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.

including this little bit published online in Open Book Toronto some years back:

 Q: When you are writing fiction, is there an audience you are thinking of?

A: It took me a while to realize why this question made me so uncomfortable. Finally I realized that the problem was that I write for a reader, singular, who is actively making my work come alive in their imagination through a process of engagement, and not an audience, plural, sitting there listening while I perform the work for them. Although I always read my writing out loud to get the rhythms and sounds right and prune any syntactical awkwardness, although I do care hugely that it lend itself to live presentation, there’s really only one reader I’m writing for: highly intelligent, empathetic, curious, witty, and easily bored (though not irritably critical). This reader has impeccable taste, has read widely and with great discrimination, and demands that I revise ruthlessly. I’ve never actually met this reader, but we have a tacit agreement that I will do my best to write something worth reading and they will do their best to provide generous attention.

Interview with Pearl Luke                                                           (2007)

What is your favourite thing about writing?

My favourite thing about writing fiction is the sensation, when it’s going well, of inhabiting another world and other bodies; of living more than one life. It’s exhilarating and terrifying because you have no idea where you are going or how long it will last. My favourite thing about writing poetry is the sensation, when it’s going well, of making something fine; finer than I’d ever hoped I could. In the best of all possible worlds, both these sensations happen simultaneously and that, right there, is my reason for living.

But there are lots of other things I love about writing that keep me going even when I’m not in the zone. I love sharpening pencils, for example. I love having an excuse to make endless cups of tea. I love going for walks with my dog Toby because we both need a break from sitting, for God’s sake, and then finding that the impasse is resolved after about a half an hour of chasing squirrels and admiring my neighbours’ gardens. I love not needing an excuse to buy more books. I love not having to dress up to go to work. I love having articulate friends. I love writing on napkins in cafés and on in little notebooks on trains. I love doing cryptic crossword puzzles and playing Scrabble and reading Roget’s Thesaurus and calling such activities “research.”

Good thing you didn’t ask me what I don’t like about writing however, because there are just as many things I could list there! For instance, I don’t love that look on people’s faces when they ask you what you do and you say you’re a writer and they want to know if you’re famous because of course any good writer would be famous, right? I don’t like the loneliness, and the endless waiting when you send stuff out, and the lack of money. But you didn’t ask, so I won’t answer.

What do you think readers would be most surprised to learn about you?

I’m really funny! But so far that hasn’t made it into my books. I don’t know why. It may be that my humour is a defence against feeling the kinds of things I let myself feel in my writing. Or it may be that my humour is just too improvisational to merit transcription.

http://www.accessola.org/web/OLA/Forest_of_Reading/OLA/Forest_of_Reading/Forest_of_Reading.aspx?hkey=e913abbb-1687-438d-bc68-64eda110aeb1

What We Carry explores the human condition and its impact on identity, culture and our physical environs. Glickman’s lyric poems traverse the Earth — commemorating disappearing species and exploring the ruins of Mycenae — and gracefully poses keen questions on time and mortality. Glickman is a poet, novelist, nonfiction writer and teacher based in Toronto.

https://www.cbc.ca/books/11-canadian-poetry-collections-to-check-out-during-national-poetry-month-1.5101688?__vfz=medium%3Dsharebar

and in the process purged a lifetime of paper – fifteen large recycling bags full. I got up at 6 am to scurry up and down the street, stuffing grad school essays, teaching notes, drafts of old poems, every journal I’d ever been published in, and who knows what else into the neighbours’ blue bins.

I am not precious about my work; I reckoned the world already had more than enough of it. I also assumed that I had copies of anything worth keeping on my hard drive or in my archives.

This proved to be quite wrong! Many poems, stories, and essays didn’t make the long migration from my first computer and the large floppy discs to a later, smaller generation of floppy discs to the hard drive of my current machine. Of course, it took me quite a while to realize how much I’d mislaid – only when I tried to gather together all my prose for a potential book did I understand how reckless I’d been.

I was able to recover some lost essays online; others at the library. But what I will never ever recover are the poems – poems in all those little magazines that no longer exist anywhere, magazines I had copies of that I tossed so casually into my neighbours’ bins. Poems that never made it into my books for one reason or another. I had assumed that this was because they were dreadful but some were really not that bad, they just didn’t fit in with whatever the overarching theme or style of my current book was, or they needed revision I wasn’t inclined to do just then but might have done another time IF I STILL HAD THEM.

But I don’t.

Periodically something turns up, waving “Remember me?” Like today, when I went on Google to see if there was any mention of What We Carry, just published this week, and in the process stumbled on the following poem, and some questions I answered about it in Canadian Literature! Here they are now, before I lose them again.

Envy: A Botanical Description

by Susan Glickman