Larsen manifests 'Brilliance' in his latest poetry collection

Asked if his poetry is autobiographical, Lance Larsen answered with a quote from another poet, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Philip Levine: "Why be yourself if you can be someone interesting?"

Larsen demonstrates this philosophy in his second book of collected works, "In All Their Animal Brilliance," an insightful and provocative collection that should help cement his standing among those who appreciate good poetry.

A professor at Brigham Young University, Larsen was self-effacing but articulate as he spoke thoughtfully about the beginnings of his love for writing. It was in the first grade, but already he was sensing competition. He tried to write "the longest, zaniest and most unexpected stories," he said by phone from his Springville home.

In high school, he "read widely but without purpose." Then, as a student at BYU, he found himself trying to satisfy "a difficult taskmaster," his creative-writing instructor Bruce Jorgensen. "When he saw merit in a piece of my writing, I felt elation."

Larsen remembers being "far too deliberate at first," taking an idea and trying to quickly transfer it to the page. He assumed it was a "transcription" when it was really much closer to a "translation." "You take the language of experience and trade it for the language of poetry. If you transcribe directly, you get a wooden result filled with cliches. You need to find words that capture that original impression."

As an established poet who attracted a wide readership with his first collection, "Erasable Walls," Larsen said he now finds writing poetry "addictive, even intoxicating," as he tries to allow for maximum intuition in his poems. He takes each poem through as many as 10-30 drafts, writing and rewriting, reading to his artist wife, Jacqui, who inspires him, and then sending it to other poets and reading aloud to friends in a writing group.

He and Jacqui share many common interests, he said. She learns from his writing and he learns from her paintings. One of his poems in the new collection is entitled, "On Being Asked, Have you ever written about Jacqui's paintings?" It was inspired by a painting hanging on Larsen's office wall.

Together the Larsens have discovered that eventually, "You become artists 24 hours a day. I don't mean that in a pretentious way, just that you see the world through an artistic lens. Living with an artist allows me a second set of eyes."