Susan Glickman

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You are here: Home » Editing » A Note on Teaching Poetry

A Note on Teaching Poetry

the older I get

It’s orientation day on campus, and the students are busy racing beds down St. George, festooning trees with toilet-paper, inventing new inter-collegiate profanities, and otherwise celebrating the start of the academic year. In my basement office I doodle alphabets and flowers down the page in lieu of outlining a schedule for my third-year course in creative writing. How does one “schedule” creativity?How does one “teach” writing?

There are some gut instincts to follow. I’ve just telephoned a young man to tell him he’s been rejected from the class. Gently, into the silence at the other end of the line, I explain that although he exhibits a certain verbal facility and a humorous take on romance, the 4-to-10-line apercus he’s submitted are not substantial enough to weigh in as poetry. I elucidate further that by “substance” I mean both the persuasive embodiment of experience in language (the “narrative” motive for poetry) and a full deployment of the resources of language itself (the “lyric” motive). The balance between narrative and lyric varies widely from poem to poem between the extremes of free-verse storytelling in conventional language and syntax and highly-wrought rhymed-and-metered poetic diction. But in  balancing these two motives, in achieving their own internal equipoise, all good poems attain intensity, density and substance: an authority of voice and vision that engages the reader more fully with life. I tell the young man that the stuff he’s sent in doesn’t have that authority; that it’s mostly notes towards poems, and I’d need to see a couple of really worked-through pieces in order to admit him to the class.

Can he understand me? Probably not. As with most beginning poets, he is so intoxicated with the lines that are given to him he can’t recognize that they must be lines to, not just lines from (the Muse, the Unconscious, whatever). Like the punch-drunk freshmen outside, he’s playing at beginnings. The responsibility of middles, the terror of endings, haven’t yet cast their shadows on his page. But it is these shadows — the spaces between the lines that are given — that interest me more and more. It is when we go beyond our delight in language and our need to “express” ourselves, when we let ourselves plummet down the rabbit hole where word and world intersect, that we find out why we’re writing at all and whether we do have anything to say. Perhaps, as a creative-writing “teacher”, my role is to disorient my students!

© copyright Susan Glickman 1990

  • A Note on Teaching Poetry
  • Angels, Not Polarities
  • Dictionnaire des idées reçues
  • Found Money
  • Maiden or Crone
  • My Life with Northrop Frye
  • Obituary for Zitner
  • On the Line
  • Second Person Impersonal
  • The Better Mother
  • The Violin in History

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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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Recent Comments

  • Susan Glickman on Beautiful setting of one of my extinction sonnets by Ronald Beckett, performed by the Arcady Ensemble
  • Susan Glickman on Beautiful cover by David Drummond for my new book of poetry, due out April 2019.
  • Eva Bednar on Beautiful cover by David Drummond for my new book of poetry, due out April 2019.
  • Jenny Koster on Beautiful setting of one of my extinction sonnets by Ronald Beckett, performed by the Arcady Ensemble

Recent Posts

  • Nice Poetry Podcast in which I Feature
  • Portrait of the Writer Reading

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