An Interview with Daniel Lassell
Home for many can evoke a variety of feelings, and while it may serve as a reminder of security and warmth for some, for others it can bring back a past they would like to keep in the shadows. In Daniel Lassell’s debut poetry collection, Spit, home and the idea of what home is does not fall into a simple narrative; rather, the complexity of one’s childhood and the feelings associated with it are brought forth in a elegiac and honest manner, and the nuance we witness in each poem reminds us that where we come from doesn’t always have to define who we’d like to be.
Daniel Lassell is the author of the poetry chapbook Ad Spot, and his work has appeared in Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, and Prairie Schooner, among others. I sat down with Daniel to discuss his poetry, as well as his influences and the lessons on life and writing that the world has taught him along the way.
Esteban Rodriguez: Daniel, thank you for your time. Your debut poetry collection, Spit, centers on a boy’s upbringing on a llama farm, and it progresses to explore how the boy and his family navigate the loss of the farm and the role it played in their lives. I was really drawn to the poem “The Way Home,” and the lines below resonated deeply with me because of my own writing on place:
Homesickness can howl
a kind of guilt, as I am guilty
to think a place my own.
Every land begets and receives
a trauma: dynamite-blasted
highways, flint shards in creek beds,
smoke where animals
flee upon burning paws.
I believe you live in Brooklyn now, and previously lived in Colorado. You grew up in Kentucky, so how have different landscapes and environments shaped your identity and writing, and what have you learned about the world and yourself from each of these places?
Daniel Lassell: Thank you for the invitation to speak with you, Esteban! That’s a superb question. I do currently live in Brooklyn, NY—my family moved here in August. Up until recently, I lived in Colorado, and before that, in Indiana and West Virginia. I was born in California and grew up largely in Kentucky. Having lived in these geographically different locations throughout my life has, indeed, shaped who I am. Each time I’ve moved, I have found myself changed as a person, both by the new people I encounter and the new surroundings that soon become familiar. Living so many places has, in short, widened my perspective for the better.
But place can also extend beyond immediate perspective to encompass something else. Living in Colorado, for example, provided a physical distance between myself and Kentucky that I needed to process my parents’ divorce, which was in full swing at the time. The move to Colorado—seeing hills flatten, then gradually turn to mountains—in some way mirrored the inner complexities I was untangling from myself at that time. The nearness of the mountains in one direction and the quiet spaciousness in the opposite direction was a much-needed comfort, and that landscape fed the artistic clarity I needed to write many of the poems that now comprise Spit.
I was able to create the world of Spit in the same way standing back from a painting allows you to see the full image. And in my case, distance in life and in art also meant adding separation between the “I” of the poet and the “I” of my poems. When writing the collection, I found it easier to approach the book as a fictionalized version of my life. Growing up on a farm, my family spent a lot of time driving to and from the city of Louisville: for school, errands, church, pretty much everything. The poem you’ve excerpted, “The Way Home,” delves into the memories I have of these long trips back and forth. As a teenager in Eminence, Kentucky, I found the isolation of that rural environment as both a gift and a curse—I always yearned to get away from the farm, to be with friends, to live where others seemed to be having more fun: the city. Any city. But now that I’ve lived in cities all around the country, I realize that happiness doesn’t hinge upon place. It certainly isn’t about one place being better than another—and much of my writing in Spit works toward this realization.
The lines you’ve excerpted do well to showcase what haunts me in Spit. The effects of colonialism linger in this poem, as they are ever-present in Kentucky today and, indeed, much of the world. Colonialism has been a driver for climate change, racial oppression, and numerous other horrors both seen and beneath the surface. I think white people like myself could do better to reconsider perceptions of homesickness, and what it means to say, “I am from a place.” To me, the idea of owning land does more to perpetuate white supremacy than dismantle it. Even the very act of drawing a property line—and a nation’s border for that matter—is an act of demonstrating ownership over something that maybe isn’t ours to claim. In the United States, no matter where I’ve lived, I have always lived on stolen land.
Oppression, in other words, is constant and everywhere. And what can we do? I don’t have any singular answer, but I keep coming back to a larger question at the heart of Spit: what does “belonging” mean? To me, the idea of “home” is intertwined with “belonging” – in essence, home isn’t a location, but something you carry with you, like an idea or a memory. Returning home, therefore, is more about re-encountering the people and landscapes you love.
ER: Your ability to paint an image and describe the landscapes around the speaker drew me further in page after page. But as much beauty as there was, there was also tragedy, in particular loss (deaths of chickens, llamas; the loss of the farm itself). To what extent has your writing (whether it was these poems or other pieces) helped cope with the inevitability of tragedy?
DL: I agree that Spit does lean heavily toward tragedy and loss, especially in the latter half of the book. This is largely due to the narrative arc that the collection called for, as well as my personal experiences growing up and the conditions of my life when writing those poems. Tragedy and loss are, indeed, inevitable aspects of life—and poetry reflects human experience. The act of writing toward something makes poetry a great avenue to process trauma, but it can also make it an avenue for discovery that transcends personal experience. It takes dedication and trust to reach into that new landscape of the self.
I’m also thinking specifically about the impacts of time on art. When you return physically to a location, even if the span of time between going and coming back is short, the place has slightly changed. Just as you have slightly changed as a person (because with age, nothing remains constant). The realities of time are inherently elegiac. And the same goes for writing and reading. When I return to an old poetry book that I admire (i.e. place), I receive a slightly different resonance—not because the words have changed, but because I have changed. There is a newly experienced loss for the previous resonance, too. This evolution is one of the great gifts of poetry. Good poems evolve. Good poems transcend the now. There is a magic in this relationship between poet and reader. But this symbiosis between poet and reader also makes the revision stage quite consequential. It can also be fun though, right? During revision, there is a chance for reinvigoration, for immersion.
ER: I completely agree with your assessment about receiving a different resonance with past poetry books that I’ve admired. Sometimes they resonate even more deeply (like with the work of Jay Wright), but sometimes I’ve changed enough to no longer feel that initial connection. What work continues to inspire you, and which works were instrumental during the composition of Spit?
DL: Yes, there are poetry books that sadly don’t resonate the same way as they did when I first read them, although I’m glad many books do allow me to find a newness each time I read them again. The full-length books that most inspired me while I was writing or honing the structure of Spit included Render / An Apocalypse by Rebecca Gayle Howell, Vantage by Taneum Bambrick, Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude and Bringing the Shovel Down by Ross Gay, Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong, Almanac by Austin Smith, The Floating Bridge by David Shumate, Thaw by Chelsea Dingman, Native Species by Todd Davis, Bright Dead Things by Ada Limon, The Dream of Reason by Jenny George, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones, Satan Says and Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds, Revising the Storm by Geffrey Davis, New Collected Poems by Wendell Berry, As One Fire Consumes Another by John Sibley Williams, Blowout by Denise Duhamel, Black Aperture by Matt Rasmussen, When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz, Good Bones by Maggie Smith, and the list goes on. Also, I can’t forget the several literary journals filled with so many poets who didn’t have full-length books at that time, poets like Joy Priest, Conor Bracken, Paige Lewis, Angie Mazakis, Cody Lumpkin, Darius Atefat-Peckham, L.A. Johnson, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Rachael Peckham, and Andrew Hemmert, for example. Some of these poets have since published full-length books, but some haven’t yet.
When I would sit down to write many of the poems in Spit, I would start by reading a couple poems from one of these books or lit journals to get me in the headspace I needed. Now that Spit has been released, I’ve been revisiting these books slowly, and many of them still do resonate with me. Most recently, I re-read Black Aperture.
Indeed, these poets as well as recently discovered ones to me, such as Frank Paino, Tarik Dobbs, Amorak Huey, Colby Cotton, Christina Olson, Issam Zineh, John Compton, Sage Ravenwood, Benjamin Gucciardi, Taylor Byas, Han Vanderhart, Mary Morris, RaJon Staunton, and Jessica Q. Stark, are inspiring me today. I’m thinking of your own work too, Esteban, like your collections The Valley, (Dis)placement, Dusk & Dust, and In Bloom for example. The well for inspiration seems endless today. We are living in an incredible age for poetry.
ER: Thank you so much for your kind words. I am undoubtedly indebted to readers like you. Jumping back into Spit, I want to talk about one poem that is quite timely, “On the Fellowship of Rabies.” Here, the speaker’s brother gets bit by a bat, subsequently resulting in him, along with the rest of the family, getting the rabies vaccine (rabies is almost always fatal if left untreated). There is definitely much to be said about the Covid vaccine right now (and please speak to it if you so wish), but there is a line I cannot quite shake: Nothing ever dies simply. I spoke about tragedy above, but why the line resonates with me is because I don’t think anything ever lives simply either, and when you’re a writer, the pressure to put words on the page complicates any sense of simplicity. Do you believe writing has the ability to simplify life, or at least aspects of it? What role has it played in yours?
DL: I’m so glad you were moved by “The Fellowship of Rabies” — it is interesting how the poem has taken on a different meaning since I first wrote it years ago, now that we are living through a global pandemic. I would certainly encourage everyone to get the COVID vaccine if they have not already.
Indeed, the line “nothing ever dies simply” does equally reflect the hardness of living, especially when we think about this specific moment in the 21st century. For those of another gender, sexual orientation, and race as my own, the very act of living can be an act of defiance against a system that has been constructed to oppress them, to prevent them from thriving. Sometimes the hardness of living gives way to a hardness in dying. When I think about ensuring comfort for people who are dying in hospice, even there we find rampant disparities between a white cisgender person’s experience and someone who isn’t. And I also cannot forget how what we call history has shaped, and continues to shape, the present experience.
Death’s resistance to simplicity indeed can extend beyond humans too. The capability of humans to inflict needless harm on animals can be worse than a merciful death, for example. Or, in another sense, I am thinking of how bones can turn to fossils, which give new life in death when later discovered. What I’m saying is that the meaning of death can go further if taken in reference to what lives on after death. On the surface of this poem, rabies is what lives on after the bat’s death. Yet, from a spiritual lens, the word “simply” also acts as a reference to the afterlife. From a secular lens, “simply” might imply the persistence of memory after death: how the dead live on in the cherished memories of loved ones—which to me is a form of afterlife.
To your question about whether writing serves to simplify, I think that good writing should both complicate and simplify life for a reader in some way. Maybe this means that the inner self is complicated when encountering a new perspective, but then simplified in terms of new understanding. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Challenging the status quo is never easy, and neither is addressing an audience with opinions counter to your own; this challenge makes writing—and poetry—well suited for argument and dialogue, since it encourages careful articulation.
I do think it’s the goal of a writer and/or poet—and perhaps our responsibility even—to simplify complexity into understanding. It’s a monumental task, too. We as poets labor over every word, to find the right phrasing and word choice, the right cadence and artful transfer of meaning. I think this goal is why we make Art: the world is complex and in need of meaning. Poets and writers aim to make sense of our surroundings—but this is not always the case. Sometimes, the aim of Art is to disrupt the harmony we have collectively assigned to the earth, often for the purpose of greater good. But, disruption seldom comes without a purpose—which to me is an intent toward better understanding (i.e. simplification). Thus, both complexity and simplicity seem to be in a constant push and pull. But this makes writing fun!
In the end, writers and poets persuade with words, which if we are lucky, can shape generations long after our passing. And if a poet is dedicated to their craft, they do not shy away from the complex, but steer into it. This attention to complexity can often mean living isn’t a simple endeavor for a poet. The mind is restless. Therefore, the Art is often restless too. But, if a poem is good, it does not die simply.
ER: I couldn’t have put it better myself. Really great response. Now, near the end of your collection, in “Finishing the Harvest,” the speaker says about watching passengers pick up their luggage:
Watch the luggage straps, how they life and place
with such ease. Something you can let go,
when ready, from your fingers like joy.
You’ve traveled far to get to this point, and are definitely not ready to let go of your writing journey. It no doubt continues, but how do you think your journey would have been different had you not immersed yourself in poetry/writing?
DL: Indeed, writing is a journey. As a poet, I’ve spent countless hours staring at a page, laboring over each comma and word choice. Sometimes the first draft of a poem ends up being unrecognizable from the published version. And sometimes even the published version isn’t the result a poet has in mind—this, too, is a journey of sorts.
I’m not sure what I would be doing today if not a poet and writer. While I got into poetry later than some, I can always remember writing in some capacity to feed my obsessions while growing up: I wanted to be a paleontologist after watching Jurassic Park, so I read countless books on dinosaurs and wrote Jurassic Park fan fiction. I wanted to be a veterinarian, so I read and wrote about animals. I had the dream of becoming a novelist too, which of course came with a lot of writing. For a time, I wanted to be a cartoonist, so I read and drew comics, writing jokes in thought bubbles. Even if writing wasn’t directly a focus of the “dream job,” it was certainly tied to my interpretation of its daily practice.
These days, I tend to only think about “what could have been” when I hit a roadblock in my writing or experience a period of burnout. I tried to stop writing poetry once—I think it was during college or grad school—because I wanted to focus on the possibility of a different career path. At that time, the career trajectory that I saw ahead for myself in poetry seemed to lack a sustainable standard of living. And for too many poets, sadly, this is the circumstance that leads them away from poetry. But I couldn’t stay away. I found my way back to the page because the page called me back. Most poets must sacrifice something to feed their Art. You get creative. For some, this can be finding a job within academia; for others, it can be something else. I am a copywriter outside of academia, and that has worked well for me.
ER: I was fortunate enough to read a manuscript you were working on when you and I did a manuscript exchange. There is no doubt you have many more collections readers can look forward to. What conversation/interaction do you hope Spit has with your future work?
DL: Thanks, Esteban—indeed, your feedback was extremely helpful in propelling that manuscript forward. And your manuscript is simply amazing! I can’t wait for people to read those poems. When I think about how my future collections may relate to Spit—and even how my chapbook, Ad Spot, relates—I see the core questions of Spit also present at the heart of my other work. Questions such as: What does “belonging” mean? And when everyone finds belonging, does that equate to peace?
A sense of belonging feeds into how our human bodies interact and react with the surrounding world we live in, but this feeling can also connect to a spiritual dimension, which often creeps into my work—and this connection can sometimes mean railing against organized religion, too. Indeed, I am still reckoning with the strict Catholicism of my childhood. I could’ve written any number of books for my first full-length collection, but when I sat down to compile the poems that would later become the foundation for Spit, I saw the collection emerging to address two gaps that I saw in literature at the time: 1) it was hard to find a poetry collection centered around the perspective of someone whose parents were getting divorced, and 2) I couldn’t find any poetry collections set on a llama farm. I’m proud of having contributed something new in this way.
But I don’t want to ever write the same poetry collection twice, which is partly why Ad Spot seems so different from Spit on its surface level. Both have immersive narrative arcs, yes, but while Spit is about losing a farm and redefining what home means, Ad Spot conjures a humorous yet dystopian world of extremist consumerism, where all the characters from TV commercials live in a single town.
Spit is a telling of my life in fictionalized form, my coming-of-age story, but it’s just that: a portion of my life. I want readers to see the collection simply as the starting point of my poetry journey, and to leave plenty of room for evolution. I don’t exactly know where I’m headed yet in my new work, but I know each subsequent book will be different from the last. I don’t want to give too much away in case things change, as revisions do and will happen. My newer poems are similar to the poems in Spit in that they feed self-exploration in connection to the larger cosmos of human experience, but they are also different in that I see them looking with a much more direct eye at climate change, human culpability in climate change, and what we can possibly do to find hope amid growing despair. In other words, I’m seeing that my newer work is continuing the same interrogations and obsessions of Spit, but in a widening lens.
