Jeanne Larsen

Jeanne Larsen Poems

Jeanne Larsen Biography

Jeanne Larsen (born 1950 in Washington, D.C.) is a poet, novelist, translator, and essayist. Much of her work shows the growing influence of Buddhist perspectives on U.S. literature. This includes not only the poetry and creative nonfiction, but also the novels in her Avalokiteśvara trilogy: Silk Road, Bronze Mirror, and Manchu Palaces. Larsen grew up on U.S. Army posts in Kansas, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Germany. A graduate of Oberlin College, she received her M.A. from Hollins College and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from The University of Iowa. She has also lived, worked, and studied in Taiwan and Japan. In 1980, she moved to the Roanoke Valley of Virginia in the United States, where she teaches literature and creative writing at Hollins University. Larsen is the recipient of a Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship (creative nonfiction), an Individual Artist Fellowship (fiction) from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (literary translation),[6] the William L. Crawford Award for the year’s best new novelist from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts and student prizes from the Academy of American Poets. She has also received residency fellowships from the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Byrdcliffe Artists Colony, Ragdale, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Eastern Frontier Society, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. The School for Criticism and Theory and the American Council of Learned Societies/Mellon Foundation have awarded her academic fellowships, and she first went to Taiwan on an Oberlin Shansi teaching-study fellowship.)

The Best Poem Of Jeanne Larsen

Compassion's Garden

Of course it exists. Let it be grasses, hollow
identical plumes that rise
structural, bowing, the color of manna,
a whole level pampas

light-sown. Each parallel nerve
embraces its own shade.
Each from node to tip breathes
out at night, ease. Winters,
when dense air holds smoke & no

branches move, other gardens
go bare: petioles crumple, racemes fall.
This one stays unmoved.

It does not harbor views. Its foul weed
is pity. It refuses
duality. Frost
is a sword to it. Burned, it springs back.

Jeanne Larsen Comments