Wonder and Wander: On Sina Queyras’s Expressway

By Margot Lettner

What to say in the face of whole paragraphs:

I agree, I agree, your wisdom like a gun to my head.

(Sina Queyras, “The Road is Everywhere Equally,” Expressway, 86)

On my deportment while reading Expressway: I have read this in a car; I have read this in a chair; I have read this while saving seats in Trinity-St.Paul’s; I have read this in an art gallery; I have read this, much like Dr. Seuss would, everywhere.

            And the Seuss reference may be more on than off here, more reverent than irrelevant, for Expressway has some of that staccato, change-up-the-suits voice—“Oh what a lot of cars there are!”

A Poet opened the door and invited her in. Lean this way,the Poet said, which meant she leaned in the opposite way.

(Sina Queyras, “A Memorable Fancy,” 86)

My response to Queyras is likely to be ambulatory. As well as my deportment to her work, there is also my movement into it, meaning, first, a walk to my bookshelf for Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking, a lovely nonfiction companion to Queyras:

But walking has sometimes been, at least since the late eighteenth century, an act of resistance to the mainstream. It stood out when its pace was out of keeping with the time….walking culture was a reaction against the speed and alienation of the industrial revolution….Most [walking] cultures draw from ancient practices—of peripatetic philosophers, of poets composing afoot, of pilgrims and practitioners of Buddhist walking meditation—or old ones, such as hiking and flâneury. But one new realm…opened up in the 1960s, walking as art. (267)

Solnit and her notion of “artwalk,” which she explores in joined anatomies of literature and history such as “The Legs of William Wordsworth,” takes me to Queyras’s overarching call of resistance yet hope, “Go forth and undo harm./ Go forth and do.” (“Proverbs of Hell,” 98). Expressway’s construction patterns this call—and here is where I love Queyras’s thick roadbed of ironies and their supporting language, “The Grey Hills of Oxford” swooning with dankish hills of the bald and threadbare. The Blakeian sequence “A Memorable Fancy,” which punctuates six of the collection’s nine parts, is often a conversation with an interlocutor, perhaps an elder, that sets up a different hum:  “You can say, Calm. You can say, Slow. You can say, Enough…You can say, Pine, and mean it” (82). It sends a hum that is the continuo throughout Expressway, counterpointing sound-bite poems such as “Progress” or “Crash.”

Queyras slows her speed to a foot amble in the book’s centre section, with variations on Dorothy Wordsworths’ journals in “Lines Written Many Miles From Grasmere.” This section of verse completely startled me, this being thrown back to the Romantics, which urged another roundabout to my bookshelf for the old maroon-bound anthology. And we’re not even using Bill’s legs! Jacqueline Larson, as well as several Influency participants, note the wanderer in Expressway and its infrequent “I,” as inflected with the female voice, also observing that it’s the women who go down swinging hammers and pickaxes to rip up the lanes—lines? I see a contesting line running through, an alternate passageway created by and for the Dorothys:  “…beautiful blue/ Butterflies and Wm asleep” (57-8). Perhaps the Romantics have a Beat, after all: ambles with cold pork in pocket aside, they could be drawn into their own pose—“Wm haunted with altering the Rainbow” (58).

These found and stitched lines from Dorothy’s Grasmere Journals are both languid and darting; like the half-starved woman Dorothy meets, they pursue with fury and tears—they move this other voice to wonder and wander in continuo, in counterpoint, to the road builders. Dorothy, resolving “[t]o write a journal of the time til/ Wm and J return” (48), is bound to her window of space “[p]ut by the linen, down Batchelor’s/ Buttons, mended in the morning” (49) yet the triplet/pause rhythm of her lines and their arch counterpointing of quotidian life/unordinary play interrupt this place, move her beyond it. The fun in bachelor’s buttons being cornflowers being flowers to amble by; no doubt that for Dorothy “[f]orms I skimmed, what freedom storms” (58). The ambiguity of “her”—here, here, and over here, voices deeper than roadbeds.

Or, as Queyras offers in “Proverbs of Hell,” “Where nature is, man is not enough” (98).