Foreword by Richard Howard
"What Might Pass as Play": Lance Larsen's Erasable Walls”
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He may have a more recondite accounting for his title than the one I should like to propose, for on the evidence of these poems Larsen is a man who holds his cards very close to the chest, inward, downward, anything but toward the opposite player. I'd wager, though, or warrant that the walls can be erased by their very consistency as poems, as structures of language which dissolve barriers. Even certain doctrinal practices, certain rituals are seen, here, as soluble obstructions, and it is the intimacies, the secrets of the Larsen poem which spirit away confines. A characteristic action is one of release, apparent destruction and loss which eventuate in ecstatic illumination.

He leads us in rather gently. The earlier poems appear to concern, indeed to construct, what we so often call, with a grimace of wrong recognition, family values. How disingenuously the poet's persona muses upon the responsibilities of fatherhood, of filial piety, of those initiations into man's estate which involve certain severances, certain deliberate repudiations. And how clearly he speaks an American idiom it is his special rhythm to celebrate:

...my mother in a whatever
shade of lipstick was holding a dead cat
wrapped in Visqueen. She had errands
to run, and Dead Pet Hill was on the way.
I dug, she watched. Deep lipstick, suggesting
what--aloofness and downtown commerce?
Or maybe a lighter shade, to go with
the inside-out smell of rain and too much
sagebrush. I don't know the color.
But wet-looking and waxy and a favorite
kind of candy all at once

These lines sound the purest native note I've heard in our new poetry. Even Ashbery, invoked in a later poem, occasionally rings a little exotic compared to or collated with Dead Pet hill was on the way. / I dug, she watched. And it is by means of these apparent saliences that the poet moves us away from what Melville--in a phrase Larsen takes as his shocking epigraph--calls "attainable felicities" to be located not "in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country." The poet moves us away from the known, the approved, the predictable and into strange terrain indeed. By the second half of this handsome and so insistently homemade book of poems, the walls have indeed been erased, and we are at a contact high:

...if the only way
to keep the urn alive is by calling it bride,
why not? Besides, there's freedom in seeing your gods
dissolve like clouds. Ask Stevens. It gives you
back yourself.

Again and again Larsen works his modest (but pervasive) wonder, he reaches transport, rapture, aloft by what he likes to call, in poetry, "mostly device", though it is rather more inspired than that. I suspect the ascent is achieved by staying so close to what we might call intra-terrestrial visits. The walls can be most readily erased, then, by the predications of death, or at least of dying. We are moved into a solitude--a religious solitude, if there are kinds--best represented by these last lines from "A Philanthropist Speaks to His Lawyer", lines among the grandest American diction since the Stevens Larsen has evidently "asked":

...drop me into a hole
with the indigents--my bones, their bones.
It's enough if hyacinths mark us. Or a fig
tree, so that if I rise, I will first smell
heavy sweetness. A sullen morning it will be,
birds slower, toads dreaming in the ferns.
I'm tired. I feel it most in the afternoons.

The walls are gone, we are in the clear, in what another of Larsen's forbears calls the Radiance. And happy to be there.