Jeanne Larsen : Review

Jeanne Larsen:

Planting Seeds of Knowledge in Our Young Poetic Hearts

By Tyler Grant

English 204: Creative Writing- Poetry

            When I originally read Why We Make Gardens, I expected Jeanne Larsen to be a super old lady who tended her garden tenderly and lived a quiet life. (I didn’t see the picture on the back of the book.) But from the moment Ms. Larsen opened her mouth, she held her student audience captive.

            “Write what you want and if they don’t get it, tough on them,” she said. Never hold back and always pursue and write what interests you were her main themes throughout her talk. She encouraged all of us to pay special attention to our skills and techniques that we really liked when writing and exploit those skills to the fullest. I loved her passion. While she did mention that she had to do some things to make money, she knew that she was doing the thing she loved because she loved doing it.

Ms. Larsen demonstrated her skills with chiasmus and enjambment. She cites examples in several of her poems where she uses these literary techniques. For her, enjambment with the title allows an interesting segue into her opening line in the stanza. Her clever uses of chiasmus furthermore gives readers the chance to hold similar writing or rhythmic words on the same level and fully see the differences between the ideas. She gave examples like “tomb” and “womb” as well as  “breath” and “death.” With my interest in Def Jam Poetry, this is definitely a technique that I will be incorporating into my writing. Enjambment is also a useful tool that allows rhyming a phrase but keeping the thought going in a way as to further the idea.

I always enjoy hearing poets read their work. Jeanne Larsen read her work slowly, thoughtfully, and tenderly. This resembled the image that I had of her as a tender gardener carefully tending to her vegetables. I love the poems she read in class. Her favorite “Why We Make Gardens” is by far my favorite and definitely her most powerful. Why do we make gardens? Because we need “chambers for chaos.” This alliteration captures the need we, as a society, have for order and “rows.” The poem is also humbling because we realize that we are merely “dust”, a “star’s bread.” Our minds can, at times, miss the very deep meanings, the deep-rooted truths because we often buy into “fallacy’s wisdom.”

The last line of her poem, I believe, depicts the truth Jeanne Larsen wants us to seek: “Because we are physical. Because gardens are not.” Jeanne Larsen is not a garden poet. Jeanne Larsen is a human experience poet. And through a simple image of tomatoes, or rows of vegetables, she can arrange the chaos of this world into neat rows in our mind. From her talk, I hope that I can harvest my passions and sow truth from not only my work but others as well.