Re-Informed

By Deena Shaffer

Susan Holbrook’s Joy is So Exhausting is flat-out teaching me about contemporary poetry; about responding, about my needs as a reader, about the history and formation of my understanding of poetry. And, of what it means to make meaning. It is re-informing me about the wonders and purposes of the new.

My learning and own writing are heavily influenced by the lyric. I’ve often felt like an outsider to the avant-garde. I like stories, being pulled, being affected, and being let in. The ultra-new has often made me feel pushed out. But I’ve been hungry to understand the so-called divide in poetry, between lyric and poetry’s other possibilities.

I heard Holbrook read at Toronto weekly NOW’s Open Stage about a month before I read Joy is So Exhausting. I laughed when she read her oft-requested “tampon poem” “Insert” (14); I laughed, everyone laughed. But more that not really getting it, I didn’t quite know what was to get. I thought, too, I had to keep trying to get it.

Included in my wonderings were questions about what insights might be housed in the poem about sex and anatomy. Is Holbrook inviting me to ask what heteronormative assumptions are being dressed down? Is she subverting norms, highlighting the ridiculous? As well, what is it I’m to glean about our society and the sham of bleach and “hygienic products”? Something about the toxicity of sanitizing? Or, is this an implicit critique about language, about things that are really only ever contextually comprehensible? Are we all only ever communicating in approximations?

Luckily, Jacob McArthur Mooney’s lecture lit up for me what had been such a closed experience. In reading Joy is So Exhausting, and in not feeling let in, I was thrashing about and cross about Holbrook’s cleverness. Then, through Mooney, a moment of cloud-parting came: perhaps, for the lyric poet/reader, meaning is not lost in all the cryptic, in its oftentimes limited accessibility. Perhaps, instead, meaning is jarred, found anew, questioned, and re-made.

Then, in this turning, I began to sense that Holbrook is re-infusing. As in “Aside From” (34), she shifts cliché. It’s not that exact resonance is found in the repetition of non-sense – “barking up the wrong tree,” “having a taste of one’s own medicine.” But it’s the nonsense of PetSmart and their regulatory writing, the nonsense of writing so coolly, even grotesquely, about tampon-insertion, the nonsense of people-watching, of headlines, of, of, of.

"Good Egg Bad Seed” (19) takes the productivity of nonsense and meaning-making to new heights for me. That the piece is entertaining could be enough. But there is also a suggestion that everything is linked, and that in our compulsion to make metaphors, everything is like something else. Moreover, that everything is mixed up, and in and with everything else. Perhaps so much so that an initial set of accessible meanings is rendered meaningless.

But more importantly, I’m beginning to get that it may not really matter at all. No matter how in I’ve been able to reach, and no matter how much I’ve managed to get, I am left with curiosity, perplexity, and an obviousness that Susan Holbrook is an excellent poet, stirring and brewing something interesting and insightful. Maybe a laugh and a scalp-scratch and a head-tilt and a wondering are enough, or even more than enough.