Susan Holbrook
Biography
Susan Holbrook teaches North American literatures and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor. She has just co-edited The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation (Oxford UP, 2008). Her poetry books are misled (Red Deer, 1999) and Good Egg Bad Seed (Nomados, 2004).
Poet's Note
On the number of source-text-generated poems in Joy Is So Exhausting:
Perhaps I don’t like to start conversations, more of a follower than a leader – I’ve never been called presidential. But what are the various translative effects – what can intervening in a source text produce? Applying an Oulipian noun swap to tampon instructions is partly just fun, creating a textual environment of absurdity and flux, but then momentarily there’s a spike in the stakes, as “the tomboy should now be comfortably inside you,” not Tampax’s idea of hygiene, but my idea of a lovely afternoon. Sometimes I just want to rip a phrase out of a science textbook so its gorgeousness won’t go unnoticed: “The eyes of limpets are open cups.” Working from Gertrude Stein’s manuscripts, the misreadings are inevitable, her illegibility makes it easy, her legible surprises an invitation. Sudoku-izing Stephen Harper is just satisfying. How to become more alert to the multiple, incessant acts of reading structuring our days, and to the attendant multiple ways we are read. To resignify, reimagine, perforate, flip, question, to intervene in the written world.Sample Poems
"Insert" (pdf), "Nursery" (pdf), "News Sudoku #19" (pdf)
External Links
"Poetsmart" at the Walrus