LOOKING FOR “SPIRAL JETTY”
By Lance Larsen
Standing at the tip of “Spiral Jetty,” surrounded by pink briny Great Salt Lake, I was tempted to draw conclusions. But none came. Instead I settled for comparisons. “Spiral Jetty” was like Crick and Watson’s double helix. Like Yeats’ falcon, turning and turning in a widening gyre. Like Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” Like the whiteout my father experienced in an Idaho snowstorm, so disoriented he pulled over and closed his eyes to prove he wasn’t in motion. You can find “Spiral Jetty” in art history books, but until you’ve walked all over it, water sloshing your ankles, you can’t know its mesmerizing strangeness. Dickinson once said, “We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble.” I was moving. I was standing still.
Lance Larsen is the author of five poetry collections, most recently “What the Body Knows.” His poems have appeared in APR, TLS, Southern Review, Five Points, New York Review of Books and “Best American Poetry 2009.” His awards include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Ragdale, Sewanee and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brigham Young University, where he serves as department chair and fools around with aphorisms: “Gesundheit! — as close as I’ve come to Nietzsche and Heidegger in months.” In 2017 he completed a five-year appointment as Utah’s poet laureate.
Artwork: Gianfranco Gorgoni, “From the portfolio 'Smithson’s Spiral Jetty Photographs, 1970-2014,'” 2013. Photo © Estate of Gianfranco Gorgoni. Art © Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation / VAGA at Artist Rights Society (ARS) NY.