Naturalization and De-naturing, Or, The Marriage of Nature and No Nature after Two Hundred Post-Romantic Years

By Ralph Kolewe

At the head of an early version of two of the poems in Sina Queyras’s Expressway, published in the online magazine MiPOesias in 2006, she placed a quotation from Jacques Derrida: “Don't make natural what isn't.” This epigraph didn’t appear in Queyras’s book, but it’s an interesting on-ramp to this work nonetheless. Queyras is certainly concerned with what is natural and what isn’t, and if Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell casts its shadow over this book, it might be interesting to look at Expressway as a Marriage of Nature and No Nature. (No Nature? That's the title of a book of poems by Gary Snyder, authentic Beat—Kerouac wrote a book about him: Dharma Bums—and Zen cowboy poet... What's he got to do with this? Nothing. Never mind. Move along.)

Anti/Naturalism

I want to look at Queyras's strategies of naturalization and de-naturing, starting with “Solitary,” the first poem in the first section, “The Endless Path of the New” (and that reminds me of something else, the title of a piece of music by Terry Riley, another survivor of 1960s California, but I can't place it just now…oh, free association, you know what they say about the 1960s: if you can remember them you weren't there). Nature? The alliteration, a natural device, of “sympathy of sounds,” “cricketing/of concrete” (6)–waitaminute. Concrete? Nature/not. And on: “shifting birdsong sweetens spring's tumult” could almost come out of Wordsworth, “emerald turf,” the internal rhymes of “ear/hear/near” in the next few lines, and the diction “of flesh, of earth, on foot”—is it the steady rhythm that makes this sound like old-fashioned “nature poetry”? And a few lines later, confirmation: “wander, lonely as a cloud”—that’s the Wordsworth lane: you know, over to the left, for passing only.

But we knew that. We expected that. No nature? “Nature,/one concludes, is nostalgia,” (7) Queyras says. And a line or two later, there’s Wordsworth’s dog, and everyone knows dogs are a marker for nostalgia. Remember Odysseus's dog dropping dead just after his old master returns to Ithaca.

I’m starting to get the sense that Queyras is playing against the Romantics after “two hundred / post-Romantic years” but her form is romantic here, as is the feel of the language. Never mind the references to Auschwitz and Darfur, how far away are they? Far enough. Perhaps far enough not to belong in this poem: the reference to genocide seems a bit forced to me. Come to think of it I’m not sure about the Alps being on fire either (though that makes me think of Caspar David Friedrich). But never mind, the expressway has smoothed out everything that’s terrifying. Naturally.

The poem “Solitary” is a kind of elegy, for the speaker’s father, and somehow, for the dream of the roads he built, and the future they didn’t lead to. Nostalgia, hence, in Queyras’s equation, is nature.

The verse is set in tercets. Where have I seen that before? It makes me think of Dante. And after seven pages of tercets we’ve got “A Memorable Fancy” in prose. Wordsworth/Dante/Blake. Who’s in charge of the expressway, or the future? “George Washington, seven times” (13). And remember Blake wrote a book called America, A Prophecy. But “Louis XVI is alive and living in Washington” so maybe those old revolutions didn’t quite displace the ancien regime after all.

And You May Ask Yourself…

On to the second section. “This is not my beautiful poem.” A skewed reference to David Byrne’s Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime,” also quoted in the epigraph to section VII. Something different: “Cloverleaf Medians & Means” features a dialogue, in verse (we can tell it’s verse because the first letter of each line is capitalized, like in Wordsworth) and prose. A dialogue between A and B, one that seems to consist of fragments of documents (“Those who live within 1,200 feet of the expressway” [16]) and found text (“Without trucks America Stops” [18]) as well as something else, “nothing between me and my poems” (20), okay, but definitely not “my beautiful poem,” at least the way Wordsworth might have written it.

And then another “Memorable Fancy.” A man is found behind the expressway’s veil (like the wizard behind the curtain in Oz? I don’t think so): an oracle of nihilism, like Beckett just a bit (the description “an elephant's behind with eyes” [22] did make me think of Beckett’s face in his later years, with all its eloquent lines): “words suck in on themselves: dig as fast as you can, they roil and fill in” (23).

The next section goes back to tercets. “Endless Inter-States” starts with a vision of expressways turned to gardens, a sort of ecotopia gone awry with “watchmen with their machine guns / keeping humans...out”—but at least the poet apologizes. She tried to show us nature, but it didn’t quite work. The verse goes on “poetically,” layering assonance and alliteration and internal rhyme. Later, in part six, the comment “but what better than the well-trodden / Path” (35). Followed by another Memorable Fancy, in which “she yelled. I am tired of the tyranny of the optimistic. I want a revolution of the optimist!” (36). Is this a comment on the “naturalism” of these tercets? Hmmmm.

Do Not Adjust Your Set—This Is the Transmission

What next? If the book has indeed been building oppositions of nature and no-nature, we’ll expect something different. And we get it: the google-sculpted chaos of section IV, “Crash.” “Cached. Similar pages. Note this” the search engine tells us, again, and again. It’s all the same, it’s all stored away, pay attention. No-nature? “Does this scene look familiar.” You bet it does.

We’re in the rhythm now. More tercets next, right? Wrong. That would be predictable, and Queyras knows a predictable rhythm is tedious, but a slightly unpredictable rhythm swings. So next we get “Lines Written Many Miles from Grasmere,” except that they’re extracts from Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, written in Grasmere. This is the centre of the book, the still centre. But this doesn’t exactly map an idyll: “melancholy and ill bowels” (54), “Wm still unwell” (52), but also “Impressed we melted into sonnets” (54). And it’s important to note that the centre isn’t William, who’s “haunted with altering the Rainbow” ([58]—one of his poems most reminiscent of Blake, it seems to me, and I think it’s also important to note that Wordsworth didn’t think much of Blake) but rather Dorothy, whose Grasmere includes not only “Common ash yew ivy holly / In rows, a sweet moss” but also “a woman half-/starved” (56–7). The form is once again tercets and single lines alternating for the most part (but not always), yet the lines are much shorter than the previous “natural” sections, and we’re given fragments rather than sentences, as though we’re hearing Dorothy’s voice in an interrupted transmission, catching glimpses of her world through a postmodern grid of speech.

Queyras has swung her rhythm with this section, so what's next? “The Endless Hum” of “Progress,” which follows the same kind of rhythm as the A/B dialogue “Cloverleaf Median & Means” and structures the next poem, “Murmurings, Movements or Fringe Manifesto,” but here it’s not a dialogue. “One is not simply” (60) the poem begins: perhaps it’s a dialogue of one? But who is speaking here? “One” asking us “What is more self-referential than A?” This would be an easy question to answer if we knew what A was. Well, “America,” obviously, but Queyras has drained the signification from the name, reducing it to the abstraction of its initial. And that invites all sorts of questions. I've already asked who is speaking here. But also, is this a gendered voice? Is the speaker a citizen of A, a visitor to A, a long-distance observer of A? When do we place the speaker in time? Generally the “now” of the poems seems to be the first decade of the 21st century, but the next poem suggests other times: “One morning thousands showed up...”

Without some of these ambiguities of voicing, “Progress” sounds very much like the Allan Ginsberg of “Wichita Vortex Sutra” and the other road poems of “The Fall of America,” written between 1965 and 1971 (though, as Margaret Christakos noted, there's the echo of “Howl” as well)—but in those poems there’s never any doubt about who’s speaking: it’s Ginsberg, the Voice of Prophesy; with Queyras the voice of prophecy, like Dorothy Wordsworth’s voice, has been fractured, fragmented: there is no certainty in it: “One is scrambled.” We could probably say something about the difference between the time in which Ginsberg wrote, at the end of modernism, and Queyras’s time (now), after postmodernism, and how that’s reflected in the difference in their voices and the way they assume authority, but that would be a long side-trip.

The Body in Time

As time begins to crack and we see the possibility of an offramp in the future, we are nonetheless denied the easy consolations afforded by being able to clearly situate ourselves. In the “Memorable Fancy” that follows (Queyras is following the rhythm of her structure, still), we’re told “You think the expressway is the future, but you're wrong” (69).

Time isn’t the only fractured substance. “In A, body parts. / In A, bodies” (63). Whereas in Ginsberg (as in Whitman, along with Blake, his prophetic ancestors in poetry—note the patriarchal lineage: another interesting side-trip would be looking at the patriarchal voice in Ginsberg, and how that plays with his sexual politics) the celebration of the body becomes an alternative to the de-naturing of “A”, an off-ramp, in Queyras, “body parts” and “bodies” are not exactly celebrated. They are “remains”—back in “Cloverleaf Median & Means” we're told that the touch of “thumb to the back of your leg ... has no business here” (21): this is the only “touch” in the book (except for the phrase “skin like a touch pad” (36): everywhere the body is denied. So that when in the Memorable Fancy at the end of  Section VI, “The Endless Hum,” the Other says “[Y]ou’re substantial” (69), my thought was “this is the first we've heard of that.”

The denial of the body’s status as an unbroken whole continues in the next section, “Misdirections.” Following the rhythm, we’re back to tercets again, broken by prose. And we've got body/parts: “pieces of cow, slices of pig” (72), “blood, steel, lining passing bone” (73) in “Acceptable Dissociations,” and in the next poem the body becomes the site of metastasis.

But there’s another thing. In part 2 of “Acceptable Dissociations” we get the only use of the first person other than that in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, and it’s startling: “Where / Is your horse? she said, and there was nothing I could say. / What I want is generally tidy. What I get often can’t dance.” Then in part 3 there's an italicized aside that “I live here because the country I once lived in is a corporate washroom...” (74) and a little later: “Sprong, sarong. I ask you?” That’s it. Who is this “I”? The poet expressing herself directly? But other than the aside these seem to be expressions of frustration about the poem itself: “What I get often can't dance” (73). Or is the “I” the “someone in all of us” in this section's “Memorable Fancy,” the “someone who sees beyond all of this” (81)? It’s not clear to me. Maybe I'll call this another example of the fractured post-modern (lack of) viewpoint.

The next, penultimate, section, headed by a quote from the same Talking Heads song that (almost) gave us a previous section title, asks “Where is down the road? Where is away?” (84), moving away from tercets again (the rhythm in “The Road is Everywhere Equally”) and then answering (perhaps) (in tercets, naturally) in “Three Dreams of the Expressway” with another vision of the expressway being dismantled, followed by a “Memorable Fancy” where expressways coexist with gardens, trees, rivers, air, and “tires humming like baby birds” (93). The expressway (no nature) has been naturalized. And go back a few pages, to “The Grey Hills of Oxford” (which sounds like the title of a certain kind of landscape painting) in which a mountain of discarded tires “lose their particularity, / Tires become brushstrokes, hills / Fading into sky” (87). This is nature now.

Queyras concludes with “Proverbs of Hell,” like Blake’s a fundamentally optimistic program: “go forth and undo harm.” And
 

        Where man is, nature is bereft.
        Where nature is not man, is not known.
        Where nature is not natural, man is not man.
        ...
        Where nature is, man is not enough.

So, “don't make natural what isn't”? But what isn't?

Again, this calls up Gary Snyder for me. His poem “Ripples on the Surface” ends with these lines:
 

        The vast wild
          the house, alone.
        The little house in the wild,
          the wild in the house.

        Both forgotten.

                No nature.

         Both together, one big empty house. [381]

Afternote

I loved this book. As the kind of guy who enjoys Derrida, I liked its capital-R References to capital-R Romanticism a whole lot. I want to look more closely at the relation to Blake, and maybe Keats; I’m continuing to think about the relative absence of Whitman’s voice. There are a few things that perplex me, like the male figure “on a train to Rangpur” in “The Road is Everywhere Equally,” the only nongeneric male in the book other than the father and uncle in “Solitary” and the various “he’s” in the Memorable Fancies, the name “Durinder” in “Divining Rod” (is this the Swedish inventor Niklas Durinder who Google tells me holds a patent for a “Device and Method for Calibrating the Center Point of a Tool Mounted on a Robot by Means of a ...”, or Durinder S. Kanwar, Internist, Doctor, Roseville, California, or...). There are a few things that annoy or seem out of place, such as the name-checking of Auschwitz and Darfur in “Solitary,” and the line “Reality is a parking lot in Qatar. Reality is an airstrip in Malawi,” which is a great line but seems to come from a different book, or strains to bring in a perspective from the world beyond the West, which feels like an afterthought.

I also have a bit of a nagging feeling that after the first poem with its very personal, elegiac feel, the poetic voice is more and more depersonalized, and that it doesn’t really recover, although the rhetorical structure of the book suggests to me it ought to. And more.