Letters to Guns

Brendan Constantine was born in Los Angeles and grew up there, the second child of two working actors. His parents placed great value on the arts, going so far as to name him for Irish playwright Brendan Behan. Before pursuing his MFA degree at Vermont college Constantine had already toured the US and Europe, published extensively, and been finalist for three major poetry awards.

His work has appeared in numerous journals, most notably Ploughshares, The Los Angeles Review, Artlife, The Cortland Review, The Cider Press Review, Directions, RUNES, StellaZine and LA Times Best-seller The Underground Guide To Los Angeles. His first official book-length collection, Letters To Guns, is due out this Spring from Red Hen Press.

 He is the creator of Industrial Poetry, a workshop for adults and teens struggling with writer’s block, and is currently poet in residence at both the Windward School in west Los Angeles and the Idyllwild Arts Summer Youth Writing program in Idyllwild California.

A regular participant in both the Los Angeles and Orange County Poetry Festivals, Brendan has enjoyed an active role in southern California’s poetry communities. He is a three time finalist for the National Poetry Series and in 2002 was nominated by the Poetry Super Highway for poet laureate of the state of California.

There is no single approach to poetry in Constantine’s view, no school of style. In a recent interview with G. Murray Thomas of Next Magazine, Constantine says, “Every poem is different. Every poem requires something different from its poet. When I think of it, I imagine that the poem exists as a complete but invisible impulse, an entity just outside our heads, spinning slowly or quickly in the air, until it is translated into some physical arrangement. If we get it right, it allows itself to be unspooled onto the page. Every poet is thus a translator charged with re-expressing what the phenomenal world has already expressed to us.”

For Constantine there are no set means for this translation and there cannot be so long as our language continues to change. A poem may require that you carefully count out its rhythms and break its lines after six beats. Or it may need you to let it move everywhere and run on for pages regardless of meter. It may be whispered or shouted or only read silently in one place at one time. It may stack itself like a list or lay down in a paragraph. “When we argue the legitimacy of one form before another we have likely hit a wall creatively and begun to discriminate out of fear.”

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