Susan Glickman, Artful Flight: Essays and Reviews 1985-2019

            So here is one leitmotif in this volume: me trying to figure out how things work, whether the relationship of sounds in a stanza of poetry, or of poems in a book, or of several books in a poet’s oeuvre. I have always been obsessed with craft. And because I recognize the terrific effort involved in making any form of art, I always try to write respectfully, and only about books that engage me or teach me something interesting. I have no interest in negative criticism; I just don’t feel it is worth my time.
            Of course, not everyone agrees with this perspective. When I was in graduate school and Deconstruction was all the rage, I was informed solemnly by another student, one of those avid and ambitious ones whose business it is to know all the right people and how to make use of them, that my ‘problem’ was that I was a poet. His verdict was pronounced with an equal measure of pity and contempt, much as a restaurant critic might address his lunch. But having been on the receiving end of a knife and fork many times gives me a bit of an advantage when it comes to discussing other people’s poetry. I try never to distort what someone else has written for the sake of a clever remark, or to ignore exceptions in order to prove a generalization, or to troll for examples out of context to support an a priori argument, or to be stylish and the expense of common sense. (“Introduction”)

There is an enormous amount to appreciate and admire in Toronto writer Susan Glickman’s latest work, Artful Flight: Essays and Reviews 1985-2019 (Erin ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., 2022), a selection of essays and reviews composed across more than three decades of writing, reading and thinking. Set in four sections—“On Craft,” “Reviews,” “Critical Essays and Lectures” and “The Self in the World”—Glickman offers her detailed and thoroughly researched thoughts on works by an array of writers and writing contemporary and otherwise including Robyn Sarah, Diana Hartog, Patrick Lane, Gary Geddes, Don Coles, Phyllis Webb, Erín Moure, Paul Celan and Primo Levi, Michael Ondaatje and Anne Szumigalski. While a number of these pieces are years old, they manage to retain a freshness that belies their age, such as her review essay on John Newlove’s final, single-author full-length collection—well before the publication of his selected poems through The Porcupines’ Quill, a final chapbook through above/ground press and a posthumous selected poems through Chaudiere Books—The Night the Dog Smiled (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1986). Her gaze is ambitious, exploratory and revealing, offering a thoroughness to the way in which she articulates her thoughts on craft and form, focusing on poetry but open to well beyond the borders of the poetic form. “Then there’s the question of those rare and beautiful situations that resonate with meaning.” she writes, as part of the essay “Indirection: Truth to Life in Fiction.” “What meaning? That’s the problem, you don’t know.” There is such a density of thinking and ease in her writing that one could get lost in such a collection, and happily so; my only frustration with this collection is the thought that perhaps she isn’t writing as many review essays now as she once had, aware of the state of contemporary reviewing and how few options, especially paid ones, that exist. Writing on William Carlos Williams’ infamous poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” she offers: “It is to him more than to any other single writer that we owe the vindication of free verse as a legitimate prosody, and the redefinition of counterpoint to include the play of line rhythm—whether metrical or not—against ordinary syntactical pausing. And yet, the way Williams uses the line break, while capturing the cadences of American speech, is nonetheless resolutely textual: most of its power comes from how it is put down on the page.” A few lines later, she continues:

            What Williams has written here is clearly, even defiantly, a poem, in that it’s neither speech no prose but a kind of language which insists on being read carefully, being attended to, in the way that poetry does. The longer you look at it the denser it seems, the more exquisite the internal clockwork, the more surprising the degree of organization in so small and unprepossessing a piece. The visual pattern is immediately apparent; four couplets, unpunctuated and with no capital letters, each consisting of a three-word phrase followed by a single word.

Notes on (some) books I haven’t had time to properly discuss:

I’m remarkably behind, in ways you can’t even imagine. Here are some scattered notes of reviews begun but never fully fleshed out. And yet, these are all books I thought were interesting. Must I wait until Aoife begins school in another, what, three or four years? (Answer: probably).

The Essential D.G. Jones, selected by Jim Johnstone: I’ve known that The Essential D.G. Jones (The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., 2016) was in the works for some time, and was pleased to know of it, although I’d hoped that there might have been another books’ worth of material that Jones was sitting on. I’d been months gently prodding him to allow me to produce another chapbook (after the one we did in 2002); despite the fact that he occasionally sent me unpublished poems in the mail that he would allow me to produce in a variety of venues (including dusie and Touch the Donkey), it was the only part of my letters he wouldn’t respond to. I envy Johnstone’s ability to work on such a project, even if not the fact that this becomes a “last collection” for the late poet [see my obituary for him here]. Jones truly was one of our finest lyric poets and as Johnstone writes in his introduction: “The Essential D.G. Jones is the first volume of selected poetry to span the poet’s entire career.”

Suddenly

a flock, a body, the birds

moving, moving the air, moving

the bank behind the house, the snow

sieved by sun and rain, the

seeds, the fallout from trees, hedge

a feeder

            nervous, a percentage of feathers

lift off, sheer off, a percentage

arrive, others remain, picking their

way, a jittery wave of scavengers, cleaners

over the snow

the body of spring emerges

the body of winter emerges

the body of spring, engages

feathers and debris

Ben Estes, Illustrated Games of Patience: Massachusetts poet Ben Estes’ first full-length poetry collection, Illustrated Games of Patience (The Song Cave, 2015), is a sharp and witty combination of straight lyric and prose poem. There was a subtlety here that I liked, that drew me back into this collection even after I’d put the book down.

A Rainbow Sign

I just don’t think that

this is what it’s supposed to feel like,

shaking my big one to break the stream

and make a pool for moving my tools,

for they weigh only half as much

when moved under water.

I emerged in the morning, covered in blood and fine acid sand

and decided to remain partially submerged a little while longer.

Itching for more exercise,

and cooled not by water but by air,

I spent the afternoon collecting sea shells,

and found each one heavily carved

with the numbers of pretty village girls

offering to take tourists to the ultimate level.

A spring and summer service they offer.

I meant to call one, with a headline ready on my lips,

but a gull would dive down wheeling and screaming

each time I tried to dial.

One can fool the animals,

but must forgive this wild, beautiful country.

Vittoria Colonna, Selections from the Rime Spirituali, English Texts, trans. Jan Zwicky

My short review of Vittoria Colonna, Selections from the Rime Spirituali, English Texts, trans. Jan Zwicky (Erin, ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., 2014) is now online at Arc Poetry Magazine.

12 or 20 questions: with David Helwig

David Helwig was born in Toronto in 1938 and lived there for most of his first ten years, then moved with his parents to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario where his father ran a small business repairing and refinishing furniture and buying and selling antiques. He attended the University of Toronto and the University of Liverpool. His first daughter was born in England and the second in Kingston where he taught at Queen's University. He published his first stories, in Canadian Forum and The Montrealer, while still an undergraduate. For two summers he worked in summer stock with the Straw Hat Players, mostly as a business manager and technician, working with such actors as Gordon Pinsent, Jackie Burroughs, William B. Davis and Timothy Findley.

While he taught at Queen's University, he did some informal teaching in Collins Bay Penitentiary and he wrote A Book about Billie with a former inmate. In 1974, John Hirsch hired him as literary manager of CBC television drama, and he spent two years in this position, supervising the work of story editors and the department's relations with writers. From 1976 to 1980, he taught part time at Queen's while doing a great deal of freelance work, and in 1980, he gave up teaching and became a full-time freelance writer.

He has from the beginning written both fiction and poetry as well as a wide range of radio, television and journalism.

One of his daughters is a writer and political activist. The other is a chemist and art conservator. He has three grandchildren.

Vocal music was for many years his avocation. After abandoning this for some years, he returned to it in his forties and sang with a number of choirs in Kingston, Montreal and Charlottetown. He appeared as bass soloist in Handel's Messiah, Bach's St Matthew Passion, and Mozart's Requiem.

He currently lives in an old house in the village of Eldon in Prince Edward Island.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Did my first book change my life? Yes, I suppose it gave me an increased sense that it was possible to be a writer. I was thirty years old, not young for a first book, but it was a period when Canadian poetry was fashionable, and the book sold quite a few copies. It included three plays, and I suppose it encouraged me to be inclusive, not rigourously selective.

As to the difference of my new work, well the poetry is more often written in fairly strict rhymed forms. I began with strict forms, then moved into free verse, but my own free verse and that of most other mostly bores me now. Perhaps I lack the urgency felt by the young and need the struggle of tight forms to lift the level of energy.

What I've just written applies, of course, mostly to poetry. As to fiction it has on the whole grown "louder, faster and funnier" to quote the old theatrical joke. Douglas Glover pointed out that I am loudest, fastest and funniest in the (imaginary) first person.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I didn't come to poetry first. I started out in high school trying to write both poems and stories. For a while in the Sixties I found it easier to publish poetry than fiction, and that led me to write more poetry. Still, at the time my first poetry book was accepted I also won a Belmont Award for a short story that appeared in Saturday Night magazine.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I believe, in general, that especially in fiction I write best when I write fastest. Once an idea has taken on some life (how does this happen? who knows?) things move on very quickly. I take some notes, but sometimes they turn out to be only modestly relevant to what creates itself on the page. As an example I have notes from the spring of 1968, notes begun in Paris, for something that meant to be a novel taking place perhaps in the nineteenth century, with some relation to the history of art. But missing from the notes is the leap by which the supposed novel became a set of lectures in the novella The Stand-In. Once I am in flight the final shape is usually there, though much detail may get revised.

4 - Where does a poem or piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Fiction most commonly begins with a voice. Or maybe more voices than one. I don't writes bits and pieces. I write stories, the narrative impulse and the voice somehow coming together. Poetry begins in overexcitement, often visual.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Public readings have nothing to do with creation. I have done a bit of acting and a lot of singing and I have some natural impulse to perform, but it has little to do with the invention of stories or the creation of poems.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I am allergic to generalizations.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

See above. A writer is a citizen, but mostly in his time off. Though there was a time when I suppose I thought it was my duty to create, alongside others, a Canadian verbal reality.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I have had some useful connections with editors, though mostly at a word by word level. Punctuation. I always greatly enjoyed collaborative work, in theatre, radio, television, but that it a joint project from the beginning.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

"We are in a whorehouse here, and people are getting fucked, and you can't just sit and listen to the blind piano player."

John Hirsch in a CBC Drama Department meeting. Maybe only the most memorable.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

By and large poetry, fiction and critical prose come as quite different kinds of approach or inspiration, different kinds of jobs, bringing their own techniques with them. A story that fails doesn't become a poem; it just remains a failed story. And vice versa.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I am mostly a morning writer. With age I'm slowing down a little, but traditionally I got up and set to work five mornings a week. This is particularly true with long forms, novellas, novels, or The Year One. Sometimes I go back later in the day, and afternoons, when I was doing more free-lance work, were for reviews and such things.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I used to sometimes run or swim, but mostly it doesn't get stalled. I stare out the window and go back to work. If it fails it fails.

13 - What do you really want?

To be read with pleasure by as many people as possible. Or maybe I only want to get up in the morning and make something out of words, something that persuades me and keeps my mind occupied.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Northrop Frye said the same thing. The answer is, as the joke goes, all of the above.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Many different ones at different times. Hemingway first, later Lawrence and Simenon, later still Nabokov. Jane Austen, John Donne. Maybe Hugh MacLennan.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I'd be happy just to keep going.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

In another world I might have been a singer (see The Year One, p 29). I can't imagine not being a writer. Aging and melodramatic I'm tempted to say I would have been mad without it. Though that probably isn't quite true.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It was what I wanted to do. It was what was there demanding to be done.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

As it happens I recently reread Great Expectations. That is an good as they come. Also recently translated some Chekhov. Same comment. Movies? Maybe L'avventura, or Bergman's Persona. Or Fanny and Alexander.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Something that might become a sequence of poems--three written. Reading around an idea for a novella, but it might or might not work. I've just finished a book of connected stories all in dialogue.

12 or 20 questions (second series);