Moon Beams #12 - Daniel Lassell
It’s a gift to be able to steer “Moon Beams” wherever I think it will be of service, and before I started recording my conversation with Daniel Lassell, we got to talking about about our mutual experience and the priority we put on marketing and business strategies.
Finding too much there to keep to ourselves, I’m glad Daniel was up for riffing on these topics and much more in our conversation on episode #12, which I’m proud to share here.
On marketing, Daniel said, “I think poets don’t give themselves enough credit with the skills they accumulate through writing poetry,” including concision, critical eyes, and creative invention that strong engagement with consumers requires.
We talked through the intersection of poetry and marketing, as well as his current work with Heather Brown at Brown Bird Consulting (“I can’t say enough good things about Heather,” he said, “she’s been wonderful”) around his newest poetry collection, Frame Inside a Frame, to be released September 22nd by Texas Review Press.
Daniel shared that the book aims to meet “the idea of proximity and distance and memory,” as well the inherent limits of any frame, on top of accuracy’s limits colored by time, perspective, and nostalgia, which Daniel blends with a personal time line of falling out of faith and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It felt very important to start a book in a dark place and then move through the collection as grappling with the state of the world,” he said.
Per usual, I was laid flat by the line of poetry I had asked him to share, this one from the immortal Louise Glück’s poem “March” in her collection, A Village Life:
“The sea doesn’t change as the earth changes;
it doesn’t lie.
You ask the sea, what can you promise me,
and it speaks the truth; it says, erasure.”
I’m tremendously grateful to Daniel for his friendship, artistic inspiration, and adding a valuable and practical angle to the conversations I get to share here, keep it up, my guy, and stay up and question the premise, everybody.
