From the Ottawa Poetry Newsletter,

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

On Writing #123

“An Infinity of Blues:  Art as a Form of Attention“

Before I learned to write I learned to draw and, to some extent, I still see the former as a more nuanced and sophisticated version of the latter. Making art is a way of representing the world to yourself; of looking closer so you can see what’s really there. The eye as microscope; the page as time-machine. Sharpen the focus. Slow everything down. Then copy what you see as accurately as you can.

There’s a radical honesty required from both writing and painting because copying what you see, not what you are supposed to see, challenges convention. To write what you feel and think, not what you are supposed to feel and think is even more subversive. This is how art frees the constrained and vindicates the powerless. It turns the bystander into an activist.

I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t a bystander; when I didn’t feel apart from things, observing them. I suspect this is typical of anyone drawn to the arts. A person fully immersed in the world isn’t compelled to scrutinize it, but if something or someone has flung you out of the centre to the periphery you necessarily inhabit a space of exploration. This is frightening but also liberating, which is why we continue to make art despite loneliness, frustration, lack of response, and lack of remuneration.

Until I went to university, the visual arts were just as important to me as the literary ones, but then I moved into my head – a space even smaller and more cluttered than a library carrel – and writing took over. There no longer seemed to be any way paint and charcoal could represent the honey and vinegar of reality; only language, parsed into metaphor and allusion, quotation and dislocation, could build a second world with anything like the variety and terror of the first. Words have been my medium ever since. I have worked as an English professor, a creative writing instructor, a mentor, and an editor; written poetry and fiction for adults and children, scholarly essays and dissertations, and book reviews. For recreation, when I wasn’t hungrily devouring other people’s books, I played Scrabble and Boggle and did cryptic crosswords. I even read Roget’s Thesaurus for pleasure! I was completely besotted with language.

Part of this intoxication was childlike: I loved playing with the sounds and textures of words. And part of it was more adult and urgent: if I only learned enough, maybe one day I could write something true. Daily life hurt; it made no sense. But literature would save me, if only I could write my way in to the truth and then out again, to offer it to others.

(painting of my brother David, from a photograph taken by my sister Lisa)

Then in September of 2015, exhausted by literary disappointment and juggling family demands, employment, too many illnesses and deaths, I took a break from writing and went to art school. And in drawing and painting and sculpture I’ve recovered the joy of making stuff not as a path to “the truth” — which I no longer believe in — but as an end in itself. When a model is posing in the middle of a room and twenty people are working at easels in a circle around him you invariably get twenty versions of “the truth,” each dependent on the painter’s height, angle and acuity of vision, hand-eye co-ordination, native skill, learned technique, quality of pigments and brushes, knowledge of other painters’ work, emotional state that day, life experience …. In the art studio it is immediately obvious that everyone’s view is partial, as is everyone’s ability.

This is something writers too often forget, but remembering it would help us be more generous not only to others, but also to ourselves. There is so much vitriol among reviewers of Canadian poetry these days. Maybe it is fueled by the reviewers’ own frustration at trying to make work that is not only authentic to their individual experience but somehow revelatory of a larger “truth”, not merely well-crafted but somehow canonical. What if we relieved ourselves of that burden and acknowledged that the task is impossible, and that none of us will ever get it right? Would that make the poetic enterprise more enjoyable?

For me it has.

Studying the laws of perspective, gradation, and shading, mixing pigments to emulate the colour wheel, trying to understand spatial relationships — all of this is bringing me back to poetry with renewed faith and energy. I’m no longer worried that I’ll never write anything great, I just want to write something good. I can never capture everything I know about a person when I paint their portrait, but if the subject is recognizable and my own feelings come through, I’m happy. The past few years of incessant feuding in the Canlit scene and of my style of writing falling out of favour made me doubt that was sufficient. But art has always been my way of paying attention, and that attention connects me to the world and makes that world liveable. Without it there is just clutter and noise; conflict and appetite. With it, cobalt, pthalo, indigo, ultramarine. An infinity of blues.

LISZTS | 11 Canadian Novels That Classical Music Lovers …
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I visited so many dear friends and met so many wonderful people on my mini-tour of the west coast, but the highlight of the trip was a pilgrimage to Cathedral Grove – one of the last stands of old growth forest on Vancouver Island. The fact that I was reading Richard Powers’ magisterial novel, The Overstory, during my travels, definitely contributed to the portentousness of the experience. Here’s a photo that may give you some idea of the sublimity of the Douglas Firs there, just outside Port Alberni.

Jane Hirshfield
THE DESTINATION

I wanted something, I wanted. I could not have it.
Irremediable rock of refusal, this world thick with bird song,
tender with starfish and apples.
How calming to say, “Turn right at the second corner,”
and be understood,
and see things arrive as they should at their own destination.
Yet we speak in riddles–
“Turn back at the silence.” “Pass me the mountain.”
To the end we each nod, pretending to understand.

This poem has been humming away in my mind all morning, as I emptied out the vegetable bin to make soup and then scraped the whiskery carrots, peeled the single ancient turnip, scoured dirt from layers of leek. Then I got distracted and repaired the malformed right hand of last night’s quick portrait, moved a few stacks of books to another, even dustier, bookcase, reheated my coffee for the third time, all the while reassuring the very patient dog that yes, we were going to go for a walk as soon I finished a few more tasks, as soon as it stopped raining, as soon as the courier came to pick up a letter…

What is our destination? the dog never asks. For him, the walk is the destination, every moment an encounter with a sensory world that fills him with gratitude and excitement. But this poem insists that I ask myself what my own destination is. It asks the question with the title and answers it in the very first line, a line that still gives me chills every time I read it.

I wanted something, I wanted. I could not have it.

What is that something that drops away mid-sentence only to be resurrected as it? A lack the speaker cannot even articulate. Not a particular object of desire, just a wanting. A wanting that thrums through human consciousness and complicates every moment of existence, a pulling-away from what is towards what might have been or could yet be, if only things would arrive as they should – that is, not as riddles but in the fullness of their being. But we are told immediately that such yearning is irremediable.

Irremediable. Six mellifluous syllables bashing themselves against a single obdurate one: rock.

Our bones would not shatter on that rock if we could just dwell in this world thick with bird song, tender with starfish and apples. And what a fabulous expanse of that world is conjured by the unexpected juncture of those starfish and those apples! Oceans and orchards, nature unconfined and nature tamed by human intervention. Nature without us and nature including us. Nature that arrests our senses and stops us in our tracks just as bird song does. Nature that, at the same time, remains mysterious, speaking a language we don’t understand, because our human narrative is paratactic – we go forward, always forward, aware of time and space, negotiating the territory.

Turn back at the silence, says the dog, kindly. (All dogs are Buddhists, like Hirshfield herself.) But I, like the “I” of the poem, still want what I cannot have. Not just being, but understanding.

April 6, 2019. https://susangillis.blogspot.com/2019/04/susan-glickman-reads-jane-hirshfield.html

Saturday, 17 August 2019

Saturday, 10 August 2019

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

http://poetryminiinterviews.blogspot.com/search/label/Susan%20Glickman

In the last two years I taught eleven courses, edited nine books and the liner notes for one CD, and mentored three students privately. I also wrote the first draft of YA novel and started a new manuscript of poems and revised another novel that has not been published yet.

I had four books come out during that same period — My latest novel, The Tale-Teller, my sixth book of poems, The Smooth Yarrow, and the final two titles in my “Lunch Bunch trilogy of children’s books, Bernadette in the Doghouse and Bernadette to the Rescue. This meant I had to do final edits and a lot of promotion for them as well — which wasn’t as much fun as it ought to have been because it was so hard to juggle everything.

For example, when I went to Ottawa for a poetry festival a week after my husband had major surgery, I had to set up a schedule of friends visiting daily to help him with things because I felt so bad about going away and then, on that trip, I lost the power cord to my laptop so was not able to correct my students’ work as I needed to before teaching the following day. This is the kind of stuff that happens when you try to do everything!

The only way to survive as a freelancer who wants to do her own writing is to be brutally efficient — which means you will have no social life. You should, however, get a gym membership and use it, because you will need to keep your energy level up. In addition, if you keep fit, you can look good in inexpensive clothing, which is all that you will be able to afford. The only thing you shouldn’t skimp on is getting a decent haircut from time to time. Having a good haircut makes you look like you’re competent and in control of your life even when you are not. That and a watch. Always wear a watch. Only teenagers use their cell-phones to check the time.

Besides getting a good haircut and wearing a watch, here is what I always tell my creative writing students at U of T and Ryerson when they ask me for advice. I tell them a writer only needs a few things:

1.  something to write with
2.  good lighting
3.  an ergonomic chair
4.  a dog, to make you get out of the chair and go for a walk.
5.  Roget’s thesaurus and a couple of good dictionaries
6.  a library card
7.  regular visits to the optometrist
8.  co-operation from other people in the house (In other words, they must be made to understand that even though you work at home you are WORKING at home and therefore are unavailable except in an emergency).

Ideally you get a room of your own to work in, even if it’s tucked away in a corner of the basement, somewhere you can leave ongoing projects spread out and no one will mess with them, but if you are forced to work at the kitchen or dining room table, make sure everyone else clears away their stuff after every meal so you have space to work. (You may need to get a bunch of bins or baskets for them to sweep everything into).

1. Time management is absolutely essential. I use the free Sunbird calendar you can download from Mozilla for long-term planning, but also plan each day in much more detail on work-sheet I review every morning and revise every night.
2. Know when you are most productive and schedule your most important work for then. For example, when I am working on an editing project, I usually spend mornings on my own writing and afternoons on editing and then go back in the evening to review what I wrote in the morning and edit it some more and maybe also get in a tad more editing if I didn’t meet my goal for the day. (Yes, the workdays are absurdly long. Often I work ten-hour-days, 7 days a week.)
3. Give yourself realistic goals and try to stick to them. It’s better to be pleased that you got more done than expected than discouraged because you got less done than expected! When I’m juggling teaching and editing and writing at the same time, I never expect more than 500 words a day from myself; 1000 words a day is for when I have more concentrated writing time and if it turns into 2000 or more, I am delighted.
4. Don’t answer the phone unless you are expecting a call. Pick up all your phone calls at around 4:00 before people leave work so if anything important turns up, you can still call back.
5. Strictly limit the time you spend on email and Facebook and other social media. Turn off the internet when you are writing (it’s OK to use it for research). You can browse Facebook as a reward when you meet a goal. It’s way more fun that way.