“A father of four, he is nevertheless kittenish.
Her skirt had a stuffed look, which could only mean she was wearing ruffled panties.
Oh nutritious mound of sprouts.
Richard and Regina had been friends for a long time.”from “Editing the Erotic Issue” (scroll down for the full poem)
Susan Holbrook has a lot of fun writing poetry. Those who caught her earlier collection (1999’s misled) may have detected that fun before most, but her follow-up, Joy is So Exhausting, out last fall on Toronto’s Coach House Press, brings with it irrefutable proof. Holbrook draws from all corners of the language (marketing copy, technical writing, newspaper reports) to create an anarchic poetry of the remixable world. By anarchic, I mean that the sum experience of reading the book is often bafflement and dizziness, even though many individual poems are memorable for the surgical specificity of their creator’s choices. Joy is So Exhausting amounts to one big, 85-page long anticipatory grin on the part of its author. She seems to be saying throughout “I can’t wait, you’re going to love this.” And you will. You probably will.
Susan Holbrook and I talked about Joy is So Exhausting in a series of email messages earlier this year. Here are the highlights.
Jacob McArthur Mooney: What struck me most when reading Joy is So Exhausting was the central role given over to fun, to gamesmanship. So often when a poet is playing, we say they are attempting to write subversively about something (for example, playing around with syntax is said to be about “subverting the language”), but in this book, I never got that same vibe. It always seemed to be play, for the simple act of playing. Did you find yourself trying to play “toward” something or, to borrow from the title, was the joy of the game your only desired pay-off?
Susan Holbrook: Hmm, good question. Perhaps I am the most subversive of the subversives! One of my principal motivations as a writer is to push, undermine, [or] interrogate a language which is freighted with, for example, sexist and homophobic bias. That is my disposition toward composition. There are pieces in the book where the politics are obvious, in the “Stephen Harper Sudoku,” for instance. And in my very inclusion of the long poem about nursing, “Nursery,” I am attempting to begin to rectify what I see as a shocking paucity of poetry about motherhood over the centuries. There is much in the book that IS fun and goofy and playful, but I hope it’s not empty fun; I hope at least it invites the reader to relate to language and the world in more unpredictable, active, interrogative ways.
Mooney: I really like that idea of “interrogation.” I wonder, in the Harper Sudoku or the found-text stuff like the tampon application poem, what’s doing the interrogating? Is it the form and structure of the poem or the words that make it up? Part of what made those pieces so interesting for me was how they felt like conceptual art, like the ideas behind them were as important as the specific texts those ideas generated. Maybe that’s just a fun way of reading them, but of no value when it comes to having to write them, I don’t know. Anyway, were you ever aware, while doing this book, of the tension between the big ideas behind some of the poems and the pressure those ideas might put on the actual texts? I guess what I’m asking is, were you ever afraid of being perceived as writing gimmickry?
Holbrook: I do worry about poems coming off as easy, cheap, gimmicky, but that’s a concern no matter what the formal choice. The epiphanic or overly poignant cadence of some standard lyric poems seems to me very “gimmicky.” We might see the sonnet form as a gimmick – oh, there’s that rhyming couplet again! No matter what the initial concept, or the various compositional strategies contributing to a final work, it’s important to be thoughtful, to make meaningful, challenging choices. I think when I feel a procedure might lead to one-dimensionality, I switch course a bit; the tampon poem was originally an Oulipean S + 7 (replacing all nouns in the source text with nouns 7 entries down in the dictionary), but I wanted to exert a little more influence there, so I decided to select nouns close by in the dictionary. The fun, absurd effect is still there, but I’m able to choose and develop a couple of thematic threads. I have been described as “wearing my compositional methods on my sleeve.” I don’t want the reader to spend undue effort figuring out my methods (that would feel gimmicky); the reader can usually see how I’ve proceeded, and can (I hope) enjoy all the dynamics of form/content that procedure allows.
Mooney: I like that idea of the lyrical epiphany occasionally being, itself, a kind of gimmick, although one excused and somewhat masked by the traditions of its form. I realized while hearing you read from Joy a couple times that the apparentness of your compositional methods becomes a key part of the audience experience. People always seem to fall in love with this book at readings. I wonder if this is in part because the work presented allows us little peeks into how it was created, in a way other kinds of poetry doesn’t do. Do you think your experience as a public reader is unique in any way?
Holbrook: I think I benefit from my tendency to engage humour in my work; that is, comedy elicits an audible response from a live audience, whereas when a listener finds something poignant, or thought provoking, they don’t usually exclaim! It’s important to me to read my more “serious work” too, but the silence can be unnerving – I don’t assume the audience is moved. I assume they’re bored. I wish they would indicate approval by making a humming or popping sound. They say stand-up comedians have the worst self esteem going, and that’s why they need the encouragement of laughter. I may suffer from the same problem. I’ve incorporated humour from the beginning of my writing life, but because of audience response to it, I’m far more conscious of that facet of my style now. That probably spells the end of the good jokes.
Mooney: I sure hope not. Another poet once told me about humour eliciting an autonomic response (laughter) and seriousness eliciting a more fakeable one (opinion, intellectual reaction, argument). Therefore the former is easier to trust than the latter, at least in public. I’d like to bounce back for a second to that talk of choices. The poem POETSMART is more contractual than the others (you’ve replaced all instances of the word “pet” in an original text with the word “poet”), and I know from background reading it’s a poem you and your editor discussed deleting from the book pre-publication. Because you were somewhat less able to influence that text while writing it, does it carry any different intentions?
Holbrook: I didn’t have to intervene in the basic formula of POETSMART, because poets just have so much in common with dirty, unruly, needy pets! You can see that I did, in the latter half, add material, but the essential substitution fell into place easily. That poem is an example of one that IS just silly, though, which is why it almost didn’t make it in. I kept it in because in live performance it makes people laugh (there’s that lure again!). I think in the context of a book-length collection, there’s room for a little pure silliness.
Mooney: Looking at this poem “Editing the Erotica Issue” from Joy is So Exhausting, what is the breakdown between found text and created text? Sentences like “A father of four, he is nevertheless kittenish” are hilarious because they don’t seem out of place in the genre. I wonder, how much of this is written, and how much was discovered, and does it matter to the point of the poem?
Holbrook: I wrote “Editing the Erotica Issue” after working on the Erotica Issue of The Windsor Review a few years back. My co-editor (Suzanne Matheson) and I read through a pile of submissions about three feet high, easily ten times taller than the piles for for any other issue. Clearly there are an awful lot of people who love to write erotica! I needed to “debrief” after reading all that material. I composed all of these lines myself, but you’re right, any one of them could have appeared in the submissions. I focussed on the elements that recurred: throbbing, glistening, outrageous similes, clunky rhymes and, of course, oranges. There were a lot of “kittenish” women, too, so I wanted to attach that quality to a patriarch to set the reader thinking about gender expectations. The poem is presented as “found,” but I don’t think it matters too much whether the lines were actually found or composed, except that in writing them I had more power to intervene linguistically, and pulling directly from earnest submitters would have felt kind of mean.
Mooney: Well, it might be mean, but I’ve done a similar gig before and most of those submitters would have likely taken any form of publication they could get. Another poem I want to discuss (and again, what I’m asking about could loosely be called “structure”) is “Nursery.” The imagining of the pacing, nursing, mother who speaks with those repeated chants of “Right…Left…Right…Left” brings forth a lot of cultural weight, from dancing to military marches. Can you talk us through the structural decisions made in that one?
Holbrook: Many new mothers keep a nursing chart in the first few bleary weeks, recording feedings under “Right” and “Left” so the breasts get equal time. Keeping that chart was the extent of my “writing” in those early days. When I began to wonder if I would ever write poetry again, I decided to work with what I had, rather than fight against it, and compose one line every time I nursed. The column headings were already there. I assumed I would later remove the “Right” and “Left” markers, but the pattern appealed to me, for the reasons you identify. The structure strikes us as so mechanical, so evocative of a military march, and I enjoyed the juxtaposition of that with the fluid, unruly, delirious practise of nursing. Right Left Right Left is understood by new mothers all over the world, and yet the nature of that back-and-forth rhythm has been overwhelmed in our cultural imaginary by soldiers on parade. I like that you hear dancing in there – that’s a start.
Mooney: And lastly, the world sees a lot of new collections of poetry in a given year, and the majority of them are destined for obscurity. Why did you publish this book? And, on the flip side, why should someone read it? What single unique thing has it given to the world?
Holbrook: Are you asking me to blurb myself?! Well, first of all, I have no problem with falling into obscurity (eventually). What has been deemed “universal” or “timeless” often simply suits the worldview of whoever’s been in charge. And poetry that might be deemed “dated” I see as specific, engaged. I published the book because I like making things. The poems are all things I made, but a book is a more concrete made thing, and this one was shaped and designed and printed gorgeously by the folks at Coach House. And people should read it because it’s all at once challenging/fun/serious/funny/ familiar/strange – there’s my single unique thing!
Editing the Erotica Issue, by Susan Holbrook
from Joy is So Exhausting (Coach House Press, 2009)
Crocuses glistened. Sparrows throbbed.
………..Would he approve
………..Of her nipples of mauve?
And that was what had first attracted him, her canvas flaps.
A father of four, he is nevertheless kittenish.
Her skirt had a stuffed look, which could only mean she was wearing ruffled panties.
Oh nutritious mound of sprouts.
Richard and Regina had been friends for a long time.
Dear editors: When I saw you were doing an erotica issue, I thought, woody-licious!
And in the velour pantsuit of evening, even the sandflies laughed to see their joy.
Richard throbbed. Regina glistened.
In the land of Zamore, mailmen had a dual function.
“Oh, excuse me, I thought everyone was gone for the night,” she says, foaming at the
…..ears.
Her heart throbbed, and the surgeon saw that it was glistening in there.
“Quickly! More crumpled wet sheets!”
He carries me upstairs under one arm, like a chicken.
…………Left a hickie as big as a toonie,
…………Monday acted like he never knew me.
Dear editors: I have been waiting years to share my expertise in this very special field
…..of writing.
Are you even glistening? I’m throbbing to you.
Oranges, all over.
