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Q: Welcome! Thank you for being our featured poet this month. Tell us, how you got
started as an artist.
My parents are both actors and they placed a great emphasis on artistic expression when
I was growing up. You may know them from films and TV. My father is
Michael Constantine and best known for his featured role
in the motion picture My Big Fat Greek Wedding. My mother,
Julianna McCarthy (also a poet!) is perhaps best known
for her years on the television soap opera,
The Young and the Restless, where she created the role of Liz Foster.
Anyway, for them the arts have never been a pastime. Art is an organizing principal,
a way of making sense of things. This attitude they passed on to my sister and I; from
very early on it was clear we were going to seek careers as artists. However it took
quite a while for us to settle on a medium.
Also I have to say a major influence was my first art teacher in elementary school,
a brilliant woman named Libby Cheney. Thanks to Facebook, we’re back in touch and I’ll
be seeing her on this tour.
Q: Have you always been interested in art?
So much so that I didn’t even recognize it. It’s always been an aspect of how I think
and function. That must sound rather grandiose, but I haven’t said I’m any good!
Q: How do you keep your creative juices flowing?
I try to stay busy and teachable. Not to mention involved with a world beyond my
experience and tastes. I do things that scare me.
Q: Do you have any projects you’d like to tell us about?
Well, I do a great deal of volunteer work and some of the most rewarding has been
with the Alzheimer’s Poetry
Project and another known as The Art of Elysium, an organization serving
children’s hospitals throughout the southland. Both groups endeavor to bring art to
isolated and challenged audiences. Also, as part of this tour, I’ll be conducting
poetry workshops with the Hillcrest Youth Services Center in San Mateo, a correctional
facility for adolescents. Each of these groups – senior citizens with diminished
memory, children living with terminal illnesses, and young adults caught up in the
criminal justice system – are people who can actually use art, who can be helped by
an emotional vocabulary. It’s the only work I’m proud of.
Q: What is something you wish other creative artists understood?
The importance of chance. Ask yourself about the conditions under which your best work
was created. Did you start with a defined vision and follow it to the end without any
deviation? Odds are, NO.
Where I see artists get stuck, again and again, is in forgetting the role of chance
in their work, the importance of being open to possibility, intervention by unsought
ideas.
Heaven help us if we’ve ever had a rave review! No sooner are we enjoying success
(even if it’s just saying “Well, that didn’t totally suck.”) than we are forgetting
the experience of discovering our art as we went. We forget that sometimes our
successes are accidental.
Then we go back, attempt to create something else, but this time we try to force art
out of sheer will. Under these conditions, the best we can hope for is something almost
as good as we used to be.
Q: What are some of the challenges and obstacles you faced during your career?
Besides the usual menu of health and poverty, my biggest obstacle has invariably
been me.
Q: What is the most rewarding aspect of your career?
When someone says I made them want to create.
Q: What inspires you?
The total unlikelihood of everything. The amazing, beautiful and completely absurd fact
of the world.
Q: How do you manage your time when you are working on more than one project?
Very poorly.
Q: What do you do to relax and to just have fun?
Think about relaxing and having fun. Sometimes I think about elephants.
Q: What is the number one thing you would like to tell new creative artists?
Hurl yourself at your art. Be willing to make lots of mistakes and then go make them. Try to make lots of them in public. Look in the mirror and ask, “When was I planning to make a fool of myself?” Now is the time. And try to finish everything you start, no matter how terrible. Like trying to pull something from the bottom of a drawer – sometimes we need to remove a bunch of stuff we don’t want, pull it ALL THE WAY OUT, so we can get at the good stuff.
Q: Do you have a support system?
Lots of friends and mentors, all of them smarter than me.
Q: If, at the age you are today, you could spend a day with you at age seven,
what would you take back in time, what would you say, what would you do?
I’m not sure that boy would trust me. I suspect he’d be rather guarded. Nonetheless,
I’d tell him to keep wishing, keep trying to catch the beginnings of dreams. I’d tell
him not to worry so much, that everyone was going to be OK. Play with the dog more.
Q: When you feel creatively blocked what do you do to get yourself back into
the creative flow? When your muse is napping what do you do to wake him/her up?
Because I believe that all ‘schools of thought’ have something to teach me, and because
I try to remain open to chance, I’m convinced that most episodes of ‘writer’s block’
are not due to a deficit of magic but rather a surplus of judgment. If I can stay out of
judgment and just start writing, I’m halfway home.
Q: How do you recharge your creativity?
To really get going, I try to do things I can’t do. Working outside my tastes, my
experience, my ‘zones of comfort,’ are all invaluable motivators. Sometimes I’ll even
immerse myself in the work of artists who frustrate me. I won’t name names, but there
are a few artists out there who astonish me with their apparent arrogance – their
choices of subject, usage, arrangement, etc. At first I used to just turn my nose up.
But at some point it occurred to me that these frustrations were also inspirations.
Whenever we look at art and can see only what we’d have done different, this is still
a very creative state of mind. To that extent I believe we must concede that the artist
in question ‘reached’ us. May I never become a connoisseur of my own work.
Q: What is your greatest inspiration?
There’s a quote by Alan Dershowits that goes, “Indeed, it is while praying that
I experience my greatest doubts about God, and it is while looking at the stars that
I make the leap of faith.” Does that work?
Q: What makes you smile?
Elephants. Elephants relaxing and having fun. Elephants being interviewed about their
careers. Elephants on tour.
Q: What advice can you offer to a creative artist that is struggling with their
inner critic?
Tell that critic to hold off until you have a draft done. Also, remember that no draft
is written in stone. You have NOTHING to lose by trying multiple approaches. This does
not diminish your dreams or your talent.
Q: Many artistic people struggle to develop a routine that allows them time
for their creative work. What advice can you give that will help them create
a balance between work and social life?
That’s an endless struggle and there’s no ‘cruise control,’ no combination of habits
that will yield a perfect balance. As frustrating as this is, an actual routine scares
me more. I fear it will mean I’ve settled.
Life happens and every moment of it changes us. The hardest part is usually just
accepting the fact. I can’t get caught up in trying to measure my art or my dedication
to it. If I start thinking that way, I’m finished. A friend of mine used to say,
“Don’t look for yourself in the art. Look for the art in yourself.”
Another good quote comes from
Nelson Algren who said, “The writer who knows what he’s doing
isn’t doing very much.”
Q: What creative individuals do you admire?
Nope. Not even going to try to answer this. The list is WAY too long.
Q: What is your favorite first sentence in a book?
I’m awfully fond of how Shirley Jackson opens her
book The Haunting of Hillhouse. It’s a terrifying book and I’ve
read it six times! It begins, “No live organism can continue for long to exist
sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed,
by some, to dream.”
Q: Are you listening to music as you answer these questions? If yes, what
are you listening to?
The Devil’s Sonata in G minor by
Giuseeppe Tartini, first movement.
Q: If you only had one more day to live what would you do with the 24
hours?
A great deal of hugging. I’d also probably try to write something profound and
get frustrated.
Q: What traits, if any, do you think that creative people have as compared to
people who are not creative?
Well, that’s a question predicated upon the assumption that some people aren’t creative.
As far as I’m concerned parallel parking is a creative act. If I were to change the
question to people who are artistic, or even better, people who have a developed
capacity for aesthetic thinking compared to those who haven’t – then I can offer an
opinion. It’s this:
Every artist on some level has had to contend with the fact that much of life is
totally ineffable. There’s just no describing mortal self-consciousness. Hence,
we have painting and music and dance and poetry as a means of ‘embodying’ our
experiences and emotional conclusions. We have brush strokes and subtlety of movement.
We have simile and metaphor and the lyric. These tools represent an emotional vocabulary
and a means of slowing the velocities of life to the stillness of art. I believe this
is why ‘aesthetic sensitivity’ is a valuable life skill. Anyone who hones this skill
is perhaps bettered equipped to communicate. They can be oracles for others.
Q: When do you feel most energized?
About 11:30 pm
Q: Who is the most creative person that you’ve ever known?
Both my parents.
Q: Can you see your finished product before you start it?
I always think I can. I’m usually wrong.
Q: Do you feel that you chose your passion, or did it choose you?
No clue.
Q: What book are you reading right now?
Three different books:
Dickens’ Great Expectations
Howard Nemerov’s Figures of Thought
(Reading it again.)
The Alphabet Vs. The Goddess by Leonard Shlain
Q: What is the last movie you watched?
The Browning Version with
Michael Redgrave. Wonderful.
Q: What is the favorite question you were ever asked and what was your
answer?
Years ago, someone asked me, “Are you always like this?”
Without thinking I answered, “Are you kidding? I’m not even like this now.”
I’m not sure what I meant but the other person replied, “Ah...”
Q: What is the best advice you’ve ever been given?
Don’t chase bad pitches.
Q: Your famous last words, will you share with us a piece of advice, a
favorite quote, a tip, whatever you wish?
This quote from
Lewis Thomas’ The Lives of a Cell:
“For the real amazement, if you wish to be amazed, is this process. You start out
as a single cell derived from the coupling of a sperm and egg; this divides in two,
then four, then eight, and so on. At a certain stage there emerges a single cell
that has as all its progeny the human brain. The mere existence of such a cell
should be one of the world’s great astonishments. People ought to be walking around
all day, calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except
that cell.”
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