March 31, 2026 • 31 mins
Brendan Constantine, poet and educator, explores how creativity evolves over time and why great work comes from moving forward rather than repeating what once worked.
In this conversation, he reflects on poetry as a “language within a language,” one that allows us to express what everyday speech cannot. He shares how teaching and working with individuals experiencing aphasia and brain injuries reshaped his understanding of communication, showing how creativity can restore connection and unlock new ways of thinking.
The episode also dives into the tension between growth and complacency, the role of failure in artistic practice, and why meaningful work is less about perfection and more about usefulness, generosity, and emotional truth.
1:41 Defining a Poetic Voice
2:53 AI Tries to Copy His Voice
4:01 Avoiding Creative Complacency
5:25 The Pitfalls of Praise
6:57 Why You Can’t Recreate Success
8:06 Poetry as a Language Within a Language
11:07 Is It True, Kind, or Helpful?
15:01 Reading Work Out Loud
18:00 Poetry and Aphasia Work
24:53 Giving Back in Art
28:41 What It Means to Be Unapologetically Creative
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Episode Transcript
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(00:03):
After a culture gets a language up and running, eventually they
will discover that their day-to-day use of language will
fall short of expressing some very emotionally urgent things.
And they discovered that they need a special way to talk about
special things. Welcome to Unapologetically
(00:23):
Created, a podcast from the Vermont College of Fine Arts,
where we celebrate bold artistry, transformative
creativity, and the audacious voices shaping the future of the
arts. I'm your host, Andrew Ram Sammy,
and in this series we dive into honest, inspiring conversations
(00:44):
with artists who are pushing boundaries and redefining what
it means to create work that resonates and endures.
Brendan Constantine is a. Poet whose work lives in the
space between humor and heartbreak.
Clarity. And complexity.
In this conversation, Brandon talks about how a poetic voice
changes over time, and while real growth as an artist means
(01:08):
moving forward instead of tryingto repeat what once worked, we
explore his idea that poetry becomes a language within a
language, a way of saying thingsordinary speech cannot quite
reach. Brandon also shares stories from
his work leading poetry workshops for people living with
aphasia and traumatic brain injuries, where creativity
(01:30):
becomes more than expression, itbecomes connection, healing, and
a way to find your voice again. Brendan, welcome to
Unapologetically Creative. Thank you so much for having me.
Your. Collections like Letters to Guns
and Dementia, My Darling blend memory, humor, and metaphor on
(01:52):
some things that are so challenging.
With just the things that you kind of cover, especially around
working with folks who have had neurological traumas, how do you
blend all of those elements to kind of define your poetic
voice? I like to think that everybody
has something to teach me, and Idon't ever expect to get there,
(02:13):
you know what I mean? Sure.
Although I was talking about this yesterday with some of the
students, I did have a very strange moment.
I teach at a high school in WestLos Angeles that actually
rejected me as a student in 1978.
And I've been there for about 21years now at the Windward
School, and I'm very proud to bethere.
(02:34):
And one afternoon, just this last semester, one of my
students brought me a poem. And he said, what do you think
of this poem? And I looked at it and it it
seemed all right. I was having trouble connecting
it with this particular student.I said, did you write this?
He said, oh, no. I said, who wrote it was
(02:54):
somebody else in class? And he said, well, it yes and
no. I said, OK, where's this going?
He said, I went on ChatGPT and Iasked it to write a poem in the
style of Brendan Constantine. I thought, Oh no, And I was
looking and I thought Oh my gosh, like is it, you know, what
(03:17):
do I have like 3 or 4 giveaway moves?
And that's like, you know. Any a bit familiar?
Not at all, thankfully. No, actually there wasn't.
I, you know, I looked at it panicked, like, you know, what
are their images that I always use or something that are in
here and I couldn't find anything in it that I'd ever
written about. But still, it was it was a
(03:37):
moment I thought, Oh, no, let it, you know, let it never get
me. Let it you know.
I also think of a number of authors have said this in, in
different ways, but I think of Donna Tart saying that she was
she was afraid. I think I'm doing her justice.
I believe she used that word. She was afraid of becoming a
(03:58):
connoisseur of her own work. And so, you know, I can
certainly talk about, you know, my influences and the kinds of
things that I tend to notice. But I'm, I, I hope that I don't,
I don't, you know, I don't want to be complacent.
And I, and I certainly don't want to look at something
(04:18):
someday and go, oh, that's not my kindest thing.
Sure. I'd like to, I'd like to think
that, you know, it'll continue to change.
And, you know, I am just fine ifpoems from, you know, this year
bear no resemblance to the poemsfrom last year.
Sure. And I kind of, you know, do you
view your work as being seasonal?
(04:39):
Do you view your? Work.
How do you view your work then, if you don't want it to?
If you hope that it doesn't necessarily reflect or look like
anything. Well, only, I mean, certainly
I'm not, you know, I guess the other side of that coin too is
it would be to would suggest that I that I look at my older
work and go, OK, don't do that again.
And it's not that's also that's not a concern.
(05:02):
It's more I like to think that I'm going to continue to learn
from other writers, that I'm going to continue to learn from
my students, that the world is going to continue to change me.
And how I'd like to think that that's got to produce different
works, you know, and that I'll notice different things and I'll
and I'll react to them. I think it is possible to to get
(05:22):
stuck. You know, interestingly enough,
and this brings me back to Vermont College, because I
remember a conversation had at Vermont College years ago, the
subject of which was the pitfalls of praise.
And David Wojon and a couple of other advisors at the time were
(05:44):
saying, you know, that one of the worst things that can happen
to you sometimes is to have somebody say good job.
Part of the reason being that when you were perhaps at your
most free and you're writing most comfortably, you're also
probably very open to chance. Sure.
And if you go back and you look at any of your previous work,
(06:05):
that might be quote UN quote, successful.
And by successful, I mean merelythat it, that it succeeded in
conveying an emotion, not necessarily that it got
published or that it had fans, but that it that it got anywhere
near its mark. That it can be very easy to
forget that probably while you were working on that piece, you
didn't always know where it was hot, where it was going.
(06:26):
It was unfolding as you were working.
You were learning things as you were crafting the poem.
But that layer writers can really get into a in a rut.
And that's true of all artists, I think, looking back on those
previous successes and now trying to recreate them, but
this time out of sheer will. And of course, you're doomed to
(06:49):
just create something half as good as you used to be, you
know? And but it's not, you know, So
you can't shoot for those brilliant ones.
It has to keep being forward. It has to be the next thing.
There's another artist I admire who says pretty much this.
You're never going to get there.And this is not just in the
cultivation of a voice, but thatat least in poetry, you're never
(07:13):
going to nail it. She says failure is not an
option. It is, in fact, always the
result. And that's always a guarantee.
And for me also there's, you know, I think writing poetry
anyways. And I leave it to whether
artists to weigh in as to the accuracy of this statement for
for their mediums that in many ways it's like the way we grade
(07:36):
diamonds. If you're a jeweler, you know
that a perfect diamond would actually be comprised entirely
of light. So everything that can be said
about it is in the nature of an imperfection.
So, you know, and for the poet, it's very much the case.
I'm not going to get all the waythere, right?
(07:56):
You know, I might get close. Somebody else may feel that I
have nailed it, but as far as I'm concerned that, you know,
right, I'm not going to get there, you know?
You've said that poetry is a language within a language.
It's I wish that was my idea. It actually, I got that from
Paul Valerie and and I like the spin that Kenneth Koch put on
(08:21):
that idea, he said. And if it's a language inside a
language, then it is a language that has changed slightly by
everyone who uses it well. And I like that very much.
People can say I can't write, but they can't say I didn't
write. And while I am not a well, I
don't pretend to be a a scholar or a historian.
(08:42):
In the time that I've been doingthis, as a result of the
conversations that I've had withpeople from different countries
and writers with different motivations and the times that
I've been lucky enough to speak with speech pathologists and
linguists, It appears to me thatculture to culture.
Poetry tends to begin under the same conditions that and while
(09:08):
not every culture will define this sort of special way of
communicating as necessarily an art form, some were regarded as
devotional and only with a few exceptions.
You know, for the most part the rule seems to be that after a
culture gets a language up and running that eventually they
(09:30):
will discover that their day-to-day use of language will
fall short of expressing some very emotionally urgent things.
And they discovered that they need a special way to talk about
special things. And their approaches may involve
using only their most beautiful words or only their most sacred
words or secret words. Or they may inflect the language
with the a musicality or a rhythm or something to
(09:51):
demonstrate that they're speaking in a special way.
And the priority of that specialway almost seems to be
completely emotional and non informational.
And that feeling seems to be themain thing or that you're the
expression of things that that you know, that won't sit still.
(10:13):
And, and that's, and that seems to be the rule from from culture
to culture. And, and that that's my way of
understanding this language inside a language.
And particularly when I'm teaching and I and I I mean, I
teach anybody little stand stilllong enough, but I love
(10:37):
particularly working with young writers because I feel that any
student who's given some agency with the arts of language,
similarly metaphor, personification, deep image
citation, etcetera, double S their available vocabulary.
So they have an emotional vocabulary in addition to A to a
(11:00):
practical 1. And so that's another way I
understand the language inside the language.
How do you balance invention with accessibility within your
work? I don't know that I've
necessarily striven for accessibility, but I would like
to be useful. And I know a handful of artists
(11:21):
that were important when I was growing up whose attitude was
always, you just have to be ableto answer yes to one of these
three questions. And the answer can be no to any
two of them. And so long as it's yes to one
of them, it's OK. And it was always, is it true?
Is it kind? Does it help?
You know, if it's kind, that might be enough.
(11:43):
If it's true, that might be enough.
Does it help? That might be enough.
It can help without being true. It can help without necessarily
being kind. But if it's, you know, if I can
answer yes to any one of those 3, then maybe, maybe that's
enough. In his essay on writing, George
Orwell says that he's not alwayssure which of his motivations is
(12:04):
the strongest, but he does know which are worth following.
Which I've always taken to mean that he may have very selfish
emotion motivations. But if among those there's
something that's worth following, then he can still go
forward, you know? So he does add like a
overlapping Venn diagram and some days one part of that Venn
(12:25):
diagram of those three things isstronger than the others.
Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes, of course, I
don't know what's going on. And I certainly have, you know,
I, I, I take, I take a lot from TS Eliot's suggestion that
sometimes the measure of a poem is that it will communicate
(12:47):
before it is understood. And sometimes it's merely, you
know, is this communicating on some level, even if I don't
myself know 100% where this is coming from and what I'm
responding to, I just know that something's coming out and the
images and actions on the page are, are starting to line up and
(13:07):
they're making a, a curious kindof sense.
Sure. At the same time, I have to say
I've certainly written when I was angry and I've certainly
written when I was depressed. And I've written when I've, you
know, and some of that work I have put out into the world.
And I don't know whether this isa concern with accessibility,
(13:28):
but I've never, I've never particularly wanted to shake my
fist at a reader. I always like to think that the,
you know, the reader is in on itwith me.
I know and cherish a number of poets who specialize in telling
people off in their work, but I've never you know, that's
never been particularly attractive to me 'cause you feel
(13:48):
the. Audience is coming along for the
ride with you. You're not.
Yeah. I tend to think so.
And you know, for a while every now and then, just like
accessibility comes and goes as sort of a buzzword or whether or
not you can say I or whether or not you can, whether irony is a
good thing or a bad thing. I know that just as frequently,
the argument over whether or notyou should say you, whether you
(14:11):
should write in second person isacceptable, whether writing in
second person is is trying to get away with something or is
shirking a responsibility, a criteria that is, in my
experience, never ever levelled at songwriters.
We never for a moment question who they what do you mean when
(14:31):
they say you you know, in a lovesong and whatnot.
We we know it's not us, but at the same time it's.
I've never thought that the writer of the love song was
trying to get away with them, you know?
And yeah, so I don't know why I.Can we go?
Down that a little bit 'cause you kind of touched on
something. That was going to be my next
question as someone who's a botha poet and a performer who reads
(14:56):
their. Work out loud.
And you've been featured on NPR and and Ted Head.
Have you has your relationship? With your work deepened as a
result of hearing it and as you hear it, do you feel like you
have a deeper, you go deeper into it and have a different
understanding of it as you can as you continue to perform it?
That's very. Possible.
I I I have to. I've never.
(15:19):
Thought of it, Let. Me turn on the.
Therapy. Therapy session.
Thank you. Thank you.
I, I haven't, I haven't thought of it in those terms.
I would imagine it must. I've always enjoyed reading
poetry, anybody's poetry aloud. Part of the reason being that I
was, I had trouble learning to read as a kid and I and one of
(15:41):
the things that motivated me to learn to read was watching
people who could read aloud welland who could do it cold.
My father, who was an actor, used to, you know, regale the
family by picking up a book off the shelf and reading a favorite
(16:02):
passage and, and, or, or readingthings just totally cold that,
you know, and making them so entertaining and so interesting.
And I said, God, I want to be able to do that.
And I, you know, I was dealing with a form of dyslexia and to
say nothing of of attention deficit disorder, which they did
(16:22):
not called attention deficit disorder back in the 70s.
They just said you had a great deal of potential.
And I had a lot of potential that was keeping me from
learning to read. And it was from a desire to be
able to read out loud that finally, you know, got me to
really, you know, work at it andwork at it and work at it and
(16:43):
somehow find some sort of means of being able to calm my mind
and focus on the page. So they've always, it's always
been part of it. They the ability to read and the
ability to read aloud, you know,we're part of the same joy.
You teach at the Windward School.
You. You teach at LACMA.
(17:03):
What keeps? You.
Fresh does. Teaching keep you fresh.
Yes, because it scares the hell out of me and it's it's never
not frightened me. I just finished doing a week of
classes online for some childrenthrough Ida Wild Arts and now
I'm going to do in person classes for them.
(17:24):
I teach at Ida Wild Arts every summer.
That's been close to 20 years aswell.
Oh wow. And I work with adults, as I
say, I work with folks that are dealing with aphasia and
traumatic brain injuries. And there is, there was no
classroom where I feel like I could ever get away with phoning
it in. I'm always terrified.
(17:44):
I'm always sure that, you know, the Dean is going to walk in at
any moment, look at me and go, oh, we hired you.
No, no, no. Different guy mistake, you know,
and. Well, just so you know, I walked
in yesterday and I approved. Oh, thank you, thank you.
So bless you since. 20/10/2017 You've LED poetry workshops for
people with aphasia and brain injuries.
(18:07):
What have those experiences taught you about language,
memory restoration, and the people who are impacted by
aphasia and brain injuries? Well, I got to tell you, you
know, once you hang out your shingle and say I'm a writer,
you can. It's very easy to forget a
number of things. One, that the purpose of writing
(18:28):
is not publishing, that publishing and writing a thing
are two completely different things.
You can very easily forget that as a poet, you can get used to
the sense that only poets are reading poetry journals and that
only poets are showing up to poetry readings.
And you forget, oh, we were never our target audience.
That's, you know, we're, you know, we're not doing this just
(18:52):
for, you know, us. And if you want a, a sense of
who needs poetry, you know, find, find the writers in your
community that are dealing with language processing disorders,
that are dealing with, you know,Alzheimer's or dementia, folks
(19:13):
that are, that are having trouble, you know, stealing
their minds. And you'll remember.
Oh, yeah. As I mentioned before, this is
for anybody in need of an emotional vocabulary.
There's two people to thank. 1 is a man named Gary Mex Glazner
who created the Alzheimer's Poetry Project, which is still
(19:34):
thriving and which brings poetryworkshops to people living with
dementia and Alzheimer's. And I got to tell you, this is
very easy work to do. And if you, if you want to get
involved, I guarantee you there is probably an elder care center
within a couple of miles of wherever you are.
(19:55):
And you know, the programmers, they would probably love it if a
writer came up and said, hey, I'd like to do a workshop with,
you know, some of the residents here they go look for Gary
Glasner online and the Alzheimer's Poetry Project.
He will if you take half a step towards them, they will take 3
towards you and make sure that you have materials and and
(20:16):
training. The other person I'd like to
thank is a speech pathologist bythe name of Michael Beal, who
along with his wife, Francie, have been running for years now
a book club for people with aphasia.
They've been running this out ofthe Echo Park Branch Library in
(20:36):
Los Angeles. And Mr. Beal, I guess it had
heard about some of the work I was doing with the Alzheimer's
Poetry Project. And he said, I, I, we've noticed
an interesting thing whenever the book club is looking at
books of poetry, they become much more engaged.
It's not that they don't like novels, it just seems that they,
they have more urgent things to share when we're looking at a
(20:58):
book of poems. Would you be willing to come out
and talk about poetry to the group and maybe offer a workshop
as I've never done 1 like this, but let's see what happens, Sir.
So I came into a classroom with,you know, just a million things,
tons of poetry and toys. I had, you know, rubber chickens
and magnetic letters and and I had index cards and Hot Wheels
(21:24):
cars. I mean, I brought all kinds of
stuff, sure. And we just slowly started
finding a way to communicate aphasias in general, a language
processing disorder. But it's symptomology can can
involve any number of what are called paraphasias.
It may be an inability to recognize text.
(21:44):
It might be an inability to spontaneously generate words
appropriate to a given situation.
It may be that you can only think of a handful of words or
only the same word over and overagain.
You may not be able to communicate at all, a condition
known as global aphasia. And the causes can be many.
(22:05):
It can be blunt force trauma, stroke, extreme temperature, all
kinds. And then of course, syndromes
like dementia and and Alzheimer's.
And you would think, well, therapeutically, why on earth,
you know, would you go to peoplewho are are having trouble
making words and say, let's write some poems together.
(22:26):
But what's quickly became apparent is that the challenge
of the poet and the challenge ofthe person seeking to
communicate who has aphasia very, very similar in many ways,
one of them chiefly being that for the poet, every word is
ultimate and it is very, very possible to get the wrong word.
(22:49):
In fact, you feel as though you always do.
A poet seems to be somebody cursed with knowing there's no
such thing as a synonym. And for the person with aphasia
who's trying to communicate, whofeels as though either no words
or the wrong words are constantly coming to have a
means of communication that putsfeeling over everything else
(23:12):
that is not as concerned. As Wittgenstein says, we're not
interested in the information game of language to have an area
in their life where they can even perhaps get things
practically wrong and emotionally right on the nose,
you know, with what communication tools they have.
(23:33):
This has been proven to be enormously liberating.
I am not a speech pathologist. And anybody who has who has
aphasia or has somebody in theirlife who's dealing with it
should absolutely seek the help of a professional therapist.
But I have noticed that those people that I, with whom I began
to work and continue to work, who have aphasia after they've
(23:56):
been writing poetry for a while,seem more inclined to
communicate at all. Where number seem to have gotten
to a point of such frustration where they only, you know,
bothered to try to speak or write when it was absolutely
necessary, now seem to be returning to it and
communicating passively. Communicating for the joy of
(24:19):
communicating are less afraid oflanguage don't see it as
prohibitive as perhaps they did and again, I've never known a
poet to walk away from a poem and go nailed it yes I I I have
solved roses and no one needs speak of them again you know we
all come away from our poems going.
Maybe. I don't know.
(24:39):
I kind of I think, do you think it'll work?
I don't. I don't know.
I'm as close as I can get. You know, and, and I found that,
you know, these writers really respond to that and feel
enormously freed up by it. You seem to be.
Very giving in your work. Kind of you to say.
You have said if you take two, give back one.
(25:02):
Yeah. Oh my gosh, Where did you read
that? Yeah.
Why do you feel that you one should have one should
reciprocate an art? Where does that philosophy come
from? It comes from there's a number
of motivations. There isn't just one 'cause I
think I think that can be a useful principle.
(25:23):
Even if your motivations for writing have are are not like
mine at all. I think if you're somebody who
loves to complain, if you're somebody that loves to go to the
racks at the bookstore and go, this is all nonsense and why
isn't anybody writing anything any good, then if all you're
doing in response to that is just working on your own work,
(25:46):
then you're only doing half the job.
You need to be finding the writers that you admire and
lifting them up, you know? Otherwise you have no right to
complain. Otherwise you're complicit in
your own frustration. What are you doing to to further
the cause of the writers you do admire?
You know, so get out there and help them and tell people.
(26:07):
You know, this is a really good book and I'm enjoying this.
You know, even if you're somebody who thrives on
division, you're only going to make yourself angry or unless
you're, you know, unless you're bringing more attention to the
things that you think are are noteworthy.
So there's, there's that motivation.
Personally, for me, I feel like I used to think it was very
important to be very militant inmy tastes and be able to point
(26:28):
in One Direction and say this isthe good art over here and over
there. That's the bad art.
And we resent the bad art because the bad art is getting
taking attention away from the good art and what not.
And I had this epiphany. I talked about it in a class
yesterday. I remember being really
frustrated by this one particular writer who I'm not
going to name, but suffice to say that writers I did like kept
(26:49):
saying you have to read this book.
This person's a genius and I didnot see it.
And the fact that I did not see it offended me and I, and, and I
hated this person's work and I would look at their stuff and
like, God, like, why on earth would you spend any time on this
at all? I mean, you could have, there's
so many other more worthy thingsyou could have done.
You could have set fire to all of your possessions.
(27:11):
You could have, you know, you could have screamed in a box and
mailed it to yourself. Any number of things would have
been better than writing these poems.
And and then I found that I was driven to writing angry poems
about these poems, you know, Andif the this writer would publish
something, asserting anything, then I would write something in
(27:32):
response, you know, refuting it.And then one day it suddenly hit
me. Wait a minute.
You think you're angry? You're not angry.
You're inspired. Look at the writers that you
think are geniuses. Not one of these guys in the
last six months has driven you to the page.
But this person has got you writing like a son of a gun, you
know, and then I suddenly lookedat their work different.
(27:54):
I go, why was I so threatened? What was so, you know, I
realized and now I'm incredibly grateful to this writer.
And whenever they publish anything, I go look for it.
Oh, what are they going to make me think about this time?
I mean, everybody's got something to teach me and, you
know, and and and I want to learn.
I'm in, you know, you, you know,maybe sometimes I'll go look at
(28:16):
something new and it might only crystallize in a point opinion I
already had. But I don't think it's time
wasted. I, you know, I I just, you know,
everybody's got something to teach me.
Everybody's going to notice something I didn't notice.
Yeah. I've been waiting to ask this
question since you walked in to the room.
(28:36):
Oh, OK. But it's the appropriate time
now in the podcast where we ask this question, what does it mean
to be unapologetically creative for you, both in your writing
and also in your service? I think if you're lucky enough
to own a set of keys, then you are living a very good life.
(28:57):
And I think that if you are at all inclined to inspire other
people or just share your work, then you are obliged to, to, you
know, and I feel like to be unapologetically creative.
But first of all, like I'm done apologizing for it.
(29:18):
And I, you know, there was a time I think I, I thought I had
to. And now I realize, no, no, no,
no, no, no, this is, this is my contribution.
This is, this is what I have to offer.
And you know, anything else would be deceitful.
You know, it's not what I reallythink.
It's not, you know, it's not what my motivations are.
(29:38):
I think this is one of the things we're supposed to be
doing with society, that this is, you know, this is what we're
supposed to be enjoying at the end of all of that work, art and
discourse is why you bother to have schools and build roads is
so that we can get to each otherand share ideas and and lift
(30:00):
each other and and feed and helpand inspire each other.
If educator and teacher Mr. Constantine could go to young
Brendan and offer him advice or counsel.
What would he say? Keep it up.
Just keep it up. Just keep going.
It's all right. Say the awkward thing, ask the
(30:23):
stupid question, and the answer is yes until it's no.
What Brendan Constantine makes clear is that creativity isn't
something you arrive at, it's something you practice.
It asks you to stay curious, to let go of old versions of
yourself, to resist the comfort of repeating what already
worked. And when we stop trying to
(30:44):
perfect the work and instead focus on making it useful,
generous, and alive, that's whenit starts to matter.
That's when creativity becomes less about proving something and
more about offering. Something and.
That may be the most honest place an artist can stand.
Thanks for listening to Unapologetically Creative.
(31:07):
Be sure to follow the show and stay tuned for more insightful
conversations in the episodes ahead.
To learn more about the Vermont College of Fine Arts, visit
vcfa.edu.
After a culture gets a language up and running, eventually they
will discover that their day-to-day use of language will
fall short of expressing some very emotionally urgent things.
And they discovered that they need a special way to talk about
special things. Welcome to Unapologetically
(00:23):
Created, a podcast from the Vermont College of Fine Arts,
where we celebrate bold artistry, transformative
creativity, and the audacious voices shaping the future of the
arts. I'm your host, Andrew Ram Sammy,
and in this series we dive into honest, inspiring conversations
(00:44):
with artists who are pushing boundaries and redefining what
it means to create work that resonates and endures.
Brendan Constantine is a. Poet whose work lives in the
space between humor and heartbreak.
Clarity. And complexity.
In this conversation, Brandon talks about how a poetic voice
changes over time, and while real growth as an artist means
(01:08):
moving forward instead of tryingto repeat what once worked, we
explore his idea that poetry becomes a language within a
language, a way of saying thingsordinary speech cannot quite
reach. Brandon also shares stories from
his work leading poetry workshops for people living with
aphasia and traumatic brain injuries, where creativity
(01:30):
becomes more than expression, itbecomes connection, healing, and
a way to find your voice again. Brendan, welcome to
Unapologetically Creative. Thank you so much for having me.
Your. Collections like Letters to Guns
and Dementia, My Darling blend memory, humor, and metaphor on
(01:52):
some things that are so challenging.
With just the things that you kind of cover, especially around
working with folks who have had neurological traumas, how do you
blend all of those elements to kind of define your poetic
voice? I like to think that everybody
has something to teach me, and Idon't ever expect to get there,
(02:13):
you know what I mean? Sure.
Although I was talking about this yesterday with some of the
students, I did have a very strange moment.
I teach at a high school in WestLos Angeles that actually
rejected me as a student in 1978.
And I've been there for about 21years now at the Windward
School, and I'm very proud to bethere.
(02:34):
And one afternoon, just this last semester, one of my
students brought me a poem. And he said, what do you think
of this poem? And I looked at it and it it
seemed all right. I was having trouble connecting
it with this particular student.I said, did you write this?
He said, oh, no. I said, who wrote it was
(02:54):
somebody else in class? And he said, well, it yes and
no. I said, OK, where's this going?
He said, I went on ChatGPT and Iasked it to write a poem in the
style of Brendan Constantine. I thought, Oh no, And I was
looking and I thought Oh my gosh, like is it, you know, what
(03:17):
do I have like 3 or 4 giveaway moves?
And that's like, you know. Any a bit familiar?
Not at all, thankfully. No, actually there wasn't.
I, you know, I looked at it panicked, like, you know, what
are their images that I always use or something that are in
here and I couldn't find anything in it that I'd ever
written about. But still, it was it was a
(03:37):
moment I thought, Oh, no, let it, you know, let it never get
me. Let it you know.
I also think of a number of authors have said this in, in
different ways, but I think of Donna Tart saying that she was
she was afraid. I think I'm doing her justice.
I believe she used that word. She was afraid of becoming a
(03:58):
connoisseur of her own work. And so, you know, I can
certainly talk about, you know, my influences and the kinds of
things that I tend to notice. But I'm, I, I hope that I don't,
I don't, you know, I don't want to be complacent.
And I, and I certainly don't want to look at something
(04:18):
someday and go, oh, that's not my kindest thing.
Sure. I'd like to, I'd like to think
that, you know, it'll continue to change.
And, you know, I am just fine ifpoems from, you know, this year
bear no resemblance to the poemsfrom last year.
Sure. And I kind of, you know, do you
view your work as being seasonal?
(04:39):
Do you view your? Work.
How do you view your work then, if you don't want it to?
If you hope that it doesn't necessarily reflect or look like
anything. Well, only, I mean, certainly
I'm not, you know, I guess the other side of that coin too is
it would be to would suggest that I that I look at my older
work and go, OK, don't do that again.
And it's not that's also that's not a concern.
(05:02):
It's more I like to think that I'm going to continue to learn
from other writers, that I'm going to continue to learn from
my students, that the world is going to continue to change me.
And how I'd like to think that that's got to produce different
works, you know, and that I'll notice different things and I'll
and I'll react to them. I think it is possible to to get
(05:22):
stuck. You know, interestingly enough,
and this brings me back to Vermont College, because I
remember a conversation had at Vermont College years ago, the
subject of which was the pitfalls of praise.
And David Wojon and a couple of other advisors at the time were
(05:44):
saying, you know, that one of the worst things that can happen
to you sometimes is to have somebody say good job.
Part of the reason being that when you were perhaps at your
most free and you're writing most comfortably, you're also
probably very open to chance. Sure.
And if you go back and you look at any of your previous work,
(06:05):
that might be quote UN quote, successful.
And by successful, I mean merelythat it, that it succeeded in
conveying an emotion, not necessarily that it got
published or that it had fans, but that it that it got anywhere
near its mark. That it can be very easy to
forget that probably while you were working on that piece, you
didn't always know where it was hot, where it was going.
(06:26):
It was unfolding as you were working.
You were learning things as you were crafting the poem.
But that layer writers can really get into a in a rut.
And that's true of all artists, I think, looking back on those
previous successes and now trying to recreate them, but
this time out of sheer will. And of course, you're doomed to
(06:49):
just create something half as good as you used to be, you
know? And but it's not, you know, So
you can't shoot for those brilliant ones.
It has to keep being forward. It has to be the next thing.
There's another artist I admire who says pretty much this.
You're never going to get there.And this is not just in the
cultivation of a voice, but thatat least in poetry, you're never
(07:13):
going to nail it. She says failure is not an
option. It is, in fact, always the
result. And that's always a guarantee.
And for me also there's, you know, I think writing poetry
anyways. And I leave it to whether
artists to weigh in as to the accuracy of this statement for
for their mediums that in many ways it's like the way we grade
(07:36):
diamonds. If you're a jeweler, you know
that a perfect diamond would actually be comprised entirely
of light. So everything that can be said
about it is in the nature of an imperfection.
So, you know, and for the poet, it's very much the case.
I'm not going to get all the waythere, right?
(07:56):
You know, I might get close. Somebody else may feel that I
have nailed it, but as far as I'm concerned that, you know,
right, I'm not going to get there, you know?
You've said that poetry is a language within a language.
It's I wish that was my idea. It actually, I got that from
Paul Valerie and and I like the spin that Kenneth Koch put on
(08:21):
that idea, he said. And if it's a language inside a
language, then it is a language that has changed slightly by
everyone who uses it well. And I like that very much.
People can say I can't write, but they can't say I didn't
write. And while I am not a well, I
don't pretend to be a a scholar or a historian.
(08:42):
In the time that I've been doingthis, as a result of the
conversations that I've had withpeople from different countries
and writers with different motivations and the times that
I've been lucky enough to speak with speech pathologists and
linguists, It appears to me thatculture to culture.
Poetry tends to begin under the same conditions that and while
(09:08):
not every culture will define this sort of special way of
communicating as necessarily an art form, some were regarded as
devotional and only with a few exceptions.
You know, for the most part the rule seems to be that after a
culture gets a language up and running that eventually they
(09:30):
will discover that their day-to-day use of language will
fall short of expressing some very emotionally urgent things.
And they discovered that they need a special way to talk about
special things. And their approaches may involve
using only their most beautiful words or only their most sacred
words or secret words. Or they may inflect the language
with the a musicality or a rhythm or something to
(09:51):
demonstrate that they're speaking in a special way.
And the priority of that specialway almost seems to be
completely emotional and non informational.
And that feeling seems to be themain thing or that you're the
expression of things that that you know, that won't sit still.
(10:13):
And, and that's, and that seems to be the rule from from culture
to culture. And, and that that's my way of
understanding this language inside a language.
And particularly when I'm teaching and I and I I mean, I
teach anybody little stand stilllong enough, but I love
(10:37):
particularly working with young writers because I feel that any
student who's given some agency with the arts of language,
similarly metaphor, personification, deep image
citation, etcetera, double S their available vocabulary.
So they have an emotional vocabulary in addition to A to a
(11:00):
practical 1. And so that's another way I
understand the language inside the language.
How do you balance invention with accessibility within your
work? I don't know that I've
necessarily striven for accessibility, but I would like
to be useful. And I know a handful of artists
(11:21):
that were important when I was growing up whose attitude was
always, you just have to be ableto answer yes to one of these
three questions. And the answer can be no to any
two of them. And so long as it's yes to one
of them, it's OK. And it was always, is it true?
Is it kind? Does it help?
You know, if it's kind, that might be enough.
(11:43):
If it's true, that might be enough.
Does it help? That might be enough.
It can help without being true. It can help without necessarily
being kind. But if it's, you know, if I can
answer yes to any one of those 3, then maybe, maybe that's
enough. In his essay on writing, George
Orwell says that he's not alwayssure which of his motivations is
(12:04):
the strongest, but he does know which are worth following.
Which I've always taken to mean that he may have very selfish
emotion motivations. But if among those there's
something that's worth following, then he can still go
forward, you know? So he does add like a
overlapping Venn diagram and some days one part of that Venn
(12:25):
diagram of those three things isstronger than the others.
Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes, of course, I
don't know what's going on. And I certainly have, you know,
I, I, I take, I take a lot from TS Eliot's suggestion that
sometimes the measure of a poem is that it will communicate
(12:47):
before it is understood. And sometimes it's merely, you
know, is this communicating on some level, even if I don't
myself know 100% where this is coming from and what I'm
responding to, I just know that something's coming out and the
images and actions on the page are, are starting to line up and
(13:07):
they're making a, a curious kindof sense.
Sure. At the same time, I have to say
I've certainly written when I was angry and I've certainly
written when I was depressed. And I've written when I've, you
know, and some of that work I have put out into the world.
And I don't know whether this isa concern with accessibility,
(13:28):
but I've never, I've never particularly wanted to shake my
fist at a reader. I always like to think that the,
you know, the reader is in on itwith me.
I know and cherish a number of poets who specialize in telling
people off in their work, but I've never you know, that's
never been particularly attractive to me 'cause you feel
(13:48):
the. Audience is coming along for the
ride with you. You're not.
Yeah. I tend to think so.
And you know, for a while every now and then, just like
accessibility comes and goes as sort of a buzzword or whether or
not you can say I or whether or not you can, whether irony is a
good thing or a bad thing. I know that just as frequently,
the argument over whether or notyou should say you, whether you
(14:11):
should write in second person isacceptable, whether writing in
second person is is trying to get away with something or is
shirking a responsibility, a criteria that is, in my
experience, never ever levelled at songwriters.
We never for a moment question who they what do you mean when
(14:31):
they say you you know, in a lovesong and whatnot.
We we know it's not us, but at the same time it's.
I've never thought that the writer of the love song was
trying to get away with them, you know?
And yeah, so I don't know why I.Can we go?
Down that a little bit 'cause you kind of touched on
something. That was going to be my next
question as someone who's a botha poet and a performer who reads
(14:56):
their. Work out loud.
And you've been featured on NPR and and Ted Head.
Have you has your relationship? With your work deepened as a
result of hearing it and as you hear it, do you feel like you
have a deeper, you go deeper into it and have a different
understanding of it as you can as you continue to perform it?
That's very. Possible.
I I I have to. I've never.
(15:19):
Thought of it, Let. Me turn on the.
Therapy. Therapy session.
Thank you. Thank you.
I, I haven't, I haven't thought of it in those terms.
I would imagine it must. I've always enjoyed reading
poetry, anybody's poetry aloud. Part of the reason being that I
was, I had trouble learning to read as a kid and I and one of
(15:41):
the things that motivated me to learn to read was watching
people who could read aloud welland who could do it cold.
My father, who was an actor, used to, you know, regale the
family by picking up a book off the shelf and reading a favorite
(16:02):
passage and, and, or, or readingthings just totally cold that,
you know, and making them so entertaining and so interesting.
And I said, God, I want to be able to do that.
And I, you know, I was dealing with a form of dyslexia and to
say nothing of of attention deficit disorder, which they did
(16:22):
not called attention deficit disorder back in the 70s.
They just said you had a great deal of potential.
And I had a lot of potential that was keeping me from
learning to read. And it was from a desire to be
able to read out loud that finally, you know, got me to
really, you know, work at it andwork at it and work at it and
(16:43):
somehow find some sort of means of being able to calm my mind
and focus on the page. So they've always, it's always
been part of it. They the ability to read and the
ability to read aloud, you know,we're part of the same joy.
You teach at the Windward School.
You. You teach at LACMA.
(17:03):
What keeps? You.
Fresh does. Teaching keep you fresh.
Yes, because it scares the hell out of me and it's it's never
not frightened me. I just finished doing a week of
classes online for some childrenthrough Ida Wild Arts and now
I'm going to do in person classes for them.
(17:24):
I teach at Ida Wild Arts every summer.
That's been close to 20 years aswell.
Oh wow. And I work with adults, as I
say, I work with folks that are dealing with aphasia and
traumatic brain injuries. And there is, there was no
classroom where I feel like I could ever get away with phoning
it in. I'm always terrified.
(17:44):
I'm always sure that, you know, the Dean is going to walk in at
any moment, look at me and go, oh, we hired you.
No, no, no. Different guy mistake, you know,
and. Well, just so you know, I walked
in yesterday and I approved. Oh, thank you, thank you.
So bless you since. 20/10/2017 You've LED poetry workshops for
people with aphasia and brain injuries.
(18:07):
What have those experiences taught you about language,
memory restoration, and the people who are impacted by
aphasia and brain injuries? Well, I got to tell you, you
know, once you hang out your shingle and say I'm a writer,
you can. It's very easy to forget a
number of things. One, that the purpose of writing
(18:28):
is not publishing, that publishing and writing a thing
are two completely different things.
You can very easily forget that as a poet, you can get used to
the sense that only poets are reading poetry journals and that
only poets are showing up to poetry readings.
And you forget, oh, we were never our target audience.
That's, you know, we're, you know, we're not doing this just
(18:52):
for, you know, us. And if you want a, a sense of
who needs poetry, you know, find, find the writers in your
community that are dealing with language processing disorders,
that are dealing with, you know,Alzheimer's or dementia, folks
(19:13):
that are, that are having trouble, you know, stealing
their minds. And you'll remember.
Oh, yeah. As I mentioned before, this is
for anybody in need of an emotional vocabulary.
There's two people to thank. 1 is a man named Gary Mex Glazner
who created the Alzheimer's Poetry Project, which is still
(19:34):
thriving and which brings poetryworkshops to people living with
dementia and Alzheimer's. And I got to tell you, this is
very easy work to do. And if you, if you want to get
involved, I guarantee you there is probably an elder care center
within a couple of miles of wherever you are.
(19:55):
And you know, the programmers, they would probably love it if a
writer came up and said, hey, I'd like to do a workshop with,
you know, some of the residents here they go look for Gary
Glasner online and the Alzheimer's Poetry Project.
He will if you take half a step towards them, they will take 3
towards you and make sure that you have materials and and
(20:16):
training. The other person I'd like to
thank is a speech pathologist bythe name of Michael Beal, who
along with his wife, Francie, have been running for years now
a book club for people with aphasia.
They've been running this out ofthe Echo Park Branch Library in
(20:36):
Los Angeles. And Mr. Beal, I guess it had
heard about some of the work I was doing with the Alzheimer's
Poetry Project. And he said, I, I, we've noticed
an interesting thing whenever the book club is looking at
books of poetry, they become much more engaged.
It's not that they don't like novels, it just seems that they,
they have more urgent things to share when we're looking at a
(20:58):
book of poems. Would you be willing to come out
and talk about poetry to the group and maybe offer a workshop
as I've never done 1 like this, but let's see what happens, Sir.
So I came into a classroom with,you know, just a million things,
tons of poetry and toys. I had, you know, rubber chickens
and magnetic letters and and I had index cards and Hot Wheels
(21:24):
cars. I mean, I brought all kinds of
stuff, sure. And we just slowly started
finding a way to communicate aphasias in general, a language
processing disorder. But it's symptomology can can
involve any number of what are called paraphasias.
It may be an inability to recognize text.
(21:44):
It might be an inability to spontaneously generate words
appropriate to a given situation.
It may be that you can only think of a handful of words or
only the same word over and overagain.
You may not be able to communicate at all, a condition
known as global aphasia. And the causes can be many.
(22:05):
It can be blunt force trauma, stroke, extreme temperature, all
kinds. And then of course, syndromes
like dementia and and Alzheimer's.
And you would think, well, therapeutically, why on earth,
you know, would you go to peoplewho are are having trouble
making words and say, let's write some poems together.
(22:26):
But what's quickly became apparent is that the challenge
of the poet and the challenge ofthe person seeking to
communicate who has aphasia very, very similar in many ways,
one of them chiefly being that for the poet, every word is
ultimate and it is very, very possible to get the wrong word.
(22:49):
In fact, you feel as though you always do.
A poet seems to be somebody cursed with knowing there's no
such thing as a synonym. And for the person with aphasia
who's trying to communicate, whofeels as though either no words
or the wrong words are constantly coming to have a
means of communication that putsfeeling over everything else
(23:12):
that is not as concerned. As Wittgenstein says, we're not
interested in the information game of language to have an area
in their life where they can even perhaps get things
practically wrong and emotionally right on the nose,
you know, with what communication tools they have.
(23:33):
This has been proven to be enormously liberating.
I am not a speech pathologist. And anybody who has who has
aphasia or has somebody in theirlife who's dealing with it
should absolutely seek the help of a professional therapist.
But I have noticed that those people that I, with whom I began
to work and continue to work, who have aphasia after they've
(23:56):
been writing poetry for a while,seem more inclined to
communicate at all. Where number seem to have gotten
to a point of such frustration where they only, you know,
bothered to try to speak or write when it was absolutely
necessary, now seem to be returning to it and
communicating passively. Communicating for the joy of
(24:19):
communicating are less afraid oflanguage don't see it as
prohibitive as perhaps they did and again, I've never known a
poet to walk away from a poem and go nailed it yes I I I have
solved roses and no one needs speak of them again you know we
all come away from our poems going.
Maybe. I don't know.
(24:39):
I kind of I think, do you think it'll work?
I don't. I don't know.
I'm as close as I can get. You know, and, and I found that,
you know, these writers really respond to that and feel
enormously freed up by it. You seem to be.
Very giving in your work. Kind of you to say.
You have said if you take two, give back one.
(25:02):
Yeah. Oh my gosh, Where did you read
that? Yeah.
Why do you feel that you one should have one should
reciprocate an art? Where does that philosophy come
from? It comes from there's a number
of motivations. There isn't just one 'cause I
think I think that can be a useful principle.
(25:23):
Even if your motivations for writing have are are not like
mine at all. I think if you're somebody who
loves to complain, if you're somebody that loves to go to the
racks at the bookstore and go, this is all nonsense and why
isn't anybody writing anything any good, then if all you're
doing in response to that is just working on your own work,
(25:46):
then you're only doing half the job.
You need to be finding the writers that you admire and
lifting them up, you know? Otherwise you have no right to
complain. Otherwise you're complicit in
your own frustration. What are you doing to to further
the cause of the writers you do admire?
You know, so get out there and help them and tell people.
(26:07):
You know, this is a really good book and I'm enjoying this.
You know, even if you're somebody who thrives on
division, you're only going to make yourself angry or unless
you're, you know, unless you're bringing more attention to the
things that you think are are noteworthy.
So there's, there's that motivation.
Personally, for me, I feel like I used to think it was very
important to be very militant inmy tastes and be able to point
(26:28):
in One Direction and say this isthe good art over here and over
there. That's the bad art.
And we resent the bad art because the bad art is getting
taking attention away from the good art and what not.
And I had this epiphany. I talked about it in a class
yesterday. I remember being really
frustrated by this one particular writer who I'm not
going to name, but suffice to say that writers I did like kept
(26:49):
saying you have to read this book.
This person's a genius and I didnot see it.
And the fact that I did not see it offended me and I, and, and I
hated this person's work and I would look at their stuff and
like, God, like, why on earth would you spend any time on this
at all? I mean, you could have, there's
so many other more worthy thingsyou could have done.
You could have set fire to all of your possessions.
(27:11):
You could have, you know, you could have screamed in a box and
mailed it to yourself. Any number of things would have
been better than writing these poems.
And and then I found that I was driven to writing angry poems
about these poems, you know, Andif the this writer would publish
something, asserting anything, then I would write something in
(27:32):
response, you know, refuting it.And then one day it suddenly hit
me. Wait a minute.
You think you're angry? You're not angry.
You're inspired. Look at the writers that you
think are geniuses. Not one of these guys in the
last six months has driven you to the page.
But this person has got you writing like a son of a gun, you
know, and then I suddenly lookedat their work different.
(27:54):
I go, why was I so threatened? What was so, you know, I
realized and now I'm incredibly grateful to this writer.
And whenever they publish anything, I go look for it.
Oh, what are they going to make me think about this time?
I mean, everybody's got something to teach me and, you
know, and and and I want to learn.
I'm in, you know, you, you know,maybe sometimes I'll go look at
(28:16):
something new and it might only crystallize in a point opinion I
already had. But I don't think it's time
wasted. I, you know, I I just, you know,
everybody's got something to teach me.
Everybody's going to notice something I didn't notice.
Yeah. I've been waiting to ask this
question since you walked in to the room.
(28:36):
Oh, OK. But it's the appropriate time
now in the podcast where we ask this question, what does it mean
to be unapologetically creative for you, both in your writing
and also in your service? I think if you're lucky enough
to own a set of keys, then you are living a very good life.
(28:57):
And I think that if you are at all inclined to inspire other
people or just share your work, then you are obliged to, to, you
know, and I feel like to be unapologetically creative.
But first of all, like I'm done apologizing for it.
(29:18):
And I, you know, there was a time I think I, I thought I had
to. And now I realize, no, no, no,
no, no, no, this is, this is my contribution.
This is, this is what I have to offer.
And you know, anything else would be deceitful.
You know, it's not what I reallythink.
It's not, you know, it's not what my motivations are.
(29:38):
I think this is one of the things we're supposed to be
doing with society, that this is, you know, this is what we're
supposed to be enjoying at the end of all of that work, art and
discourse is why you bother to have schools and build roads is
so that we can get to each otherand share ideas and and lift
(30:00):
each other and and feed and helpand inspire each other.
If educator and teacher Mr. Constantine could go to young
Brendan and offer him advice or counsel.
What would he say? Keep it up.
Just keep it up. Just keep going.
It's all right. Say the awkward thing, ask the
(30:23):
stupid question, and the answer is yes until it's no.
What Brendan Constantine makes clear is that creativity isn't
something you arrive at, it's something you practice.
It asks you to stay curious, to let go of old versions of
yourself, to resist the comfort of repeating what already
worked. And when we stop trying to
(30:44):
perfect the work and instead focus on making it useful,
generous, and alive, that's whenit starts to matter.
That's when creativity becomes less about proving something and
more about offering. Something and.
That may be the most honest place an artist can stand.
Thanks for listening to Unapologetically Creative.
(31:07):
Be sure to follow the show and stay tuned for more insightful
conversations in the episodes ahead.
To learn more about the Vermont College of Fine Arts, visit
vcfa.edu.
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