Through a Country
You, on the one hand, see a land
Green and rolling
With chalky marble
And stretches of yellowed sandstone
Patched here and there into the hills,
Coming up for air after eons of sleep.
While I on the other hand say
Here collisions occurred
A hundred million moons ago
With valleys heavy and damp
And sea islands becoming rock above the clouds.
But now all of this
Comes to bear upon
Exit 49, a place
Of rest,
Of a chosen view of the Taconics and the Catskills on the horizon
The geometric fields left half fallow, half
In hope of an early spring,
A pause on our way home.
The time continues
One stop past this moment.
Clairvoyant for a mortal hour
We finish what is in our cup
Then climb back into our debate
As to where the best place is
To eat, to die, or
Start anew.
The land moves down to the sea
And the sea relents
It is getting ready
To begin again.
Joel Stein
Highland Park, NJ 2010
Joel Stein was born in Denver, Colorado, and grew up in the Hampton Roads area of Southeastern Virginia. He attended college at the University of Cincinnati, and the Iowa Writers Workshop. He lived in New York City for several years and then commuted to, and worked in, New York City for many years more. He was a resident at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He has been published in The New York Quarterly, The Kansas Quarterly, Glassworks, Icarus, The Vanderbilt Poetry Review, and The Paris Review. He currently lives in Hancock, New Hampshire.
The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Four): Joel Stein
Joel Stein’s compelling meditation on the landscape of the interstate, addressed to a partnered “you,” dramatizes the temporary clarity—“clairvoyance” of highway travel, which, as we progress, provides illusory panoramas of future, present, and past. Of the “big four” poets of the New York School, its tone shares most with James Schuyler’s wry sense of the limitations of human experience. But where Schuyler’s decision in “June 30, 1974” to “have another piece of toast” suggests contentment, even coziness, Stein emphasizes our apartness from geological processes that take place in a distant and alien time frame. Where Schuyler is domestic and personal, Stein is objective. A “Rest Area,” that oxymoron, provides an anonymous beverage: “We finish what is in our cup.” There is a coolness appropriate to the experience described—but that also extends itself to a characterization of the human. A poet mindful of quantum physics, Stein reminds us that choice is sparse, even illusory.
The poem’s contrary “you” sees an up-to-date landscape, viewing it as a painter might:
You, on the one hand, see a land
Green and rolling
With chalky marble
And stretches of yellowed sandstone
Patched here and there into the hills,
Coming up for air after eons of sleep.
What an excellent image, that “coming up for air.” In it, road cuts become agents of awakening.
But our poet/speaker penetrates further, reaching underneath to the drama of collisions as perceived by science—possessed, after all, of its own lore—as suggested by the language of “a hundred million moons ago.” Where the “you” sees a quiescent landscape woken after “eons of sleep,” the speaker is most interest in origins, in orogeny—the violence of change.
While I on the other hand say
Here collisions occurred
A hundred million moons ago
With valleys heavy and damp
And sea islands becoming rock above the clouds.
That all this is visible or imaginable to the traveler is the work of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the federal interstate system built in the fifties that redesigned travel—in a way somewhat analogous to Haussmann's redesign of Paris in the nineteenth century-- exchanging, for the dark vagaries of Medieval alleys, wide boulevards and their prospects.
Super-highways colonize, neutralize. We must see the marked miles as they have been arranged, an organized text with exits as chapters, a primer we skim in powerful machines. All has been thought out by engineers: grade and degree of turn, depth of road cut, opportunities for drainage, possible wind shear.
A town near me once owned a throwback hairpin curve in its interstate—the source of much excitement and inconvenience. Known as the last such crimp allowed in any major highway, it was, in its time, a thrilling deviation.
It can be said that highways form an enduring metaphor for how we too often live: following a bland prescribed route, observing signs. But, as Stein’s poem brilliantly points out, they also provide moments of clarity:
The time continues
One stop past this moment.
Clairvoyant for a mortal hour
We finish what is in our cup
Then climb back into our debate
As to where the best place is
To eat, to die, or
Start anew.
When they deepen into seriousness, free-verse poems tend to wax iambic, and Stein’s “Through a Country,” with its provocatively bland title, is no exception. “As to where the best place is” wisely roughs up the rhythm for a moment, mirroring the difficulty and/or impossibility of choice. So does the line break at “or”—not to mention the wild incongruity of the list itself. Is this what choice comes down to? The list is chilling yet inspiring, ending as it does with (a somewhat ironic) “Start anew.”
“Then climb back into our debate” provides more than an eloquent metaphor for re-starting a discussion. The vehicle itself, powered by the destruction of nature, is the debate. It keeps the dialogue going, for the poem’s couple and for us, who emerge from it with both a clearer and more vexed sense of possibility and destiny. Stein’s masterful “Through a Country” incites us to look beyond ourselves, to question speed’s smooth illusions, and to cast a cold eye on the resurgent sea. -Angela Ball
Yes, we do need "A pause on our way home" and "cast a cold eye on the resurgent sea." Enjoyed the poem and analysis.
Posted by: Jian Z | December 05, 2023 at 09:29 AM
Dear Angela, Thank you for the thoughtful exegesis of the poem by Joel Stein. I have followed and admired his poems for a long time.
Posted by: Rick Stull | December 05, 2023 at 03:20 PM