Brendan Constantine: Defending the Moon, Making Big Mistakes, and Finding the Momentum in a Poem

Why do poets still write about the moon? Should we stop? In this interview poet Brendan Constantine discusses the way the moon and the sea and other eternal markers act as a ground zero for discussing poetry. Art is a marker of our mortal consciousness. It is where we go to make mistakes, where we go to get things wrong. Constantine affirms his belief in making big mistakes in poetry, and therefore making a public discussion possible through art. Art does not resolve our problems or disagreements, but it makes discussions of challenging subjects possible. 

 
Rewrite Strategy: Brendan shares some re-writing tricks he uses to find and create momentum around his subject matter. One strategy is to try explaining the poem to someone who doesn’t have a lot of time, the “elevator pitch” of a poem, instead of the poem itself. The other is to put the poem in different forms, such as couplets, quatrains, etc. He suggests reading the poem several times over, then trying to rewrite it from memory. What comes out? What do you naturally forget to put back in? Let your unconscious mind sort through it, separating the vital lines out from the chaff.