Fielding the Austere in Holbrook’s Joy

By Ben Nolan

I tend at best to be suspicious and, at worst, dismissive of poetry that seems excessively “about” procedure. On my first reading of Joy is So Exhausting, whose formal/procedural experimentation and play are very much in the foreground, I found myself skimming forward in the longer poems, moving without pause from the shorter ones, finding the whole experience frankly homework-like, and myself eager to get through it.

Because of this “trouble,” I experienced Jacob McArthur Mooney's highly engaged discussion of Holbrook’s work as if I’d been grabbed by the shoulders and shaken. If you just wake up and pay attention, Mooney effectively demonstrated, you’ll see the mountain of decisions with which Holbrook’s procedures confront her, you’ll start to recognize the lucid thoughtfulness of her composition, and come to recognize the work’s humour and lightness as one of its most impressive accomplishments.

Mooney insisted that Holbrook’s procedures should be seen as “vehicles” for creative expression, and I buy it to a degree. I’m less convinced, though, about his implication that freedom and thoughtfulness are tied proportionally to the demands of the procedures. It still seems to me that it is those poems in Joy that are the least obvious about their language-centred procedures that read as the most free, or "serious” (to use a term one respondent used in our class discussion). These are, however, from my point of view, among the least thigh-slappingly funny.

This led me to think more about the “funny” in this work. How exactly does it relate to the procedures? Mooney suggested that we're either laughing at the humiliation of the poem itself, or that we're in a position of sharing the uncertainty and hazards with the poem itself and not laughing. Perhaps this theory describes Mooney’s own sense of humour. It seems plausible that a poet would be in the habit of personifying poems and, as a result, be delighted by their individual humiliations, or empathize with their struggles. But I doubt if most readers, especially those who are not poets, would so easily relate to a poem in this way.

In Dialectic of the Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno observe the following:

Laughter, whether reconciled or terrible, always accompanies the moment when a fear is ended. It indicates a release, whether from physical danger or from the grip of logic. Reconciled laughter resounds with the echo of escape from power; wrong laughter copes with fear by defecting to the agencies which inspire it. It echoes the inescapability of power… To moments of happiness laughter is foreign; only operettas, and now films, present sex amid peals of merriment. But Baudelaire is as humorless as Hölderlin… What is infernal about wrong laughter is that it compellingly parodies what is best, reconciliation. Joy, however, is austere. (My italics, 112-13)

This passage describes a relationship between three distinctions: laughter versus not laughter, right (reconciled) laughter versus “wrong” laughter, and the entire structure of fear versus joy as “austere” – the core theme we’re primed by Holbrook’s title to seek.

Asked in class to comment on how she interprets the audience’s response of laughter to her most vigorously procedural poems, Holbrook replied something like “I'd imagine it’s [the humour is] quite disturbing.” Based on this response, I began to wonder how we might account for the simultaneous presence of joy, laughter and politics in her poetry in terms of Horkheimer and Adorno’s critical structure.

Maybe Holbrook’s not subverting language generally, but only language forms that carry with them some kind of specific implied institutional authority: corporation-written instructions on how to insert a tampon, or train a puppy; professionally written texts like the home-inspection document and writing guide mashed together with Walt Whitman's authoritative voice, etc. In “Insert” (14), for example, I do find delight, but it’s a pointedly subversive variety of delight. The subversive act itself, however, does not strike me as joy-filled or joyous in any profound sense.

Can “Insert” be said to be a joyous poem? Holbrook certainly takes satisfaction in sculpted details formed around the procedure – notably the line, "the tomboy should now be comfortably inside you" (15). But that line, even on multiple readings, seems like a lovely vulnerable sandcastle built in the wet sand behind a receding tide; made possible by the receding tide (impossible either when the sand was submerged, or were it dry and crumbly). The poem seems so overwhelmingly to be about and for the subversion of the charged tampon instruction source text that its beautiful and rich little substitutions are hard to appreciate on first read. These linguistic and semantic tactics are not really funny, or at least not funny in the same sense as is the poem's humorous conceit which produces mostly, I think, readerly delight at seeing the poet both reveal and overcome the frighteningly suppressive power of the original text.

Pithy distillation: Holbrook’s “funny machine” generates destabilization in language by kneading malleabilities into it. Holbrook seizes and sculpts these subversive opportunities, like shards of loosened clay, into truly joyful but humble-by-contrast monuments of free expression. These become visible only once the shadow of the machine recedes, or, more accurately, when vision adjusts to its continued looming presence. Maybe the book is about learning how to live and find resistant joy emergent in the shadow of the machines that plow across our lives ongoingly, pummelling our expectations and leaving us standing amid rubble.

Now, to loop back to Mooney, I don't think as he does that the procedures are the "vehicles" for Holbrook's freedom. I think that it’s with the detritus left in the procedure's wake that she comes alive as a free creative subject, using this material to express things that come from her life and lived politic, from outside of a language-centred poetic itself. In these engaged, embodied interactions with language as material to be reshaped, she expresses something lived, something notably including, but not limited to, the physical and affective experience of new motherhood. The experience of new motherhood is perhaps most foregrounded in "Nursery" (72), which takes the form of a document of roving one-sentence impressions of the world through time, each one situated in an experienced moment of breast feeding – a simple and humble (austere?) procedure demanding little of the reader’s attention, making all the more prominent the impressions themselves. Is it a coincidence that this poem, although not funny in any extroverted sense, should read to me as the book’s most potent and lucid expression of joy?