(B. 1959)

Any given Sunday or Monday, if your radio's tuned to KRUU 100.1 in Fairfield, Iowa, you'll catch Rustin Larson hosting his talk show with the quirky-hip title: “Irving Toast, Poetry Ghost.” With an eye on creating a venue for poets, Larson spent several years in magazine publishing, but the venture ran its course. Still looking to showcase writers, he met with the KRUU station manager, who gave him free reign. “Irving” (the spirit of poetry who lives in the hearts of all) hit the airwaves in April 2008, and features live readings and interviews with new and established poets.

A published poet and writer himself, the five-time Pushcart nominee has authored three poetry collections, Loving the Good Driver (Mellen Poetry Press, 1996) Crazy Star (Loess Hills Books, 2005) and most recently--The Wine-Dark House (1st World Publishing, 2009). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, North American Review, Poetry East, Atlanta Review and others.

Mr. Larson credits a high school creative writing class for piquing his interest and serving as a catalyst for future endeavors in the field. He received his B.A. in Literature from Maharishi International University in Fairfield Iowa, an M.F.A. in Writing from Vermont College of Norwich University in Montpelier, Vermont, and has taught writing in a variety of settings.

Reviewers have described our featured writer's work as “stylistically diverse”--ranging from luminous to deadly serious. “When Larson's on...” says the editor of Voices on the Landscape: Contemporary Iowa Poets, he is as good as anyone writing today, maybe better.” We find evidence (both literal and figurative) of that luminous quality reviewers refer to in Mr. Larson's poem, The Lamp.  The tone is set in its beautiful opening lines to give the reader a sense of gentleness and movement, and the core of the writing has lovely sensory elements as it builds slowly to the uplifting final lines.

Every word in this next piece seems perfectly chosen, lending even more meaning to a wonderful tribute to a mentor. Its reflective quality allows the expression of gratitude, as well a teacher's impact to be felt, all within a framework of ambience and quietude. A thoughtful and beautifully-crafted write, to be sure.

In this poem from Rustin Larson's book by the same name, we find wise and layered musings and philosophy based on authentic feelings and ordinary lives. I believe the descriptive use of “wine-dark” is particularly effective in creating both physical and emotional darkness. The final lines mesmerize:

There is a raw, throbbing feel to the powerfully-expressed observations in the following poem. I love the beauty and compassion throughout, particularly in the second stanza's opening lines. Creatures Nobody Recognizes displays wonderful depth as well, in the weaving of the organic with the philosophical.

Larson's Copper Dislocation communicates a sense of vastness and freedom and takes us to a place of quiet reflection where one can fully be one's self. There is a masculine quality to the poem, but certainly it speaks to us all of relaxation and well-being, of the place we return to again and again to seek solace and be rocked by “Woody's...lullaby.”

Readers and writers alike will appreciate the wonderful imagery and personification in this last selection, Trying to Survive Death's Little Weather.  The poem's format on the page suggests the undulating feel of waves.  And this Lark loves the stunning lines, “The water's restless/ sleeping body/ pulling a wave/over its shoulder/ like a sheet,” as well as the lyrical feeling which builds pace slowly, picks up speed and ends quietly.

It is a privilege indeed, to be able to share the work of this original and creative writer and talk show host with our readers; we thank him for permission to feature his poetry and for the gracious interview that follows.   

Lark Vernon Timmons
October, 2009

Pirene’s Fountain interviews Rustin Larson

PF-Thank you for speaking to us about poetry, Rustin. It is a pleasure to have you at Pirene’s Fountain. We were all impressed with "The Wine-Dark House." Please tell us about some of the poems in this collection that are closest to your heart.

Thank you for the attention! Do poets ever get enough of that? Pirene's Fountain is a beautiful place.

In "The Wine-Dark House" some of the poems that are closest to my heart are these: 

"Baker's." It preserves a bit of my old childhood neighborhood, which had a hazy, yawning Mayberry (although dark side) type of feel to it, at least in my memory. I return to Des Moines periodically, and little by little the old neighborhood has become unrecognizable, new buildings and businesses replacing the old. So I am glad for the poem's ability to resurrect.

And then there's the eerieness of the past. In that era, there was always the constant awareness of the U.S. involvement in southeast Asia, even we as children had it. It was in the news, it was in the way a draft-age boy slouched in his chair at the barbers, it was in the way people exhaled. This current era is not much different, I suppose. I believe attitudes alone have created our predicaments, as they have in the past. Poetry, I suppose, can spend a lot of time idealizing a moment, for inexplicable reasons, but it can also be a mechanism for witnessing of what was, and by extension, what is.

"Character & Setting," "Loving the Good Driver," "An Ordinary Drinking Glass" and many other poems in the book incorporate, describe, elaborate upon, or spring from the life I've shared with Caroline. I haven't done a lot of travelling, lived in only one big eastern city (Washington, D.C.), and so my life has been just what I cooked up. I do my share of reading, Caroline does much more. She's painted and written things. I've done a lot of writing. I like being with her. We are not carbon copies, she's very different in many ways, but I'm smart enough to know when I'm in a healing presence, and I would have been dead years ago if it were not for Caroline. Her touch is very healing to me, and I am grateful.

PF- Please share with us your process of producing a poem. What do you do to get into the flow? Do you listen to music, work alone at a desk or around others? Do you rework and revise your piece a lot? Do you write poems in one shot, or work over a span of time? How do you get to a finished piece?

To start, it's a matter of making time to be open to absolutely anything that comes along. Sometimes I'm at home, other times in a library. Sometimes the writing is less than wonderful during any given writing period, but that's OK. Things can always be revised, reshaped. It's just a matter of being open for business. Just have an impression, follow the next thing you think of and so on. I say 20 minutes a day is doable for anyone. If things are going well, it will stretch out to an hour or more. I often write about what's in front of me at the moment and then take it from there, building through memories and associations, writing quickly, listening for the words as I hear them in my head. If I'm lucky I get a poem in one shot, and then can revise it from there.
 
Other times poems can get built up in collage fashion, by fitting pieces of previous journal entries with others in pure juxtaposition or other times conscious placement of similar topics and themes in a perceived sequence. Then it's a matter of having a typed manuscript and reading and re-reading the poem or group of poems over a long period of time, making changes, some major, some minor.

Sometimes the worth of a poem will hinge on the change of a single word, and sometimes that takes weeks or months of contemplation and meditation. I tend to do a lot of reduction, whittling down of phrases, and changing the typographical shape of the poem from draft to draft. Recognizing the finished poem is all feeling, there is no set criteria or formula. It will sound good read aloud. I will no longer stumble over awkward phrases because they will have been ironed out through word exchanges or word removal. Sometimes I hear a subtle *ding* in my head that tells me its done.

PF- There are so many exceptional poets writing today. Besides prize-winning poets and those in literary headlines, there are some great lesser-known poets. Can you recommend some of these poets to our readers? Which writers inhabit your personal bookshelf?

A few from my bookshelf: Michael Carey's The Holy Ground; Michael Carrino's Cafe Sonata; Robert Long's Blue; Paula Yup's Baja Poems; W. E. Butts' Sunday Evening at the Stardust Cafe. I highly recommend them all. I particularly like Robert Long (not to be confused with Robert Hill Long). Not only did he appear in a poetry section I edited in The Iowa Source, but his work also appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Crazyhorse and so on. Be that as it may, I still don't think he got nearly enough recognition in his lifetime. Blue is an amazing book and I'm not sure if it is still in print. I also want to mention Bill Kemmett who has a new book forthcoming called Black Oil. His poems are often brief but they sink deep. And a good friend of Kemmett's is W. E. Butts, an amazing lyric/narrative poet and newly appointed poet laureate of New Hampshire. Despite that appointment, I wonder if enough people know about Walter Butts. Everyone should read him.

PF- Please share with us some experiences as an editor of a literary magazine. How do you make time to write with all your literary activities?

For a number of years I edited The Contemporary Review. The poets who appeared in the first issue back in 1988: Audrey Bohanan, Mark Fleckenstein, Scott Paul Elledge, William James Austin, Lyn Lifshin, Theresa Pappas, Salmon Halpern, Pia Tafdrup, Fran Barst, Marcia Hurlow, Suzanne Rhodenbaugh, Robert Cooperman, Patrick Mathias, Nicholas Samaras, Douglas Mailman, Ann Douglas, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Mark Johnston, William Miller, Steven Schneider, Paula Yup, J. C. Ellefson, Mary Anne Redmond, and Bruce Lloyd. The magazine was published at least once a year, sometimes twice, until 2002 (with a hiatus in the middle years). A cheaply produced, saddle stapled, chapbook style magazine, it is often credited in published books' acknowledgments, and, I hear, it is greatly appreciated by many of its past contributors.

I was also poetry editor of The Iowa Source for a while. While there, I published Gary Whitehead, Robert Long, Suzanne Rhodenbaugh, Mark Cox and many, many others. While The Iowa Source does not currently have a printed poetry feature, I still feature poets on my on-line blog for the Source. And once in a while I get an article in print there myself. And of course there are my blog entries, which I count as writing written during my time to write. I consider responding to this interview writing time.

When this interview is finished, this time space will be filled by another writing activity. I also carry a notebook with me wherever I go. If I have a weird dream or think of a peculiar line, I jot it down, and sometimes these get recast into poetry (or on rarer occasions a short story). I figure if I can make time to brush my teeth, or eat a good breakfast, I can also make time to write. Granted, I'm not a novelist. I'm not going to require the same blocks of time a novelist does. I'm glad I'm not a novelist. I really don't intend to write a novel. I'm not saying it won't happen, but it just doesn't FEEL like it's going to happen, and I say whoop-dee-doo! I like being stuck on poetry.

PF-What is the difference between performance and written poetry?  Do you think the poet who writes away from the public eye will be eventually overshadowed by the poet who reads aloud and attends all the reading events?

Well, I just got my Poetry Out Loud teacher's packet and watched the DVD, and I can say there's a lot to be said for performance and vocal interpretation. I consider myself a sensitive, expressive and good reader of my own poems out loud, but I would not consider myself in any way a performance poet. Performance drifts toward acting, dance, stand-up, improv, which are all terrific and fun to watch and be around. Written poetry can be performed, but does poetry composed expressly for performance stand up in print? Some does, some doesn't, but that does not necessarily take anything away from a great performance. There are so many ways of entering a moment and valuing it, and writing and performance are two distinct things, just as a play on the page is a beautiful thing, and the play performed is another, yet different, beautiful thing. One's not going to overshadow the other. There are great happenings, and there are great print showcases. It will always be that way, I think.  

PF- People often think workshops turn out standard, production-line writers. What is your take on this? How significant are formal workshops, or getting the opinions of other poets about your work before it is completed?

I have to be honest. Workshops were not what I liked best about the MFA program at Vermont College. I got a lot more from the faculty poets I worked one on one with during the semester instead. Workshops made it a lot less clear what the weaknesses and strengths of a poem were, since there were opinions flying at me from a half-dozen different directions. It was just too confusing. Once I settled into the semester, I could count on the careful readings and observations that came from people like David Wojahn, Elizabeth Spires, Jack Myers and others. I didn't always like what I heard about my writing, but at least it was one opinion at a time, and a fairly reasoned argument each time.  This was about 25 years ago.

Yes, I suppose workshops, and by extension literary magazines, can encourage a poetry that is "in vogue." Poets can and do start sounding like one another because they gravitate towards the sounds and styles of important contemporary poets they admire. And the literary editors may do the same. Yes, there is a lot of poetry that sounds production-line. But then there are great magazines like Margie (to name one) that manage to put out volumes full of excellent quality and diverse poetry. Many of the poets published there teach in or come from writers' workshops as well. So there's one example of production-line standards not predominating. I guess what I'm saying is there are probably different strata out there. There's a layer of homogeneity, and there's a layer of uniqueness, and possibly several transitional levels between the two.

PF- Please share with us some facets about your excellent show “Irving Toast, Poetry Ghost."

I'm lucky to live in a town with so many crazy and creative people, and radio station KRUU is the hive where so many of them congregate.  Station manager James Moore told me today KRUU has well over 100 hosts contributing shows to the airwaves. This is all grass-roots, community, non-commercial stuff. People from all walks of life contribute, from Harvard-educated political analysts to local church ladies.

I was told that if I had an idea for a show, I should drop by and start work on it. And so I did. I wanted to create something nice for the poetry community both locally and abroad, and so far I've interviewed poets who literally live down the street like Freddy Fonseca, to poets who have international reputations like Marvin Bell. I've put up well over 52 shows like canned peaches on our radio archives, and these can be listened to anytime at http://www.kruufm.com. Just click on the "archives" tab at the top of the page and then scroll down until you find "Irving Toast, Poetry Ghost." You can either listen with KRUU's player or download the show of your choice.

(We thank Rustin Larson for permission to publish his work, and appreciate his time and graciousness in response to the interview above.)