Romantic Ramblings, Revisited: Eco-logics of Mobility in Sina Queyras’s Expressway

Abstract

Sina Queyras’s 2009 book of poetry, Expressway, begins with two epigraphs that explore modern life’s fraught relationship to time, wherein considerations of past and future run up against the crush of the new and the now. The first, from Wallace Stevens’ “Lettres d’un Soldat” (1918), deliberately confuses temporalities with its advice to “have no rememberings of hope,” while the second, drawn from a 2007 Daily Horoscope, offers more chipper, though arguably no less cryptic, advice: “‘If you can’t see the finish line in the near distance, don’t get frustrated—turn around! There you’ll see it, miles behind you’” (Queyras 5).1 This juxtaposition of references, which pairs the literary avant garde with popular wisdom of the sort that routinely floods e-mail inboxes, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds, reflects Queyras’s larger intellectual and aesthetic vision, one that has experimented with popular forms of social media in the hope of creating public forums wherein people—and women in particular—feel welcome to express and exchange ideas about art. For Queyras and her readers, much of this experiment in public poetics has taken the form of blogging, specifically via the online Lemon Hound site that Queyras started in 2005, and which later turned into a multi-authored blog and literary journal.2 The Daily Horoscope’s assertion that the finish line is already miles behind us also serves as an apt shorthand for the vision of accelerated modernity Expressway goes on to explore, wherein wanderers cross landscapes “nowhere untouched” (7), and where Nature with a capital-N has become “nostalgia” (7). Two hundred years after the Romantic era, Queyras’s work prompts readers to ask whether nature can any longer be understood as something more than a fanciful idea. If so, then how might contemporary ecopoetics address the dynamic relationships between human and more-than-human worlds, and what might a re-engagement with certain Romantic texts contribute to the discussion?