Down My Arms, A Thousand Satellites

down my arms, a thousand satellites
suddenly discover signs of life

Feel OutDaron LarsonOctober 31, 2015Sleeping At Last, music, touch, senses, lyrics, writing Comment

One Less Scoundrel in the World

"Poetry is a lot more important than poets."

~ Ted Kooser

Practice in LifeDaron LarsonOctober 19, 2015Ted Kooser, poetry, writing, practice, poetsComment

Refine Your Lens

When I talk to people about finding stories in their life, I'm talking about finding things that are almost in their everyday that they can bring great meaning to and connect to audiences or to people around the lunch table.

~ Matthew Dicks

Practice in LifeDaron LarsonAugust 14, 2015Matthew Dicks, story, storytelling, practice, writing, advice, time, memory, mundane, creativityComment

Tired of Yourself

"A lot of the poetic discipline boils down to getting tired of yourself, and I really believe that. When you get tired of yourself, then you change."

~ David Whyte

Feel In, Clarity, Equanimity, Practice in LifeDaron LarsonApril 21, 2015David Whyte, freedom, poets, poetry, writing, thinking, feeling, suffering, confusion, Mark Levy, creativity, selfComment

Where the Other Losers Live

Wherever you’re from sucks,
and wherever you grew up sucks

~ Erin Belieu

Daron LarsonDecember 10, 2014Erin Belieu, poetry, pretense, writing, home, belongingComment

Freedom

"I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality."

~ Ursula Le Guin

MagnanimityDaron LarsonNovember 21, 2014books, writers, writing, reading, freedom, capitalism, money, Ursula Le GuinComment

Passing through Nothing

Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine,
most intense when the wind blows through it
and the sound it makes equally strange,
like the sound of the wind in a movie—

Louise Glück

Daron LarsonNovember 20, 2014Louise Glück, poetry, poets, writing, paying attention, past, time, memoryComment

Feel Around

"Because I write poetry, I can sit down and write things that I don’t have proof of, or even know the end of the sentence. I can feel around and nobody gets hurt, right? It’s a poem. And so I wrote this poem out of grief and an attempt to make it very plain to myself, the argument that I’d come up with."

~ Jennifer Michael Hecht

Feel In, EquanimityDaron LarsonSeptember 29, 2014Jennifer Michael Hecht, suicide, TRBQ, conversation, poet, poetry, grief, writing, empathy, feelingsComment

Completely Drowned Out

"I don’t like when precious things slip through people’s fingers—especially things that seem defenseless or undercelebrated, like old newspapers, but also unheralded people who may have said sensible things at a certain time in history, but who were completely drowned out by other people. Or minor poets whose lives were instructive."

~ Nicholson Baker

GoneDaron LarsonSeptember 23, 2014Nicholson Baker, Ann Hamilton, mundane, memory, archives, writers, writing, paying attention, poetsComment

A Volitional Flick Away

"The world in front of me and the world 'inside' me are not merely adjacent, but overlapping; superimposed. A book feels like the intersection between these two domains – or like a conduit; a bridge; a passage between them." ~ Peter Mendelsund