Susan Glickman

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You are here: Home » ninja_forms_preview_page » 2019 » April

Archive for month: April, 2019

A few years ago I gave my office to my son to turn into a music studio

08 Apr 2019 / 0 Comments / in Uncategorized/by Susan Glickman

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

Not in some shady corner, screwed down into the moss,
ferns cooing protectively “There, there,
next time it will be your turn”
not rootbound, no, nor stagnant
filtering swamp scum
not parasitic not
a clinging vine
in full sun on the south wall
multifoliate
charming really, if a little excessive
trying too hard
not green
but red
oddly unvisited by bees, though aphids like it,
and certain tiny blue caterpillars we’ve never seen unfold
as butterflies or moths
its annual exhibition by now
predictable, though the effort
not entirely unappreciated
a stalwart in the garden
useful for filling out a bouquet
perennial, in other words

Questions and Answers

What inspired “Envy: A Botanical Description”?

I’m a passionate gardener, so horticultural imagery frequently finds its way into my work. I think here what happened is that Shakespeare’s characterization of envy as “The Green-Eyed Monster” in Othello conflicted with my sense of green being a positive force, so I imagined a way in which the “greenness” of envy could be seen as not such a bad thing, but—as all green things are—“natural.” “Perennial” in the sense of happening all the time, everywhere, and therefore perhaps not to be seen as a deadly sin but an ordinary aspect of human nature, since everyone feels overlooked and under-appreciated from time to time.

At the time I wrote it, I had dropped out of academic and literary life to raise children. So I often felt this way, and was ashamed of my feelings.

What poetic techniques did you use in “Envy: A Botanical Description”?

The poem is built up of a series of negative statements which are highly concrete images of something abstract. It’s a kind of a game. If you didn’t have the title to guide you, you would have no idea what the speaker is trying (and ultimately failing) to describe.

I’ve always loved Shakespeare’s sonnet 116, which generates tremendous psychic tension by the use of negative statements. After all, anyone who has to declare “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ admit impediments” had already admitted that he is well aware that impediments exist! In the same way, the speaker of this poem manages to suggest a great deal of ambivalence about what she’s saying.

As well, by using the strongest language to say what it is not, rather than what it is, the speaker ensures that we are likely to carry away an image of envy as “screwed,” “stagnant,” “root-bound,” “swamp scum,” “parasitic,” “a clinging vine,” “excessive,”  and “trying too hard.”

Finally, the poem pretends to reach a conclusion but doesn’t—there is no final period.


“Envy: A Botanical Description” originally appeared in New Directions. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 158 (Autumn 1998): 108.

 

 

Nice review of What We Carry in the Toronto Star

06 Apr 2019 / 0 Comments / in Uncategorized/by Susan Glickman

What We Carry by Susan Glickman Véhicule Press, 92 pages, $17.95

A keen awareness of mortality underlies the poems in Susan Glickman’s vibrant seventh collection. It’s expressed not as dread but as a bittersweet cherishing of what she holds dear, from memories to music to nature. As the Toronto poet and novelist puts it in one poem, “with more time behind you than ahead,/the world grows larger, pregnant with wonder.” The world’s losses grow larger, too: “Elegies for the 21st Century” is a series of sonnets addressed to various extinct species, including the river otter of Japan “once abundant as reeds in the waters.” These lyric poems have an unassuming grace and clarity, and an eclectic range: Glickman “translates” a number of Chopin’s 24 Preludes, Opus 28, into poems that mirror the mood of the music; elsewhere, she muses wittily on the travails of urban life, such as being “hemmed in … by backpacks and hockey bags,/groceries and gifts” on a crowded streetcar.

-Barb Carey, The Toronto Star, April 6 2019

Awards & Prizes

The Violin Lover, Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2006.


WINNER 2006 Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction!


The Picturesque and the Sublime: A Poetics of the Canadian Landscape Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queen's University Press, 1998.


WINNER 1999 Gabrielle Roy Prize Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures


WINNER 2000 Raymond Klibansky Book Prize Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada For a transcript of the Klibansky acceptance speech -- please click HERE

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