"Writer "
Nathaniel G. Moore’s review of The SubWay
Broken Pencil Issue 43
After two fiction books with legendary Toronto publisher Gutter Press (Dis Location, Stories After the Flood, The Double, a novel) Philip Quinn is back with The Subway. I got this book in the mail just before some bad shit went down at Osgoode Station, a few blocks from where I work. The recent TTC subway shooting sent city-wide panic into an otherwise normal boring work day here in Toronto, the Centre of the universe. And what connects this central power more than the subway? Philip Quinn’s new book The Subway attempts to humanize and categorize all that is transit, transient and translucent whilst whizzing along underground. Sometimes backed with morgue-like historical fodder, other times sparse and linguistically playful, Quinn’s book is a "jackhammer to the simple concrete things", perhaps fitting that a line from his own book best describes the work. The back copy suggests that our subway system is a reflector, and also a deceptor, "you see what you want to see; sometimes acts of inexpressible kindness and beauty, and often just that cold paralyzing indifference that exists between strangers."
While the subject matter may seem to limit Quinn to ride out the theme, his quirkiness never subsides. His invention here makes the commute enjoyable and you’ll find yourself rereading certain passages, deliberately riding the subway loop just because it’s not so bad a system after all.
Two new books by Toronto poets each use systems of mass transit—the subway
and the expressway—to investigate the condition of contemporary life.
Working both as metaphors and settings for the lived experience the poems
document, these transit routes become analogies for language itself, which
also brings people from place to place, and from person to person.
Riding home from Kennedy to Kipling, your eyes wander up to the ads but
instead find poems in the TTC's "Poetry on the Way" series; reading these
words invites you to think of what you might write if you held a pen and
paper. In The SubWay (BookThug, 2008), Philip Quinn inhabits this commuter's
space of reflection. With close attention to a TTC that resembles David
Topping’s photographs in 69 Stations, Quinn uses the subway system as a
theme upon which to compose his subterranean variations. Thepoems range from
specific locations ( “Bloor-Danforth Line at 10:45 P.M. on a Tuesday Night”)
to broader psychogeographic meditations (“Language is a City”). Beginning
with the first departure from Davisville Station in 1954, Quinn’s collection
educates readers about Canada’s first subway system: “a symbolic signal
changed from red to amber to green, and the first train pulled out of the
station.” Quinn often returns to this “symbolic signal” as a figure for the
possibility of “Making Histories.” He also maps the subway onto the human
body through recurring images of birth, and the central nervous system
(“triune brain”). Yet Quinn’s speaker and the subway riders that appear in
his poems—“the old man” and “this woman”—are only ever described in slivers
of detail, an effect that conveys the anonymity of the subway but leaves
this reader wanting to know more about these ghostly figures, glimpsed as if
through a train window.
Moving from a public train to a private car, Sina Queyras’s Expressway
(Coach House 2009) deconstructs our expectations of this capitalist symbol
of the mobile self. This collection does not start inside an automobile,
but rather places readers beside the I-95, looking at the cars roaring past
on the expressway. It is the expressway as representative of modern
civilization that is under scrutiny in this book of poems.
Sharing the anonymity of subway riders in Quinn’s The SubWay, Queyras’s
speaker riffs on Wordsworth as she wanders “lonely as a cloud, dappled,
drowned / A melancholic pace and nowhere untouched.” The poetry is packed
with rich fragments ¾ phrases that follow each other like cars as they
extend outward onto onramps and exits refusing to cohere, or rather refusing
to adhere to “a system of containing that is concrete”. For instance,
“Murmurings, Movements, or Fringe Manifesto” articulates this character of
the expressway that constantly exceeds itself: “The expressway is the
future. / The expressway is the market. / The expressway is the line
endless. / The expressway contains multitudes.” In exploring and expressing
these multitudes of meaning, the poem as a form becomes part of the
expressway: “the poem is a connector, the poem is not a country lane, there
is nowhere that doesn’t lead here […] There is nowhere this is not. There is
nowhere I.” Queyras’s poems poignantly ask what this nowhere means to the
people who travel, not towards, but within it.
Whether writing as a passenger on a subway plummeting through a
nowhere-space between stations or as a driver forging her own path amid an
intricate network of laneways (which look like “Busby Berkeley in the night
sky”), both Quinn and Queyras show what poetry can do when it simultaneously
re-maps roadways of transportation and lines of human thought.
