A selection of essays from 1985-2019, published February 2022 by The Porcupine’s Quill.
FIRST REVIEW OF ARTFUL FLIGHT!! Read the whole thing below, or just this short excerpt:
‘The title Artful Flight is itself a kind of enjambment, bringing together two books about the craft of writing that Glickman especially prizes: Ali Smith’s Artful and Ann Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Lamott, Glickman writes, includes “superlatively useful advice” for beginning writers, such as, “start by describing what you can see through a one-inch picture frame, then let the Polaroid develop to discover what unexpected objects you focused on and work on those.” In her collection of essays, Glickman puts this advice to good use, and the results are engaging and erudite.
—Steven W. Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag
Here is the whole review:
Here is a another grand review, this one by Gary Geddes, who says “There’s a level of wisdom, grace and scholarship in Glickman’s writings that sets her apart from many other poets and critics.” His whole review follows.
And here is an interview I did with Open Book about Artful Flight:
Open Book:
Tell us about the new collection, Artful Flight, and how you became involved with it.
Susan Glickman:
Serendipitously! Several years ago, I gave my home office to my son to turn into his music studio and, in the process, recycled 25 bags of paper. (Sorry, trees!) When I realized that I had accidentally discarded a lot of old essays, I bemoaned the fact on Facebook, assuming other folks could relate to my predicament. I never expected this confession to lead to an invitation to submit a selection of my nonfiction to the Porcupine’s Quill, a small press in Erin, Ontario, that makes very beautiful books.
The opportunity to review a lifetime of writing inspired a dogged pursuit of all those missing pieces online and in the library. It was actually kind of fun.
OB:
How did you select the pieces for this book? What were you looking for when assembling it?
SG:
I started out with over 500 pages of prose, so it was quite a challenge choosing what to include. My editor, Carmine Starnino, helped me decide what would be of interest to others, and PQL had clear guidelines: nothing that had already been anthologized.
It took a while, but we wrangled the beast down to manageable size by leaving out stuff that was too academic or too ephemeral, too ponderous or too slight. I wanted the collection to convey the whole range of my experience as a reader and a teacher and a mother, as a traveller and an artist and a person. Everyone’s life involves so many different things, all interacting in ways that are not always obvious or predictable. I wanted to create something surprising and varied. As miscellaneous as life.
OB:
How do you view the pieces in the book as speaking to each other?
SG:
An early title I had for this collection was Acts of Attention, and that’s what these pieces are. I find the world much too discordant unless I concentrate on one thing at a time: music, flowers, the sky. Dancing, swimming, hiking. A poem. A painting. I realize that may seem to contradict what I said above about wanting to create a collection with a lot of variety, but it doesn’t. Each piece is, in itself, quite focused, even though the whole may appear eclectic!
OB:
What do you need when you’re writing and editing – in terms of space, food, rituals, writing instruments?
SG:
Quiet, if possible. Copious amounts of tea and coffee. Lots of walks with my dog, Toby.
OB:
What do you hope readers will take away from these pieces, after having read them all? Is there a question you set out to address or delve into through these works?
SG:
Whenever I write an essay about someone else’s work, I try to do so with maximum curiosity and maximum respect. I wonder why they were compelled to write what they did, how it relates to their previous work, and what it reveals about the form they chose. At the same time, however objective I try to be, I am inescapably limited by my own taste and experience and knowledge. I am only one reader, with one reader’s capability. But I hope to convey some of the pleasure I find in the work to others, so as to encourage them to look a little closer at what they read.
Of course, there are many pieces in this collection that are not literary criticism but personal essays; essays that I needed to write mainly to find out why their subjects preoccupied me. I leave it to others to tell me if they succeed, and maybe even what they are really about.
OB:
SG:
A book of poetry entitled Cathedral/Grove about the historical tension between nature and culture and the alienation of a diasporic Jew living in the West. And another collection of essays with the working title The Sweet Particulars, which plays images and texts off each other. In recent years I have returned to my first love – visual art – and felt the need to bring both forms of artistic practice together.
‘Arguably a book length anti-hot-take, Artful Flight is a nuanced, intelligent, and witty deep dive into the literary arts.’
—Grace O’Connell, Open Book
And some other reviews:
‘Reading Glickman’s work, especially now, when clear thinking is needed more than ever, is like drinking good clean water after weeks (years; epochs, it feels like) in the desert. I haven’t even put away the groceries yet, but while browsing these essays and reviews—on poetry, on parenthood, on politics, on gender, art, travel, writing—I feel so much as if rusty gates are pulled open to reveal lush but well-ordered gardens.’
—Amy Lavender Harris
“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.”
—Rob Mclennan in his blog, https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2022/04/susan-glickman-artful-flight-essays-and.html
The Picturesque & the Sublime: A Poetics of the Canadian Landscape
Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998
Winner of the Gabrielle Roy Prize in English and the Raymond Klibansky Prize, The Picturesque and the Sublime is a cultural history of two hundred years of nature writing in Canada, from eighteenth-century prospect poems to contemporary encounters with landscape. Arguing against the received wisdom (made popular by Northrop Frye and Margaret Atwood) that Canadian writers view nature as hostile, Susan Glickman places Canadian literature in the English and European traditions of the sublime and the picturesque.
Glickman argues that early immigrants to Canada brought with them the expectation that nature would be grand, mysterious, awesome – even terrifying – and welcomed scenes that conformed to these notions of sublimity. She contends that to interpret their descriptions of nature as “negative,” as so many critics have done, is a significant misunderstanding. Glickman provides close readings of several important works, including Susanna Moodie’s “Enthusiasm,” Charles G.D. Roberts’s “Ave,” and Paulette Jiles’s “Song to the Rising Sun,” and explores the poems in the context of theories of nature and art.
Instead of projecting backward from a modernist perspective, Glickman reads forward from the discovery of landscape as a legitimate artistic subject in seventeenth-century England and argues that picturesque modes of description, and a sublime aesthetic, have governed much of the representation of nature in this country.
From the Reviews:
“The Picturesque and the Sublime sheds bright light on an important but neglected area of Canadian writing in a style that is wonderfully readable and lucid. A profoundly insightful critic and a gifted writer, Susan Glickman cogently and compellingly challenges the views of Northrop Frye and his heirs and calls into question the assumptions of much modern and contemporary Canadian criticism.”
-David Bentley, Department of English, University of Western Ontario
“In addition to her skills as a polemicist, Glickman is also brilliant at close reading … The Picturesque & The Sublime enriches our sense of the past and opens new perspectives on the present.”
– Tracy Ware, “Enduring Landscapes,” Canadian Poetry 45 (Fall/Winter 1999), 115; 117.
“The book is short, but the thinking, like the writing, is flexible and lithe, full of common sense and composed of layers of learning not paraded but effectively deployed.”
– Stan Dragland, University of Toronto Quarterly, 69 (Winter 1999-2000), 246.
“She engages thoughtfully with many of the well-known sites of debate about the nature of Canadian poetry: the Mermaid Inn columns, the New Provinces anthology, the Preview-First Statement conflict, and Robin Mathews’s reaction to Tish. Thus, beyond its own engaging ideas about the picturesque and the sublime, the book provides an interesting, although not comprehensive, survey of Canadian poetic history.”
–Paul Milton ESC: English Studies in Canada Volume 27, Issue 3 (September 2001), 390-92.
Other reviews:
Klay Dyer, ARIEL 35.1-2 (Jan-April 2004): 251-3.
Christopher Levenson, Journal of Canadian Poetry 15 (2000): 151-57.
William Keith, The Canadian Book Review Annual (Nov/Dec 2000): 267.
Essays on Canadian Writing 70 (Spring 2000): 191-7. (I cannot retrieve this essay and did not record the author – possibly it was Albert Braza? Sorry!)
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