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.
