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Poet, fictionalist, mother and professor Susan Holbrook authored 1999's misled from Red Deer Press (shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Stephen J. Stephensson Award) before her 2004 chapbook, Good Egg Bad Seed (Nomados) caught the attention of Kevin Connolly -- poetry editor of Coach House Books -- and led to the publication, launch and mini-tour this month of Joy Is So Exhausting, a profoundly grip-roarious collection showcasing the wordsmith's wry wit and wondrous willingness to turn notions of poetry and poetics ipso-nutzo topso-turvy in her seek-and-enjoy methodology. She teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Windsor (where, incidentally, she also recently completed co-editing the January 2010 volume, The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation, with author, Killam Fellow, professor and official biographer of David Jones, Thomas Dilworth).

Combining and recombining sly humour and torqued-up wordplay avec jouissance gélastiques, Holbrook's Joy Is So Exhausting contains -- barely -- a surreal fusion of the experimental and the experiential, the procedural and the problematic. Punch lines become sucker punches, line breaks slip into breakdowns, the serious plays comical and the comical turns deadly serious. Holbrook's poems don't use humour as much as they deconstruct the comic impulse, exposing its roots in the political, the psychological and the emotional life of the mind. Many of these poems borrow shapes and source texts from elsewhere -- home-inspection reports, tampon instructions, poems by Lorca -- in a series of translations, transpositions and syntactic transgressions that invite a more intimate and critical rapport with the written word. This is not merely a book, it is a chocolate-covered artificially intelligent virus with an expansively impish sense of humour that will continue to replicate in your mind long after initial exposure while its title, based upon a line from Marian Engel's Bear, reminds you how many more miles you must travel before you lay your sleeping head to rest for the next curves launched in your direction.

Dear Susan (and you are, to me): You're a natural. How do you think that happened? IMO, you rank first among your peers, the best poet of your generation (and, judging from what I've read from other critics and commentarians I consider solid and worthy, I ain't wrong). How did this occur? How did you come to know what matters -- how early, how young, how terrifying?

I know my first infatuation with poetic language starred Fuzzy Wuzzy. In case you forget: "Fuzzy Wuzzy / Was a bear / Fuzzy Wuzzy / Had no hair / Fuzzy Wuzzy / Wasn't fuzzy / Was he?" At four years old, I walked around reciting this to myself. The irony of it! The revelation of phonetics! Before that, my very earliest memories are a wonder and a nightmare. I lived in sunny Southern California, and I recall staring at a three-foot-tall silver star leaning up against the neighbours' fence, flaring in the sunlight. It had fallen from the sky, they informed me. It looked like cardboard covered in foil; but, then again, what did I know of real stars? I was torn between wanting to believe and wanting to peel up the foil.

In the nightmare? I walked along the edge of a cliff, last in line behind father, mother and brother, until I declared that I wanted to be the leader. Soon after taking up this position, I turned back to find them all gone; then, I looked down to a bus zooming along the highway at the base of the cliff, my mother's arm waving goodbye out the window. It's a remarkable little sexist fable, crystallizing all that I had absorbed about a girl's proper place.

The first writing I remember? First Grade, a little tale about a dandelion who needed a human to blow off her "parachutes." A little boy refused to do it, since the dandelion was only a girl; so, her parachutes never hit the wind. Gad! At seven, I spent a year in Caracas, Venezuela, and my parents wisely just threw me into public school (so that I might learn the language quickly). I remember sitting in the back seat of the car realizing, Spanish speakers don't think "city" and then translate to "ciudad" -- they just think "ciudad." That's when I began to think "ciudad" with no city in it, and found that there are multiple worlds on Earth, and that I was multiple too, one character in English and someone slightly different in Spanish. To know something of another language immediately throws one's mothertongue into relief . . . you can begin to peel up the foil.

Pick a poem, Susan, any poem :) . . .

Difficulty is
hard.

Unbucked up. Walk-
ing as if

moving, boots-
trapped tucked.

Birds chin up,
drill.
Love
cupped
around a glint.
-- "Unfilled Prescription"

Not unlike "Unfilled Prescription," your book's gorgeosity to the Nth degree, a typically outstanding Coach-House prouduction™, IOW. How do feel you about it today? How about yesterday or tomorrow?

It would be hard ever to feel bad about a book with such a beautiful cover (that joyful exhausted dog photo by Graham Law). I've been warned never to read one's own recently published book, because once the inevitable typos are discovered, you've lost forever the illusory perfection of the newborn, the new car smell, the scabless leaf. I think I may be safe, though, since Alana Wilcox performed the final edits and design and she misses nothing. So as an object, it's absolutely lovely and I can't imagine changing my opinion on that. The contents are subject to the vagaries of creative doubt, so my feelings are perennially mixed there. I do like to work in a variety of modes and registers, from the colloquial / popular to experimental sound-focussed work, so depending on my disposition at any given time, one or another part of the book is successful, the other not! My readers agree. My biggest fan dislikes a full third of the book, the more experimental ventures, and a recent review likened the airy little piece "PoetSmart" to an only slightly funny mass email. Ouch. He's got a point there; and my editor earns an "I told you so" because he worried about the silliness of that one. Silliness is my downfall. Every time I try to cultivate a little gravitas, goofitas intervenes. There's always a risk that the critical projects motivating your work -- and I am very serious about, in particular, misogyny and homophobia, in my books -- can be diluted by the comic. Humour is a wonderful political tool, but there's a delicate balance to strike.

[Ha! If only Susan knew what I already know; and, more to the point, what I am about to share with you, My Dear IOW Readers, concerning her editor, himself an extraordinary poet, Kevin Connolly who, when I asked him to describe the process of discovering and working with one of our finest, responded quick-fastest:]

Susan's work jumped out at me the moment I opened the envelope containing her manuscript a couple of years back. What surprised immediately was how she could further the project of avant-garde poetry -- destabilizing the subject or pulling language apart subgrammatically in politically provocative ways -- without ever losing track of the idea that poetry can and, indeed, should be entertaining. I like poets who include the broad range of human experience in their poetry, who don't just wait for that quiet moment of reflection or emotional intensity or intellectual discovery. Susan can do that effortlessly; but, she's decided, above all, to be funny, and that makes her work intriguing and unique to me.

As far as working with her goes, it was a complete privilege. There was very little for me to do in most of the poems, most of my role was in helping with the order; but, Susan seemed genuinely pleased when we came up with even the smallest improvement. My one worry with the book early on was that it might be too entertaining, that she risked being dismissed as merely funny, not serious about poetry in some way. Poetry is not supposed to be funny in some people's eyes. Susan's work is clearly no less serious than any consummately skilled artist's work, she just takes the work more seriously than she does herself. I think she's really a frustrated stand-up comedian at heart. I take the fact she trusted me with her work as a great compliment and am proud of the small role I played in bringing it to fruition.

I don't think Kevin's gonna say he told you so, Susan . . . Just a feeling. Back to you: When did you start listening, reading and falling in love with our bitch-mistress, Poetry? Do you have any of your first poems? Would you mind allowing IOW the honour of embarrassing you (since that's exactly how I would feel were I asked)?

Lucky for me -- and you or your readers -- I do not have any of my early poems. I know my first publication was in something called FEH! (which was a journal of odious poetry, a magazine full of gross things, I guess. My poem was about insects living it up in Vegas, written in dactylic hexameter). I thought it was pretty clever at the time . . . I always loved reading poetry, but I got excited about writing it when I picked up a couple of books by John B. Lee (a "popular" poet) at the Bookshelf in Guelph. I guess I was 20 or so. One of them was The Bad Philosophy of Good Cows . . . (Black Moss Press!). Poetry can be funny? There can be cows?! I was all for that. Then? I took a couple of creative-writing classes at the University of Victoria which was fun (but, already, my work was slipping off the edge . . . edits usually included the word "weird!") . . .

Still, when I arrived in Calgary, the great Fred Wah saw that I was not weird enough; he wrote "formula" in red pen across all my precious little lyrics. That was the most important day of my writing life.

This is guaranteed 100% authentic poetry product. Designed as the perfect ludic accompaniment to any mood, Joy Is So Exhausting is the ideal aperitif for your Journey-of-Life-Actual-Everyday Experience. There are basically two kinds of readers for this book: Those who will delight in Susan Holbrook's comic inventions . . . and, well, let's not bother about the others.
-- Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein? How in the . . . I love his work and his energy, his love, the effort and attention he devotes to Penn Sound. He loves your poetry. I know why. How did his generous and unqualified praise come to grace Joy?

Charles Bernstein is my hero! He's absolutely brilliant and hilarious, easily one of the most important poets of our time. That paragraph came about because Coach House asked me to think about my ideal endorser; and, well, his name came to me first. The fantasy up-lift. It helped that we had met briefly at a couple of conferences where he'd heard me read; it also helped that he's intimately acquainted with Coach House work.

Is it an "issue" for you, your intimate relationship, your gaiety :)? Nicole Brossard said her lesbian leanings were a frame of mind more than a sexual preference in a profile we featured celebrating her inestimable contribution to literature and linguistica? Would you agree with her in that respect?

My first book, misled, was written while I was coming out in my 20s, and much of it is "about" sexuality. Now a lesbian "frame of mind," yes, motivates all of my writing, as it necessarily shapes my everyday life, as I deal with neighbours who are titillated by us, teachers who don't understand why I'm concerned about gay-inclusivity because they "just teach about families." Poetry offers me a way to enter into cultural codes and upend, question and hopefully nudge them toward something more welcoming.

Okay. Let me ask you: What do you think of the formal aspects of poetry, of the form/all versus content never-ending debate, of Black-Mountaineer Charles Olson saying "form is never more than an extension of content" but me ultimately disagreeing -- and, I was writing my doctorate on his work -- because they equal each other or the poem fails. Medium / message merger, IOW . . .

You're right about the failure of a poem with either irrelevant form or filler content. I take the Olson saying as a strategic overstatement, important in his time (and ours) for encouraging writers to consider form as more organically related to content.

Hrm . . . Works for me. Which of the Romantic poets, then, works for you? Whose work do you most love?

Keats . . .

Oh, Lard! Me, too!

Negative Capability! Yes, it's the most important concept to teach first-year students. If they can believe that it's no sign of failure, but rather a generative experience, to find themselves in a state of confusion, they will let poetry in more often.

Alright! How about Shakespeare? Which of his sonnets do you hold in the highest regard, say?

I like Sonnet 20, the one about the "master-mistress," for its incredible wit. The sustained ambiguity regarding the gender of the addressee makes for entertaining discussions in first-year classes. It ends up being a good vehicle for getting the students to begin questioning their own homophobia. I've developed a thick skin (and patience) in the face of comments like "Sonnets addressed to a man?! But I always thought they were romantic."

Listen. Weird question (although, I think, germane): Are you a collector (PackRat) or an editor (Zen / SpaceBlank / clean lines / no clutter)?

Collector. A collector with pipe dreams of clean lines, no clutter. (Though I once read that messy people are perfectionists, unwilling to make a hasty decision about whether or not this document belongs in the recycling.) Maybe that's why it takes me ten years to compile a book?

Susan Holbrook is the best of the "experimental" or "language" poets as Alexander Pope was the best of the Neo-Classical poets (because the smartest). Her intelligence brightens language, making it a continual surprise. Often, what's missing in so much "experimental" poetry is its free play, its fun, funning -- free of subjectivity, never self-expression -- and always engaged with culture. It can be dramatic or revelatory -- she (left) reveals what it's like being a (right) nursing mother -- but it never fails to remind us that really we are in it only for the fun. This is one of the best living poets.
-- Thomas Dilworth

You were a nursing mother. You mention "our house" and your book is dedicated to your young daughter, Elise. Tell me about your love life, if you can accept my prying since I'm curious -- not prurious -- and never yellow . . . Okay, I'm nosey, too; but, I also genuinely wonder: What effect do you think living in the tomato capital of the world has had upon your view of it?

You're very . . . inquisitive; but, I don't mind because I know you come by (or to) it honestly. Well, I live with my partner, Lori (who was a drummer for 20 years and is now a sexual-assault crisis counsellor). We live at Point Pelee, a wonderful place for a Nature-junkie like me. All migratory flying things rest here, so there is always an absurdly spectacular congregation of something or other around the house. Sometimes we can't see out the windows for the mayflies. The tomatoes are excessive too. In September the intersections in Leamington are lined with the tomatoes that slid off over-full trucks as they rounded the corner. There's something grotesque about the bounty, of course, that it can't be shared.

The other disturbing feature of this area is the treatment of migrant workers. I recently mentored a young woman whose essay on being an illegal worker will appear through Chatelaine Magazine next month. This spring several women were rounded up and jailed here, after being cuffed -- wrists and ankles -- for doing low-paid agricultural work without proper papers. I wouldn't have heard about it if it were not for my work with this young woman. I'll allow her to tell her own story in her own words when it appears.

Poet, professor, person of interest? Which comes first?

Ninety-nine percent of my non-domestic work is professorial. I mean, the actual hours of labour are spent grading, editing, lecturing and reading with an eye on teaching which is, for me, a satisfying and rewarding avocation; but, it's my poet's disposition toward it that makes it enjoyable. When I teach a good poem it's with the curiosity and admiration of a fellow writer -- look what H.D. did with that line there! I feel I am always a poet even if I only actually write a few poems a year, just as I was a mother long before my child came along.

"Excess is always good for poetry," you told rob mclennan; is this why Joy Is So Exhausting? I don't like -- appreciate? -- Gertrude Stein's work all that much -- most of it's so precious, IMO. You love it. What do find attractive in it?

Joy IS exhausting; it's that excess of happiness that compounds the already exhausting labour carrying, nursing, changing and otherwise tending to a newborn. And then there's poetry, where you've got to exceed the familiar, exceed the atomistic, promote excess in all kinds of ways . . . and let's not forget Wordsworth's "spontaneous overflow!"

Stein is wonderfully excessive in her insistence -- her word for repetition, which is never exactly repetition -- and her relentless undermining of readerly expectations. Stein's sentences still surprise me at every turn; that's what makes me smile (and feel great relief, relief from the straight road); now that I know her work well, it has become a room I love to enter and re-enter, endlessly.

What do you hope to have accomplished by the end of your life in poetry?

I hope that I will have made a few poems that still delight me. I've heard from several young lesbians for whom misled was empowering. That would make me glad, if my work were sustaining as well as pleasurable, for some people, just as Brossard's and Marlatt's books have been sustaining for me. But, you know . . . As a creative-writing instructor, I do spend much of my time insulting -- that is, constructively critiquing! -- my students' work. So I'm capable of being very critical. But that feels fine, because I work with them over the course of a year or several; and, it's clear I want them to get better; in that sense the "love" of their poetry is understood.

Is it true, in your opinion, we always attack ourselves first?

Women do.

Difference, resistance, ecological integrity, sustainable dreamscapes, what matters, sweet stylings of lust or languor? What makes you shudder with frissonsongs? Whose work provides sustenance, scaffolding, substance, solace, inspiration for you, not necessarily nor simply poetically, either?

Here's a partial list: Nicole Brossard, Fred Wah, Charles Bernstein, Daphne Marlatt, Harryette Mullen, Bernadette Mayer, Nicole Markotic, Sina Queyras, Suzette Mayr, bp Nichol, Gertrude Stein, Ron Silliman, and lots more . . . but these are some I especially admire for their wit, music, movement and radical translations of our idiom.

Charles Foran recently wrote, "a writer's voice [is] no more -- or less -- than how he perceives the worlds around, and within, him." What's your sense, take or feeling concerning "voice" in poetry? When did you find yours; or, as one broad did, does that question make you want to storm out of this e-view and tell me to go find myself with a chainsaw or something :)? Well, actually, she told me to stick it where the sun don't shine; but, I thought the sun shone everywhere till she endarkened me.

"Voice" has such an interesting history. Just to stick to the last few decades, we've got the big push to "find one's voice," contradicted by post-structuralist complications of the very notion of singular voice, critiqued in turn by feminists who noted that this refusal of voice coincided with their hard-won moment to finally be heard. My little daughter seems to have figured out already that you use certain discourses with some people, others with others. While she would never speak to me in this way, she casually asked my partner (whose language is saltier), "So, when are those a**holes coming to pave the road?" We all take in a multitude of voices, and speak through them. They are all -- some consciously, some unconsciously -- present during the writing process. Part of my project is to be aware of the internalized voices that would defeat me as a woman and a lesbian. Of course we develop inclinations, habits and signature moves that reveal us. My voice runs through my work, whether it's anecdotal or procedural, whether I am inviting the reader to engage with some constellation of letters or just trying to communicate something.

What's your favourite constellation? Explain.

Cassiopeia. How could a poet resist a great big W in the sky?

Speaking of great big Ws in terms of the words strung on the writerly line in a given work, how do you "hear" it, break it, make it work for you? IMO, a poem succeeds, one way of knowing it succeeds, for me, is seeing value in each of its lines, a mini-poem in each of lines; each of its lines contains a dazzler / unifier. Work with lazy filler drives me up the wall. I want every word to pull its weight, every line to shuttle its freight, every stanza to rip my throat. I think this is one of the reasons I admire your work so much. You seem to work towards that consistency . . . sustaining that level . . .

The line is constantly and wonderfully mysterious. Some people have pretty definite ideas about where to end it, especially in lyric poetry. I like your idea of finding value in each one -- that makes more sense than some rule about which grammatical unit makes the best finale. Because I work mainly with prose poetry, I often think about shape and stanzagraph rather than line, so that makes it even more of a challenge. Students hanker after some rule, but it seems to me the line has to be organically related to the poem; each poem will call for its own strategies of lineation.

Susan Holbrook is so hilarious! . . . Holbrook is so dedicated to playfulness we can almost believe these poems don't take themselves too seriously. Which is to say this is a seriously stellar collection. Holbrook's writing is powered by a joy for language, life, laughter. This Windsor poet is wired to the poetic texts embedded in her everyday encounters: Home-inspection reports, guides to writing English essays and petsmart.com are translated into poem-guides, joyful, comedic, moody messages to lighten the wary . . . In "Nursery," Holbrook transcends the left-right breastfeeding experience of monotony: "Left: Trace pictograph of an elk in the fine veins on your temple . . . Right: Your smells make us embarrassed and sorry for the people around us until we hear the group ahead is visiting Ontario to hunt." And from Good Egg Bad Seed, Holbrook's personality poem-test: "You are a binary thinker or you are and you aren't."
-- Jennifer Still

You seem comfortable collaborating with others. How do you manage that? What does it do for you or your work?

It's thrilling to be in the band for once, rather than always working solo. It's also a process that makes me more conscious of compositional process -- since I'm discussing the project with my collaborator, I have to find a way to articulate to myself what I'm doing. My friends and I often find ourselves talking departmental shop -- council meetings, student issues, course-calendar revisions, how many photocopies to make . . . exchanging poetry feels unbelievably decadent; for once, you don't feel guilty taking time out to write poetry because in this case you are "doing your part."

I love string theory; well, I might just like g-strings :). But, the idea of ten and 26 dimensions . . . The lesson: It's fine to be clever, but don't be an idiotass about it . . . Bohr atomic model with elliptic orbits to explain relativistic fine-structure constant? (BTW? JSYK: You call prose poems "stanzagraphs"; Geoffrey Hill considers them "versets"; I guess they're "versagraghs" for me.) Make sense? K . . . You say you love scientific language; what does that mean, though? Expand. Is it language rolling around the floor of your brain or touch to your tongue, bursting with rich flavours, pomegranate seeds, dragon's teeth, what?

The pomegranate seed factor is important; this is language that we don't -- unless we're scientists -- use every day. There are lots of delicious polysyllabic words, paradoxically very translatable across a number of languages. I love the enthusiasm that's palpable in much science writing. It carries the investigative passion I like to see in poetry. And every now and then, in the midst of this language where function is purely explanatory, you get the most exquisite poetry. For example: "The eyes of limpets are open cups."

Is poetry work, play or both?

Play. Perhaps if I wrote more of it, it would become work, but for now it is only play -- often serious, sometimes painful -- but never a slog.

Are you a narrative, lyric, epic, popular or post-modern poet? Argh :) . . .

Yes!

Atta Grrl! (And, BTW, Susan, thank you for the trust and treats :).)

Just like people, poets can develop unhealthy, unpleasant and sometimes dangerous habits. Poets are cute but, let's face it, they can disrupt a household. Like children, they need guidance and discipline to live happily and healthily with the "adults" in their lives. From fundamental manners to problem solving, anything is possible with a good education.

POETSMART™ professional Poet Training Instructors can help you teach your poet a variety of skills from the basics of good behaviour to complicated tricks and everything in between. Developed by the world's leading poet trainers and behaviourists, this gentle and effective approach is fun for both poets and their families. Regardless of your poet's age or skill level, we have a course that will help him learn new, desired behaviours. Choose from the following two levels:

1. Poet Head Start

Using positive reinforcement methods, you'll learn how to prevent unwanted behaviour and establish a bond with your poet. Training points include:

• House-training and basic manners.
• Non-aggressive behaviour around other poets.
• Poet health care, grooming and nutrition: You can't leave hair care and oral hygiene to poets themselves! Right from the start, poets should eat in moderation and drink plenty.
• Common language and simple commands (for e.g., "come" and "stay," as in "Come with me and be my love" and "Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare," etc.).
• Learning to resist toys, pork chops, clichés and overwrought endings when left alone.

2. Advanced Learning Class

We'll focus on performance despite distractions, and reliability when at a distance from people. Key topics covered in these classes include:

• Performing with and without awards.
• Learning despite distractions (including everything from television to other poets in heat).
• Additional language ("heel," "lie down," "rose," "Ode to . . . ," "pallid," "marrow," "propinquity" and more).
• Relationship-forming games and play that maintain poet's submissive role.
• The special grooming needs of outdoor poets.
• Performance while "off-lead" or "free verse."
• Quieting extreme barkers, because some poets love the sound of their own voice!

Visit a POETSMART™ for more information on either of these. Don't forget to pick up treats, toys and a cozy poetbed -- poets need lots of attention and some can sleep for up to 22 hours a day!

-- "POETSMART™: Training for Your Poet (with apologies to www.petsmart.com)"

(Hat tip, Kevin Connolly, Thomas Dilworth and Evan Munday.)

(Photograph of Susan Holbrook © 2007-2009 Steve Daigle. Poems © 2009 Susan Holbrook. Reprinted by permission. All Rights Reserved.)