O Little Expressway: Sina Queyras and the Traffic of Subversive Hope

Abstract

O Little Expressway: Sina Queyras and the Traffic of Subversive Hope Erin Wunker (bio) 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 [End Page 37] 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...