How I Became a Poet: A Few Thoughts for the Students of Parkdale Collegiate
by Susan Glickman
Nobody in my extended family was – or is – particularly interested in literature. Nobody thought it was a great career move to become a poet. But everyone loves to talk and to tell jokes and stories, and I’m sure their pleasure in language influenced me when I was growing up. For example, my father was famous for making terrible puns, and puns are pretty close to metaphors, as you have probably noticed in your study of poetry. Both kinds of wordplay emphasize the similarities between things that are quite different from each other, and we enjoy them because of how surprising or original we find the comparisons they make.
I also loved the sounds and rhythms of language and made my parents read Mother Goose, and basically anything that rhymed, over and over again. Even before I learned to read by myself, I was obsessed with books. My grandmother was really disappointed when I immediately read all three books she gave me for my ninth birthday; she thought I had “wasted” her present by not making them last longer. But that was never an issue for me since I loved to reread my favourite books – and still do.
My happy place has always been the library. I still go to the library a couple of times a month and leave with more books than I can finish before their due date. This is because I am just as happy reading about evolutionary biology or astrophysics or medieval history as I am reading novels and poetry, because I am insatiably curious and everything is so interesting!
Reading is one kind of travelling, and it is the best way of travelling through time. But nothing beats travelling through space to give you a sense not only of what other places look like and sound like and smell like and taste like but also of the cultural differences between where you come from and other places. I left Montreal at seventeen to go to university in Boston, in Greece, and then in England, visiting many other sites across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. When I was older, I lived in Mexico for four months. And though I don’t have a lot of money, I save whatever I can in order to go travelling. Last year I went back to Italy for the first time in fifty years and it was amazing.
What you get from travelling is similar to what you get from reading: the recognition that there are many different ways to be a human being. Experiencing other cultures makes you question your own assumptions and become more open to new experiences. It also challenges you to hear and maybe even learn new languages. Learning other languages is fantastic training for being a poet because it makes you very aware of nuances in meaning and also in sound and rhythm.
So if you ask me what made me become a poet, here are the main things that come to mind:
1) a love of jokes, stories, songs and poems
2) a love of reading books and disappearing into the worlds they made
3) curiosity about the world
4) a love of travel and of learning new things about the ways people live on this Earth
5) some familiarity with other languages
Another big influence on my career was the poet Denise Levertov. I took a workshop with her and she became my mentor, and later my friend. And then, a few years later, when I moved to Toronto to work in publishing here, I met a whole bunch of poets my own age who have been my friends ever since. So here’s another extremely important factor in my life as a writer: the support of others. It’s hard to be confident you are doing something worth doing, no matter how much you love it, if no one believes in you.
My love of reading and writing led me to write lots of other things besides poetry, including short stories, and essays, and novels for kids and adults. So far I have published seventeen books and dozens and dozens of articles; two new manuscripts are being considered by publishers right now (one is poetry, the other is nonfiction). Some of the stuff I’ve written required a lot of research; other things were pretty spontaneous. But even the work that didn’t involve many hours in the library or on the internet had its origins in a lifetime of reading, and thinking, and travelling, and listening to other people. In other words, the necessary research had already taken place rather than happening at that particular moment.
If there’s anything I have to teach you, then, it is that writing doesn’t come from nowhere – it comes out of a lifetime of learning. You can learn many ways: from literature, and art, and all the things that people make; from your family, friends, and people you encounter, from travel to different countries, from doing different jobs. And then comes the hard part: you have to work at it! Which means that you have to write a lot of bad stuff before you can write the good stuff.
In fact, the more poems you write, the more poems you will have to throw away. But that’s just the way it goes with any job, whether it is basketball or ballet, cooking or carpentry: you can only learn by making mistakes. So if you want to write poetry, you have to learn to be patient and enjoy the practice.