Artful Flight: Essays & Reviews 1985-2019

“Arguably a book length anti-hot-take, Artful Flight is a nuanced, intelligent, and witty deep dive into the literary arts.”

—Grace O’Connell, winner of the Canadian Authors Association Emerging Writer Award, in Open Book

In Artful Flight, Susan Glickman dives into poetry and prose, music and visual art, in an effort to find the joy in creative work not as a path to the truth but as an end in itself.

“Whether writing on issues of grammar, investigating particular works, or describing the sabbatical experience of going to art school in her sixties, Toronto poet and novelist Susan Glickman is alert to the counterweight forces that keep any good work of art –or life – aloft. Her attempt, amply and richly fulfilled, is to see how the engine’s materials and designs can accurately serve; each ‘fugitive piece’’ here offers expansion of feeling, knowledge, and freedom.”

—Jane Hirshfield, former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, winner of the California Book Award, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize, in Ploughshares

“Susan Glickman, poet, fiction writer, scholar, essayist and visual artist, draws from a trajectory of a life practicing the arts, sharing with insight and honesty what she has garnered from that evolving practice. Multifaceted, she illuminates in her capacity as literary scholar and engages the reader in a voice that leaps across the page with imagination, wit, and that pivotal ingredient, the element of surprise. Artful Flight, a book of essays and reviews, presents a life-affirming model of the interdependence of the arts as its author moves seamlessly from attuned critical appraisals of poetry to reflective essays on subjects as varied as the making of violins and the proliferation of opinions voiced without evidentiary support. And in her finale, she caps the book off depicting the joy of immersing herself in the visual arts in her own continuum of learning.”

—Carol Lipszyc, Associate Professor of English Emeritus at SUNY, in The Dalhousie Review

“Artful Flight provides a deep dive into Canadian poetry and the poetry makers who shaped where we are as poets and readers today. Glickman gets inside how they did it. Through her combination of critical intelligence and poetic instinct, we are invited into process, a sharing of how (selectively) modern Canadian poetry means, articulated by someone who understands and appreciates it as well as practising it. Glickman’s poets are not just remembered but dynamically acknowledged, their fine lines of influence traced and refreshed with critical integrity, with immediacy and excitement.”

—Author Patricia Keeney in the League of Canadian Poets Book Reviews

“Creative and analytic, serious and witty, generous and judicious, her thoughtful prose takes wing in many different forms and directions. A feminist Daedalus, she re-invents dance, flight, and cadence in her craft of criticism that ranges from Shakespeare to modern Canadian poetry, and from the scholarly to personal intimacy. Whether her pen flourishes across paper or her hands tap dance on the keyboard, she choreographs with subtlety and clarity.”

—Michael Greenstein in The Miramichi Reader

“[A] deeply pleasurable book assembled from many years of excited engagement with poetry.”

—Award-winning poet Brian Bartlett in The Malahat Review

“There’s a level of wisdom, grace and scholarship in Glickman’s writings that sets her apart from many other poets and critics …. What I find most satisfying and instructive about Glickman’s reviews and essays is that I learn as much about her and her literary values as I do about the poet she is studying. Without grandstanding or trying to steal the show, she quietly and civilly gives each author and work the attention they deserve …. It’s fitting and no surprise, also, that the book’s design is as elegant as its contents, with a gorgeous cover and what used to be called, if memory serves me well, Zephyr Antique-laid paper, a joy to handle and behold.”

—Gary Geddes, winner of the Lt.-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence and the Gabriela Mistral Prize from the government of Chile, in The British Columbia Review

“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 on his blog

“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.”

—Critic Steven W. Beattie in his blog, That Shakespearean Rag.

“It is a challenge of obdurate proportions not to feel educated, cultured and intelligent when succumbing to the charms of Susan Glickman’s reviews and essays, such is the poise with which she positions her analytical powers and witty observations throughout the wondrous compendium which is Artful Flight.”

—Gordon Phinn in the WordCity Literary Journal online

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: What are you working on next?

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.

Erin, ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2022