Holbrook's Subversive Humour

By John Stout

Susan Holbrook's Joy is So Exhausting is an exuberant, inventive, delightful book! As the epigraph to the text indicates, the phrase "joy is so exhausting" refers to a line in Marian Engel's classic 1970s CanLit novel Bear, in which a female archivist has a sexual relationship with a bear. Engel's novel is a shocking and surprisingly moving upending of the cliché of the encounter with the wilderness that has so marked Canadian literature in the past. Like Bear, Susan Holbrook's poems are cheeky and subversive.

Throughout Joy is So Exhausting, Holbrook shows a fascination with taking clichés and altering them into odd and goofy new combinations of words in order to renew language and to question its usual functioning. This engagement with clichés is emblematic of her writing, which foregrounds the appropriation of "found" material in order to rework it, as she acknowledges at the end of the book: "Phrases have been pilfered, spliced and transcreated from a range of texts" (85). Such borrowing, splicing and "transcreating" allows Holbrook to produce tour de force poems that band and stretch clichés and received ideas as she debunks the notion of "originality."

Given my enthusiastic admiration of her work, it is odd that I nonetheless wonder, after rereading Joy is So Exhausting, if there is too much humour in this text – too much surface play with words and not enough depth? Is it possible the humour swallows up other impulses in the writing? Yet, one of Holbrook's goals (and it is a goal worth pursuing) must be to question adherence to conventional notions of "meaning" and "depth" in poetry. Her poems are more than just clever games or parlour tricks with language. As Jacob McArthur Mooney stated in his guest lecture, "Play in Holbrook's work is divorced from simply joking."

It is interesting that, during the question period, following her reading from the book, Holbrook expressed concern that, because there is so much humour in Joy, some readers might not see the ethical dimension that is so important to her work. "I would hope my ethic comes through in everything I write," she said. She later clarified that play with words is significant to her because language is so often associated with, or determined by, oppressive social structures (e.g., patriarchy), but "if you have the freedom to rework language, that's empowering."