the environment in two different ways,\u201d wrote Jenefer Robinson, professor of aesthetics, of this very phenomenon. \u201cIt is possible for us to believe contradictory things simultaneously about it.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

The contradictions resulting from both modes of knowledge check each other from veering too far into nostalgia, or dream, or even grounded-ness. The body says \u201cIn Dreams of Old Girlfriends\u201d: \u201cjust once I wish her red ants would picnic with my black ants and mean it.\u201d The mind says\u2014\u201cthey love me, these old girlfriends, but from a distance.\u201d The \u201860s personified knew a young boy \u201cperfecting [his] dead man\u2019s float,\u201d but perhaps knows him even better losing brain cells \u201cduring acid flashbacks\u201d (\u201cTo the Sixties\u201d). The body and mind keep secrets from each other at times, the secret of a signature written on a back, the secret that women\u2014neither allowed to be sumo wrestlers, nor enter a sumo ring\u2014will be warriors and protectors anyway. The mind that wonders if worshipping \u201csweet decay\u201d is a righteous prayer housed in a body smitten by moldering mushrooms, and the funk of stables (\u201cAll Things Earthy, All Things Quag\u201d).<\/p>\n

In an age when it feels so surprising to need to cling to reason like a lifeline, What the Body Knows <\/em>brings a welcome respite, a welcome balance between component parts of us brain-heavy human beings. Don\u2019t tip over, it says, with its physicality that welcomes the reader like a cradle. It is possible that those readers particularly susceptible to hypnosis, psychic transference, or abduction should beware lest Larsen\u2019s work snatches them from their own bodies, lest they taste the pears and apricots he tastes, or see his old girlfriends in their dreams.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What the Body Knows<\/em>
\nby Lance Larsen
\nUniversity of Tampa Press, 2018
\nPaperback, $14.00 (also available in hardback)
\npp 83<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The epigraph to Lance Larsen\u2019s new collection of prose poems is attributed to Paul of Tarsus: \u201cEverywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and suffer need.\u201d Evoked, of course, is the ever-famous notion of negative capability […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1594,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2589,35],"tags":[880],"class_list":["post-35716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews-literary-arts","category-literary-arts","tag-lance-larsen"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-29 13:36:12","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1594"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35716"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72046,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35716\/revisions\/72046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}