Finding the Form with Susan Glickman
When I taught creative writing, I always said that poetry and prose are built of the same elements: the horizontal axis of narrative time, in which events succeed each other according to causality, and the vertical axis of lyric time, in which a single moment expands infinitely as one explores it. The difference between the two genres is one of degree, not kind. Poetry prioritizes the lyric impulse; prose, the narrative.
All my life I have worked simultaneously in poetry and prose, going back and forth between them as the mood takes me. Not only does this keep me productive but the concerns of whatever I am working on in one genre inform and provide inspiration for the other. This was revealed to me most clearly when I had just finished writing a description of a French immigrant’s first Québec winter in my novel The Tale-Teller and found myself writing a poem, in both French and English versions, trying to describe snow to someone who had never seen it.
Recently I had the good fortune of being asked to edit a life’s worth of essays down from a 550-page “collected” to a 225-page “Selected”, which was published as Artful Flight (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2022). That process reminded me how much I enjoy the essay form, so instead of beginning a new novel to counterpoint the poetry manuscript I was working on (coming out as Cathedral/Grove in autumn 2023), I started writing pieces like “Gargoyles.” Artful Flight was dominated by literary criticism and thoughts about various art forms, but these pieces are more playful and improvisatory. In their precision of language and imagery they embody the lyric impulse that animates my poetry; in their paratactic momentum, they engage the same imaginative energy that inspires my fiction.
I needed a prose project to work on but found myself silenced in the face of mass extinction, climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and right-wing nationalism and autocracy around the globe. Soon afterwards, Russia invaded Ukraine. To ward off despair and to keep writing – because I am miserable when not writing – I occupied myself with these odd little appreciations of things that intrigue me and give me pleasure. I had no idea, starting out, where my research on any given subject (pencils, tea, bees, lichen, moonlight) would take me, nor what strange and deeply personal associations would be unearthed during the process. So writing “Gargoyles” and the other pieces was super fun!
And as with “Gargoyles”, each essay is accompanied by an illustration because looking closely at things is one of the great pleasures of my life and, again, I have been trying to practice joyful appreciation in a dark time. Also, ever since I went to art school a few years ago, I like pairing my writing practice with my visual arts practice and allowing them to play off each other.
Hmm, I just realized that echoes my opening remarks about always needing to pair a poetry project with a prose one. I guess I thrive on binary tensions, or maybe by dissolving such
tensions.
AND here is the cover of my upcoming book of poetry, Cathedral/Grove (due out from Véhicule Press in the autumn of 2023). Yes, there are poems about gargoyles in it, and the cathedral referred to in the title is Notre-Dame de Paris. But I had nothing to do with the cover image – that derives entirely from the brilliant imagination of the designer, David
Drummond.
Susan Glickman grew up in Montreal and lives in Toronto, where she works as a freelance editor and is learning to paint. She is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently What We Carry (2019), four novels for adults, including The Tale-Teller (2012), a trilogy of middle-grade early readers, and two works of nonfiction prose, most recently Artful Flight (2021).
Header image courtesy of Hannah Olinger on Unsplash
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