Susan Glickman : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

The book that knocked me sideways recently is Louise Gluck’s Faithful and Virtuous Night, but for the past year, I’ve also been savouring Helen Dunmore’s last book, Inside the Wave, and several volumes by Jane Hirschfield and Alice Oswald. They all live on my night-table for emergency administration.

Susan Glickman : part four

What are you working on?

A couple of weeks ago I began a series of prose poems about common tools, paired with drawings of the same objects. I had just finished four years of art school and wanted to mate image and text in some way. So far, I have written poems about and made drawings of a hammer, a knife, secateurs, and clamps. I have no idea how many tools I will address, or whether I will complete this project. It’s too early to tell! I spent about ten years writing and rewriting the poems based on Chopin’s 24 Preludes that appeared in my last book, What We Carry. In the end, I only included fourteen of them.

Susan Glickman : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

W.H. Auden quoted Paul Valéry - who himself was paraphrasing Leonardo da Vinci - when he said that “a work of art is never finished, only abandoned.” I agree with all of them! From a purely practical perspective, however, a poem is finished when I can’t do anything more to it just then. Nonetheless I am an inveterate reviser, and although a poem has appeared in print in a journal, I may still make some revisions to it before it appears in one of my books. I even revised poems that had appeared in previous books for my new and selected, Running in Prospect Cemetery.

Susan Glickman : part two

How does a poem begin?

It begins like a tiny pebble in a shoe or a grain of sand in an oyster. An almost imperceptible but persistent irritant. Until it isn’t. Until it’s rubbed me so raw that I find myself asking Why is this damn thing still here? To answer that question, the question of why I am snagged on something I am not consciously thinking about, I must write a poem.

By writing a poem, I discover what significance that thing holds for me and how it is linked to many other events, objects, feelings, dreams, ideas, and so forth – a deep and wide network of associations. Was that network built prior to my paying attention or does it arise during the process of writing a poem? I don’t know. But paying attention to one’s obsessions is its own reward, whether or not the poem that evolves proves to be a pearl or remains a dull and lumpy grain of sand.

Susan Glickman : part one

Susan Glickman grew up in Montréal, but after many travels landed up in Toronto with a husband, two children, a dog, and an old house that always needs fixing. Formerly an academic, she now works as a freelance editor and is learning to paint. She is the author of seven books of poetry from Montreal’s Véhicule Press, most recently What We Carry (2019). She has also published four novels, three children’s books, and an award-winning work of literary criticism: The Picturesque and the Sublime: A Poetics of the Canadian Landscape (1998). The children’s books and her novel The Tale-Teller (2012) have all been translated by Christiane Duchesne for Les Éditions du Boréal, the novel appearing as Les aventures étranges et surprenantes d’Esther Brandeau, moussaillon (2014).

Photo credit: Toan Klein.

How did you first engage with poetry?

I was enchanted with poetry from the moment my parents began reading Mother Goose to me, and I started making up rhymes before I could read or write. I loved the sounds of words as much as I loved their meaning and I loved their rhythm as much as I loved their sounds. I don’t think we read much contemporary – or even modern -- poetry in high school, but I bought a copy of Leonard Cohen’s Selected Poems 1956–1968 at a school bookfair when I was sixteen, and my head exploded.
Then, in university, I had the great good fortune of studying with Denise Levertov, who became my mentor and my friend. Everything I understand about open form -- about writing to express the inner rhythms of thought and feeling, about the line break and the breath -- I owe to her, and to the practice that began with her. Living in Greece the next year, when I was nineteen, introduced me to modern Greek poetry and that also made me more interested in experimenting outside closed forms. I sometimes go back to those forms, however. I especially love the knotty logic of sonnets, because they help me tame big emotions.