O Little Expressway: Sina Queyras and the
Traffic of Subversive Hope
Erin Wunker
Dalhousie University
a & b: The poem refuses to start from a position of safety and end in a position of safety having momentarily revealed a tiny fracture in human existence, the equivalent of a fly (a very small one, possibly a fruit fly even) in the
chardonnay, or perhaps even more revelatory, a dose of chemotherapy (but
not yours), a glimpse into the abyss (a tiny one, twice removed) and back to
the front porch (this could be yours), before the next sip, because the poem
is a connector, the poem is not a country lane, there is nowhere that doesn’t
lead here, there is nowhere here cannot find there. Everywhere is capable of
being here now. There is nowhere this is not. There is nowhere I.
“Murmurings, Movements or Fringe Manifesto”
Weary, maybe. But, no hope? For that there is never an appropriate time.
“A Memorable Fancy”
I. Set the gps
Here are some orienting facts: an expressway isn’t the same as a highway or
a simple road. Characterized by limited access, divided lanes, and no traffic
lights, expressways are entities unto themselves. They have been credited
with bringing communities together, in the case of linking rural towns
with other centres, and they have also been blamed for dividing or even
ghettoizing neighbourhoods (Borth). In 1926 Hilare Belloc acknowledged
the usefulness of expressways to deal with the rise in traffic but was certain
ESC 36.1 (March 2010): 37–55
Erin Wunker is an
Assistant Professor in the
Department of English
and the Canadian Studies
Program at Dalhousie
University. Her areas
of interest include
contemporary Canadian
literature, Canadian
women’s cultural
production, critical
theory, and collaboration.
With Heather Zwicker
and Aimée Morrison,
she is a co-founder of
the feminist academic
blog Hook & Eye: Fast
Feminism, Slow Academy.
that the expressway would be an exception rather than a rule because the
“creation of a great network of local highways suitable for [this increasing] rapid and heavy traffic” would be impossible. “Even if the wealth of
the community increases,” mused Belloc, “the thing would be impossible,
because it would mean the destruction of such a proportion of buildings
as would dislocate all social life” (quoted in Patton 77). Fast forward to the
contemporary moment: in the United States alone there are over 75,000
kilometres of paved expressways (cia). If, as poet Sina Queyras’s tollbooth
operator observes, “the roar of the road” is the rhythm of her day, “every
fourteen cars a sonnet,” then we might say that the expressway is a creation
that has been disavowed by its creators. Or, put another way, the road, like
Queyras’s lyric, has been reoriented.
II. Entrance Ramp
“Let sleeping cars lie,” demands an enigmatic interlocutor called only “a,”
“let little dogs go” (“Cloverleaf Median and Means” 18). A few lines later “a”
and “b” chime together: “Occupants must refrain from leaving the vehicle”
and later still “On your road, or expressway / b: (No, it is not your moon)
/ a: (No, I am not your begonia” (19). What is a reader to make of this
inverted dialectic, where neither a nor b seek truth or trust but, rather,
traffic in subversion that might be called hope?
In this article I read Sina Queyras’s Expressway as jamming the traditional lyric transmission, with all its habitual anthropocentric foci and
desires. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s treatise on nomadology and
desire I suggest that the collection traffics in subversive hope for an overwhelmed century and that it does so by inhabiting and reorienting an oft
over- and under-determined form. In their interrogation of the function of
capitalism Deleuze and Guattari posit that the creative worker threatens
institutionalized systems because she escapes “the sedentary state” (22).
By forging non-linear lyric-jamming narrative, there is a challenge to the
totemizing discourses of the nation-state. I read Queyras’s Expressway as
a reorientation of the lyric, where grammar of verse—emblematized by
the voracious road—literally moves its own exchange value. The possibility
for innovative change may be found in a line break borne not of a beloved
but of a road. The dialectical and syntactical strategies of the loved lyric
are inhabited by a voracious desiring-expressway that teems with endless
cars. The question that I come to is whether or not Queyras jams open
arteries of what we might understand as subversive hope.
Traffic isn’t merely metaphoric in Queyras’s Expressway. Between 2007
and 2008 Queyras held the Markin-Flanagan writer-in-residence position
38 | Wunker
at the University of Calgary, located in a city whose spectacular urban
sprawl is lashed together by a series of large highways. Before moving to
Calgary, she lived in New York and taught in New Jersey. All this driving
led her to the conclusion that “the modern economy was built on disconnect” (Fadden ). “All roads once led to Rome,” she says, “I don’t know where
they lead now, but they’re all connected” (Fadden). Expressway inserts
itself at the point of disconnect, where traffic is always moving. Although
on the expressway there are “millions of bodies hourly exiting,” there’s no
sense of to where or to what they exit. Indeed, in the traffic of late-capitalist
consciousness, where “all minds on the cellphone, / The safari not around,
but inside / Us: that which fuels” (76), I will suggest that Queyras’s collection does not leave the reader with an ultimate image of pessimistic
gridlock. Queyras’s Expressway travels up and down i-95 and gets stuck in
traffic on the Jersey Turnpike. There is on this endless vista of roads and
cars a Brechtian sense of alienation as well as a Romantic reverence for
Nature. A lone woman drives through British Columbia’s interior, hikes a
mountain to let loose her fathers’ ashes, and channels the Romantic’s fear
of the future through her revisions of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals. And
while critics are right to point out the “deep conversation” (Ewing) between
Expressway and the Romantics, it is perhaps the influence of William Blake
that is most significant for my reading. Neither wholly pastoral nor entirely
lyric, Blake’s concerns are echoed in Expressway. As Julia M. Wright argues
in Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation, Blake’s overarching
poetic concerns occur at a paradoxical interstice, where “individual liberty”
chafes against “engagement with community” (xiv). As I will go on to suggest, following the trail blazed by the Blakeian enigma, Expressway takes
up the paradox of the personal and the communal by inhabiting—albeit
problematically—the lyric form.
Queyras has called her earlier methodology the “poetics of collision”
between Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Sina Queyras (Thompson
para. 4). Expressway, the poet reflects, is “more like Wordsworth meets
Blake, meets Alice Notely or Erin Moure and Samuel Beckett. Modernism
refracted through the Romantics and the conceptualists” (Thompson para.
4). Jacqueline Larson interprets the poetics of refraction as a “frenetic and
speedy” “multitasking” “conversation” (para. 5), reading the collection as
“white line fever,” another version of a road trip, only this time the road
is “poetry’s own history” viewed in the rearview mirror (para. 5). And it
is, to a certain extent, although I would suggest that like Blake’s influence
on the Moderns, postmoderns, and even the Beats (Larrissy), Queyras’s
poetics are both backward-looking and forward-moving. It is notable that
O Little Expressway | 39
the majority of published conversations about Expressway—virtually all of
which take place on the Influency Salon site—take up Queyras’s interest in
Blake and the Romantics and yet do so in such a way that gestures toward a
collapsing of the two. As the editorial collective notes referring to Larson’s
engaging article, “we need to channel the Romantics and the Moderns in
order to understand and critique our complicity in the project of progress” (Casady et al. para. 11). Yet, as Wright and other Blake scholars have
noted, Blake does not fit easily into the Romantic project, even if he can
be considered “one of the most startlingly original” poets of the Romantic
period (Larrissy). While I don’t take issue or particularly disagree with
any of the writing about Queyras’s collection, what I’m most in interested
here is her work within and on the expressly Romantic form of the lyric.
As Guy Ewing notes, Expressway is in “deep conversation” with the
Romantics as well as Walt Whitman (para. 1). Ralph Kolewe suggests that the
collection might be read more accurately as an homage to Blake’s Marriage
of Heaven and Hell, recast as a “Marriage of Nature and No Nature” (para. 2).1
Everywhere, though, there is the expressway “with its chapel and truck
stops,” the expressway, “Its millions of bodies hourly exiting” (68, 76). Part
ode to Nature and part lament for the modern condition, Expressway’s
poetics intersect formal and innovative techniques to lay bare the dangers
of hurtling headlong into false freedoms or remaining sedentary in the
gridlock of passivity. Expressway’s poetics innovatively jam the traditional
transmission of the lyric. As the poet notes, it is too late for simple solutions for saving ourselves, and the world, but if we are willing to innovate,
there is much we can do to alter our course (Thompson para. 8). With
attentiveness to Queyras’s imagery and form, the article is thus organized
around what I have called “traffic jams.” I use traffic to imply both the
movement of materials and the flow of ideas. Traffic jams, then, occur at
points of theoretical or poetic exchange.
III. Report from the Road
Part way through Expressway there is a section entitled “Crash.” It opens
with an epigraph from conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s project Traffic in which Goldsmith catalogues traffic reportage from over the space
of a day. “What a mess with a lot of traffic in view in Brooklyn with the
1 An interesting side note: Kolewe proffers the title “Nature and No Nature” as a
gesture toward poet Gary Snyder who was aligned both with the Beats (Kolewe
reminds us that he has a cameo in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums) and with the Romantics via the deep ecology movement. Snyder, like Queyras, might be read
to traffic across formal lines.
40 | Wunker
wins Jam Cam,” documents Goldsmith, “The eastbound side of the bqe
very slow coming up from just past Battery Tunnel split, past the Brooklyn
Bridge and on into, uh, well, it looks like a lot of people are choosing the
Manhattan Bridge” (38). Lines composed a few metres above the expressway, Goldsmith’s project has been described fulfilling Guy Debord’s “Positions Situationnistes Sur La Circulation [Situationist Theses on Traffic]”:
Les urbanistes révolutionnaire ne se préoccuperont pas
seulemnet de la circulation des choses, et des hommes
figés dans un monde de choses. Ils essaieront de briser ces
chaines topologiques, en expérimentant des terrains pour
la circulation des hommes à travers la vie authentique.
Revolutionary urbanists will not limit their concern to the
circulation of things, or to the circulation of human beings
trapped in a world of things. They will try to break these topological chains, paving the way with their experiments for a
human journey through authentic life. (58)
Despite the dislocation of perspective—the natural world seems unnatural,
the human interlocutor (subject) is made claustrophobic by the constant
flow of things (object)—both Goldsmith’s project and Debord’s manifesto
retain humanistic strains, although it should be noted that this can be read
as deliberate. Goldsmith’s poetics of uncreativity focus on theft, impersonation, and plagiarism (Goldsmith, Jones). These tactics come out of
Goldsmith’s position that we have entered a “technologically-driven paradigm” in which inhabiting the writing of another writer teaches the interloper more about writing than emulating style. “If we retyped Kerouac,”
said Goldsmith in an interview, “we’d learn much more about Kerouac
than by writing in the style of Kerouac” (Jones para. 2). Thus “inhabiting”
works in much the same way that “trafficking” does in this paper: in both
cases despite the initial shrugging off of influence, the form remains what
Debord calls “detournement” or alternate route into a concept, phrase,
or, here, form. By hailing both Goldsmith and, by proxy, Debord, Queyras’s collection simultaneously retains and problematizes the human in a
postcapitalist environs. Not “No Nature,” but, perhaps, “know nature(s).”
Inherent in Expressway, via Debord and Goldsmith as well as Blake and
the Romantics, are questions of industry and capital, the form they take,
as well as the ways in which an individual is informed—and even constituted—by this forked force.
Capitalism transforms the revolutionary potential of individuals into
a desire to be led. Enter Deleuze and Guattari, whose writings are espeO Little Expressway | 41
Thus
“inhabiting”
works in much
the same way
that “trafficking”
does.
cially concerned with the contemporary concept of desire and the ways
desire has been appropriated and re-formatted by the capitalist system.
Rather than allowing an individual the revolutionary pleasure of his/her
own desire, under a capitalist system desire is stripped of its revolutionary
potential and constructed as a lack: desire is always conceived as being for
something outside one’s grasp. Deleuze and Guattari name this reformulation desiring-production: “it is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly
at time, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It
shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is
machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines, with all the necessary
couplings and connections” (1). The subject is brainwashed into believing
that his/her desire can never be reached: otherwise, why desire it? Go get
it! Thus, the capitalist system based on labour and production functions
at a very personal level.
At its most basic level, Queyras’s reoriented lyric disrupts the mechanistic I/id. It opens the possibility to destabilize the “lyrical inference”
of the human as the sole and central ego (Olson 24). The lyric is more
than a set of poetic conventions, of course. To interrogate the lyric as a
poetic form one must also interrogate binary oppositions of subject/object,
human/inhuman, cultivated/wild. The reoriented lyric allows the poet to
step aside. “Poetry is concerned with using and abusing, with losing and
wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun,”
writes Gertrude Stein, “poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry
does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is”
(Stein 231). Despite its immediate similarities to Goldsmith’s Traffic, and
its resonances with the Situationists, Expressway’s “Crash” complicates
the role of the poet even further. Let’s return to the scene of “Crash.” Knit
together from Google-generated text, “Crash” collects accident reports
and rebuilds them into a reoriented lyric mash-up. Here is an excerpt:
A 58-year-old woman from San Jose. Three-car crash turns
deadly. Multiple-car crash along the Atlantic City Expressway.
Gas station in shambles overnight. skokie car crash kills passenger on Edens Expressway. “It veered to the right across
four lanes of traffic and overturned in the right grassy area.”
Two car crashes briefly. The Beachline Expressway is open this
morning. Woman dies in expressway car crash. Crash text:
David Cronenberg’s most controversial film. “A driver picked
me up around midnight under the Gardiner Expressway.” The
car crash may be one of Hollywood’s most rudimentary cli42 | Wunker
chés. San Jose woman dies in car crash on Capitol Expressway.
Author David Halberstam killed in crash near Dumberton
Bridge, at the intersection of Bayfront Expressway and Willow Road when his car was broadsided. Multi-car crash on
Expressway injures one. Thunder Bay News: One woman is in
hospital as investigators continue to piece together. Cached.
Similar pages. Note this. (40)
The fragmented documentary collage continues for six pages. It is barrage
of the human that, in its formatting, refuses to grant subjectivity either to
the victims or the speaker. The human, it seems, has misplaced its humanity (for, lest one forget, Queyras reminds the reader in her acknowledgements that the expressway is a made thing, and a handmade thing at that).
On the road to the future, where the transnational has dislocated the
national and power is a nebulous entity (Hardt and Negri; Sassen), Elaine
Scarry cautions “it is crucial to see that injured bodies would not be something on the road to the goal, but would themselves be the road to the goal”
(58). If poetry can elevate objects and affects, it can also work to make
plain the ways that capitalism alienates subjects and senses. “Crash” serves
as one node of transfer for the voracious, handmade expressway. Neither
traditionally lyric nor wholly Flarf, which poet Gary Sullivan explains is
poetry that acts as a “kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying, awfulness. Wrong.
Un-P.C. Out of control. ‘Not okay’ ” (Sullivan), “Crash” moves us with its
movement. Set predominantly in large text blocks with the occasional line
break, this surprisingly moving catalogue of damage and death figures the
expressway as a voracious space. Indeed, despite its structural similarities
to Flarf, I want to suggest that “Crash” works within the lyric tradition,
albeit to reorient that tradition. Curiously, as I’ve alluded to earlier and
will go on to explore below, that reorientation is both forward moving
and backward looking.
Let’s take as foundational that the traditional lyric is a three-way intersection held up by “heterosexualized desire” (Homans 570). In this configuration, a masculinized “I” speaks “as if overheard” (Duplessis 29) to an
equally masculinized “us.” The focus of this poetic transmission of desire is
an absent but desired “she” (Grossman 227). As Eve Sedgwick puts it, this
constructs a homosocial triangle, a geometric structure that is stubbornly
human in its transmission and focus. Queyras’s collection complicates the
masculine anthropocentric traditional lyric. Expressway is composed of
investigative lyrics where, to build on Paul Naylor’s definition, investigative is reserved for those poetries that examine their cultural contexts,
pose challenges to boundaries that exclude, work to name and critique
O Little Expressway | 43
Through a
jamming of the
lyric tradition
Queyras
reorients the
triangulated
structure such
that the
traditional roadblocks between
speaker and
listener are
lifted.
the systems of power at work in the creation of meaning, jam up myths
of progress, and are deliberately and self-consciously engaged in politics.
Queyras’s reoriented investigative lyrics enact a poetics of subjectivity,
where the subject isn’t only human. We might add to this rebuilt definition
“Lyric dandelion,” a phrase Charles Altieri uses to symbolize an instant of
heightened mutability. Here, in this moment of fluxus the poet recalls that
what is most essential about I (my self, our selves) and it (Nature) remains
beyond signification. Swerving away from Debord’s thesis of the urbanite
in traffic and Goldsmith’s catalogue of traffic, Queyras’s collection takes
as its focus the dehumanization by humans of humans. “Meanwhile the
expressway encloses, the expressway round and around the perimeters like
wagons trains circling the bonfire, all of them, guns pointed” (75). Both
echoing and anticipating Blake’s anti-industrial Proverbs, which work in,
on, and against the Romantic tradition, Queyras’s reoriented investigative
lyrics break the traditional identificatory flow, that three-way intersection
of speaker, listener, absent object of desire. Through a jamming of the
lyric tradition Queyras reorients the triangulated structure such that the
traditional roadblocks between speaker and listener are lifted. Reader and
speaker are together, driving on an endless highway, or being surrounded
by it, or simply walking beside it. “Restructur[ing] our ordinary perception of reality,” the investigative lyric dandelion jams the circulation of the
familiar “so that we end up seeing the world instead of numbly recognizing it” (Hawkes 62). In reorienting the traditional lyric structure Queyras
figures the road—that made thing—as pure desire in the Deleuzian sense.
The reader and the speaker(s) are left to witness what we’ve done and,
perhaps, imagine a future with—rather than for—the future.
V. Desiring-Expressway: Who is Driving this Thing?
In their much-traversed dyad on capitalism and schizophrenia Deleuze
and Guattari unseat the Cartesian cogito. In their analysis, contemporary
society is structured such that any revolutionary, individualistic impulses
one has are immediately integrated into the social machine. The task for
the individual, then, is to question at every turn, to be wary of theorems,
absolutes, and above all myths. To combat the fascistic impulses ingrained
in our ways of being one must ask “How does one keep from being fascist
even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant?”
(xiii). In this analysis individuals are not, for them, separate from nature;
they are parts of processes—to separate them into discrete entities is to
deny their “one-and-the-sameness” (5). In a capitalist society, production
becomes (has become) valued over process, “That is why desiring-produc44 | Wunker
tion is the primal concern of a materialist psychiatry, which conceives of
and deals with the schizo as Homo natura.” However, in this model, the
dealing with only works when it is not set up as a goal with an end product (5). Desiring-machines are always engaged in binary relationships—
subject/object—this works to deform certain flows that are, in nature,
fragmentary (5). Desire is itself a constantly moving force; it is “nothing
other than the state and impulses of drives” (Smith 71). The Deleuzian
formulation draws on a Nietzschean schema. For Deleuze and Guattari
drives exist in an always-already constructed social architecture. The territories of early societies, the State, capitalism, nomadic machines—all of
these assemble drives in their own fashion (Smith 71).
As Daniel W. Smith observes, despite their desire to claim the opposite, this formulation is deeply invested in the traffic between Marxist
and Freudian analysis. For Deleuze and Guattari the political economy
and libidinal economy are one in the same: “The only means of bypassing the sterile parallelism where we flounder between Freud and Marx,”
they write, is in “discovering … how the affects or drives form part of the
infrastructure itself” (Anti-Oedipus 63). In this analysis there is “no reason
to subject all actions [humans] undertake to the criterion: is it free or not,”
write Deleuze and Guattari. Freedom is something to speak of only when
“we pose the question of an act capable not of filling the amplitude of the
soul at a given moment” (“On Capitalism and Desire” 157). Desire is pure
force operating without a body. It is vehicular, moving in much the way that
Paul Ricouer explains metaphors quite literally move perception from one
place to another (“The Metaphoric Process” 141). Or, to quote Umberto
Eco, “Metaphor conflates two images: two things become different from
themselves and yet remain recognizable … what does metaphor point
out to us or teach us to see? Not the real itself, but rather a knowledge of
the dynamics of the real” (102). I. A. Richards’s distinction between the
tenor and vehicle of metaphor is useful here: where the tenor is the idea
expressed or subject of comparison, the vehicle is the image that carries
the comparison.
With the Deleuzian schema in mind, then, let’s enter the expressway.
We first encounter it slantwise, it is “near … a patch / Of emerald turf,”
where it takes on the role of cultivation, “smoothing each nuisance of wild”
(6). It then carries the reader to “canoe trail, / Wagon trail / trail of tears”
(11). The expressway is an “unzipping,” a “vehicular vista,” and “whole paragraphs” of “wisdom like a gun” (12, 86). If the tenor here is postindustrial
global capitalism unleashed, then the vehicle is, oddly, the road itself. Free
of the fetters of subjectivity the nomadic, dissembled expressway is pure
O Little Expressway | 45
force, pure desire criss-crossing the landscape. Queyras’s lyric reorientations jam the traffic of the traditional by using some of the improvisational
tactics of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad.
VI. First Jam: “There is nowhere I.”
The extant reviews and essays on Expressway comment on its lyricism,
noting that there is no gendered “I” (Christakos) and no Kerouacian driver
on the road (Ewing). If the traditional lyric is structured by the homosocial
intersection of speaker, listener, object of desire, it does so as a product of a
given moment. What Rachel Blau Duplessis calls the “foundational cluster
or concerns” of the traditional lyric—the stuff and bother—are historically
inflected (29). “Lyric ideologies are not timeless,” as Duplessis cautions,
they are “learned and reinforced” in specific contextual moments and
internalized over time (29). That they recur is a testament to Althusser’s
understanding of ideology as an individual’s imagined relationship to his/
her real situation. Given the object of its gaze the lyric has a tendency to
resist effeminacy, says Duplessis: “While other aspects of lyric exist this
cluster contributes to the ‘political unconscious’ (Jameson) of poetry in
general, and or the romantic lyric in particular” (29). Unpacking these
poetic positionings, where the desired is feminized, the desirer masculine, and the transmission is myopically anthropocentric, must then come
from a “poet’s sense of cultural responsibility” (30). Although some of
the internal lyrical contradictions emanate thematically within the poem
itself, through the investigative lyric dandelion, a reading strategy that
inscribes poetic texture as poetry, the reader and the poet are repositioned
(Duplessis 30–31). No longer a homosocial intersection, the investigative
dandelion jams the triangulated traffic of lyric desire.
Consider, for example, “Solitary,” which opens the collection. Broken
into four parts, “Solitary” inhabits the lyric form from a minoritarian vista:
What sympathy of sounds? What cricketing
Of concrete, what struck rubber, what society
And shifting birdsong sweetens spring’s tumult?
She walks near the expressway, a patch
Of emerald turf besieged by doggy bags,
Where frolicking hounds squat to pee, crimson
Cellphone at her ear. She is calling home,
Calling the past, calling out for anyone
46 | Wunker
To hear. She is waiting, she is wanting
To be near, of flesh, of earth, on foot,
And this is her perspective: the i-95 (7)
The rhetorical structure of the opening questions, “What sympathy of
sounds? What cricketing / Of concrete, what struck rubber, what society / And shifting birdsong,” displaces the speaking subject. The reader
encounters “She” in the second stanza, cellphone at her ear. The tyranny
of the “I” is dislodged; in a roundabout fashion the reader comes to first
“sympathy” and “cricketing,” then “concrete,” “rubber,” and “society,” and
“shifting birdsong” before reaching the feminized object. But then, whose
desiring gaze guides the reader? Not she who is “waiting” “wanting / To
be near, of flesh, of earth, on foot.”2 Rather it is the I that is absented,
making way for she, who listens. It is the expressway, “smoothing each
nuisance of wild, each terrifying / Quirk of land, uneven, forlorn paths”
which is granted a more solid subjectivity. It is the expressway, “wanderer,
Wander, lonely as a cloud, dappled, drowned,” whose “melancholic pace”
is “nowhere untouched” (7). Ghosts of the traditional lyric’s attendance to
musicality and homosocial circulation transparently gesture not to Gerard
Manley Hopkins’s sprung rhythm, or Wordsworth’s tranquil recollection,
but to the objects of those lyrical gazes. Syntactical symbolism renders
present the trace of a windhover, a wisp of a cloud, and each of these is
experienced not by she, speaker, or we, but by the expressway that “goat
trail on steroids” (11).
“If a body is no longer a body, / Where is memory? If a text is no longer
a text, / Where is body? If a city is no longer a city, what road? If the future
no longer has a future, where does it look?” The reoriented structure of
“Solitary” jams the formal architecture. Marjorie Perloff has described
the contemporary lyric as one in which the lyric I is “increasingly created
by a complex process of negotiation between private feeling and public
evidence” (208). Here, the lyric dandelion; here, the I recognizes she is “a
link—an unwitting one, perhaps—in a cultural matrix” (Perloff 208). “We,”
the poems remind us, do not pre-exist our relatings (Carr and Wunker
“Take out your pen. Begin. We.” 9). Subjectivity becomes an object of discovery, the vehicle the poem, the expressway that fraught means. “Divided
allegiance between the public and the private self ” jams the traditional
2 See also Casady et al. who make a corollary observation that there is “no unified
lyric voice in the text … there is only an a-relational and unsituated consciousness” (para. 6). The difference I’m suggesting is that the “unsituated consciousness” is rather a resituated or reoriented consciousness.
O Little Expressway | 47
It is the
expressway.
lyric’s phenomenological flow: self and other are stuck together on the
dystopian expressway (Carr 4).
In this index the boundary—however tenuous—between subject and
object dissolves or, rather, decomposes, for in its decomposition Queyras
underscores the traffic between subject and object as an animating, vivifying circulation. The expressway appears at first glance to regulate movement and access to the city, the self, community. What Queyras’s speaker
seems to suggest is that the expressway—though a built environment—can
be read to offer the possibility of a kind of disciplinary nomadism. If, as
Foucault suggests, the role of the disciplines are to arrest motion and regulate nomadic movement, then Queyras’s literal and figurative jamming of
the lyric opens the expressway to new horizons of movement.
VI. Second Jam: “I cut shrubs”
Decreation is a neologism coined by Simone Weil to articulate her attempt
to “undo the creature” in herself. As Anne Carson notes, decreation is an
unstable term that Weil mobilizes in an attempt to jam the transmission
between an individual, the soul, and God (194). Decreation is a “program
for getting the self out of the way” (Carson) in order to think not about
I but about the ability to say “I.” For Weil, “the power to say ‘I’ ” is all the
power that humans have in this world (71). Giving up this egocentric power
is necessary if the individual is to get out of the way. Maintaining the focus
on jamming transmission, I posit that Queyras’s reoriented investigative
lyrics enact a constant decreation of Cartesian dualism and a constant
decreation of ontology, where the made thing—the expressway, the poem—
unmake the human and subject it to their aggregate architecture.
Queyras further unknits the traditional lyric in the section immediately following “Crash,” entitled “Some Moments from a Land Before the
Expressway.” Here, the reader encounters a new interlocutor: not Wordsworth but his sister Dorothy. Again haunted by an earlier lyric form,
this section is divided into fourteen smaller units culled from Dorothy’s
journals. Cultivated in the form reminiscent of a sonnet, this section mirrors Dorothy’s project of cultivation at Grasmere (Page).3 The voice of
this section is not the expected voice of William, whose reflections and
connections with Nature are well known but, rather, is a decoupage that
3 Although it is somewhat outside the focus of this paper, it is worth noting Page’s
argument that while the Romantic project—especially Wordsworth’s—is known
for its search for the sublime in nature, both William and Dorothy were deeply
engaged in the domesticating project of cultivation at Grasmere. Page understands Dorothy’s cultivation work as a hopeful project: “her desire to make the
48 | Wunker
documents another reorientation. Here, the reorientation to a female
speaker engages in logopoeia, or the intellectual and analytic poetry that
Duplessis explains began as “an attack on the gender narratives of lyric
poetry” (38). Read through the reoriented lyric, this section further jams
the lyric transmission but does so in such a way that is again Janus-faced.
Dorothy’s redacted diary entries create a catalogue that is similar to the
poetics of Flarf, but Queyras’s attentiveness to grammatical architecture
reorients without effacing the lyric “I.” Consider, for example:
No letters! No papers!
Put by the linen, down Batchelor’s
Buttons, mended in the morning
To Ambleside and found a letter
From Wm. (49)
If grammar, the structure of the subject and the predicate, inspired Cartesian dualism, in this section Queyras decreates that surety. Michael
Haar argues that grammar made possible Descartes’s “certainty that ‘I’
is the subject of ‘think’ ” but cautions that “at bottom, faith in grammar
simply conveys the will to be the cause of one’s thoughts” (18). In each of
the fourteen successive sections Dorothy/Queyras displaces her self in
favour of a decreated lyric I. In this section grammar unfurls, dependent
clauses pile up:
To lakeside in the morning
To the waterfall
On the hill above the house (50).
Severed from the “grammatical connective tissue” (Carr) the “I” of the lyric
loses its sense of urgency, and ontological matters become, as Lisa Robertson has argued, an ontological luxury (277). Queyras’s Dorothy relates not
Nature but the natural, where all is not sublime but often “Melancholy and
ill bowels” or “Yellowish-green after tea” (54), while all the while walking
To Ambleside, to Rydale, to Lhoughrigg,
To Mary Point, to Wytheburn, to Keswick,
un-home-like places and objects of the world homey and welcoming. When
[Dorothy] sees a threatening scene, she attempts to find a way to redeem it with
an image of protection or hope” (19).
O Little Expressway | 49
The expressway
and the onceabsented lyric
object-woman
reterritorialize
each other.
To Windy Brown, to Silver Hill, through Rydale
Woods, in Borrowdale, to Stickle Tarn,
To Langdale, to Mr. Olliff ’s gate (53)
The literal traffic here is on foot; Dorothy walks while there is “Wm writing his Preface” (52), then “Wm still unwell,” and finally “Wm haunted
with altering the Rainbow” (59). While “Wm” writes, altering and “(again)
attempting to alter” the page, the poem, the “I,” Dorothy likewise alters,
although in a different fashion. Rather than constructing poems on the
page Dorothy’s alterations are physical: she moves. Queyras’s attentiveness to Dorothy suggests that her movement is not a removal of self but,
instead, suggestive of an alternate route. By inhabiting Dorothy’s journals
Queyras decreates the Romantic “I,” making room for “Sunshiny coldish
hackberry crab / Blossom, anemone nemorosa, marsh / Marigold speedwell, beautiful blue” (57–58). Wm is still there, “asleep / In the window” but
the perspective has been deterritorialized and shifted, if only momentarily.
VII. Exit Ramp: Proverbs of Hell
Curiously, as the collection progresses, the expressway and the recurrent
“she” of the opening poem come closer together. “Occasionally there is
anger,” the reader learns. But instead of subsuming or objectifying “she”
or putting her in a position of speaker or listener, she acts: “she takes
her one good foot and applies it to surfaces otherwise flat and safe, the
expressway progressing itself through her, expressly” (74). The expressway
and the once-absented lyric object-woman reterritorialize each other. In
a reality where “woodpeckers are not essential. Trees are not essential.…
Humanity is ornamental” (74), it is the desiring-expressway, the poem,
that moves ever onward, pure force. In the meantime the women, “with
their pickaxes unmaking,” come down and reterritorialize their monstrous
offspring, building gardens (88). In all of this movement the reoriented
lyric asks: What is hope? For, as the second epigraph states, although there
is weariness, it is never the time to cease hoping. Hope is becoming-hope,
a poetry of “textual compost” (Rasula 195). Becoming is a borrowed term.
“The dynamics of becoming,” explains Inna Smetsky, can be described by a
process in which “any given multiplicity ‘changes in nature as it expands its
connections’ ” (Deleuze and Guattari 8). Becoming is a minority, surviving
on the margins, that serves as a medium of becoming: “All becomings are
minoritorian” (Deleuze and Guattari 291), “All becomings are, first and
foremost, becoming-minor” (Smetsky 27). By “becoming-hope” I mean to
suggest the radicality of Queyras’s reoriented lyric which, in its jamming,
shifts the transmission from I to you-about-it/her/that/them.
50 | Wunker
To conclude by way of deferral, let me turn to the ultimate section of
Queyras’s collection, entitled “Proverbs of Hell.” This final section, which
directly hails the other William, is perhaps an unlikely site to complete the
case for the collection’s traffic of subversive hope, unless we first consider
the terms. Ancient and omnipresent, the proverb pithily recounts a generally held truism or belief. Moreover, the nouns of this title are linked by a
tiny preposition, which “denote the relations of place” (Harris 266). These
proverbs are connectors; these proverbs are poems; these proverbs relate
the word to place without reifying either. Here are some of Queyras’s:
The body sublime, the heart suv.
Follow your plow with the blood of war.
Drive your car on the bones of the dead.
The roads of co2s lead to rising seas.
…
The future is the reversal of destruction.
Even a bee’s too busy. (96)
The first proverbs sketch a cybernetic, war-torn cartography, where the
bee and the body are either busy or Borg. But, as the catalogue progresses
the proverb is reoriented as imperatives. Keeping in mind that imperatives
are commands for which the word you is taken as the subject (Tufts 209),
consider this shift:
In abstentia, in absence, in obsolescence, or obnoxious.
Where nature is, man is not enough.
Enough, or too much. Too much.
Go forth and undo harm.
Go forth and do. (98)
Here, in the final lines of the collection, the investigative lyric is fully
reoriented. “Folding on the seam between I / nation and Nature / culture,”
as Emily Kruse Carr suggests, “this grammar … creates a distinctive yet
flexible personal presence and to avoid the pathetic fallacy, freeing both
I and it from static signification” (6). If power, as so many have argued
for so long, has become disconnected from “issues of equity, social justice, and civic responsibility” (Giroux 38), in her reorientation of the lyric
Queyras implies that the lyric, too, is at risk of disconnection. In reorienting the lyric and jamming the traffic between I-you-it, Queyras opens
outward, hopefully. “Hope,” Henry Giroux states, “is a precondition for
O Little Expressway | 51
social struggle” (38). The becoming-hope exemplified in the reoriented
lyric, which leaves the reader with an imperative to “go forth and undo
harm / Go forth and do” is not a “wistful attempt to look beyond the
horizon of the given” (Giroux 28) but instead is what Andrew Benjamin
has called a “structural condition of the present” (1). Or, as a man on a bus
said, “There is no path to the future, the path is the future” (Expressway
70). Time, then, to exit the given.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the audience members of Dalhousie’s Department of English
Speaker’s Series for their critically engaged questions on an earlier draft
of this paper. Especial thanks to Julia M. Wright, Geordie Miller, and
Jason Haslam, whose thoughts and suggestions were of great use to me
as I turned to the often daunting process of revision.
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