EDITOR’S NOTE

This is the 20th annual issue of the SUNY New Paltz Undergraduate Literary Journal, The Stonesthrow Review, which means that this publication has been a part of the experience of creative writing students for many years longer than I have, and hopefully it will remain a piece of the experience for many years more than I will. In my office I have a shelf of little printed copies going back to some of the earliest issues. The prose, the poems, and the scenes inside those volumes are from a distant time now, as these will someday seem to a future reader. A note from the editor in the 4th issue ever made reminds us that “Time exists on its own terms” and that every moment in life is a potential moment for the receiving of enlightenment. The artist’s job is to “stencil [these] against the surface of the mundane.”

In some ways when I look at those older pieces they feel so similar to the ones we’re presenting here. Writers then wrote about the beauty of nature, the anxieties of the moment, about sex, about drugs, about brothers and mothers, about refrigerators, about traffic, about love, about the future. The enlightenments we receive today, the mundane surfaces we stencil them onto, are not so different at all.

But we keep writing. We Make It New. When Ezra Pound, the modernist poet, adopted this phrase as the fundamental drive for what he saw as a new kind of art for a new age of humankind, it was a call to arms, to break the old rules, to reinvent, reimagine, and go into unexplored territories of language, structure, theme, and soul.

“Make It New” he commanded, even using this as the title of his anthology. And yet I read this week that Pound likely appropriated the phrase from one of several books of Confucian history and philosophy that he read and taught in the 1920s, in which King Ch’eng T’ang (Tching-thang), was described as having a bathtub with a particular inscription engraved on it:

“Renew thyself daily, utterly, make it new, and again new, make it new.”

Only it may not have said this at all, apparently. Somewhere in the translation from 10th century Chinese to French and then to English, it seems the meaning may have shifted. The washtub’s inscription’s original meaning turns out to be less like “Make it new” and more like “Do it again.”

Make it new. Do it again. We are always, in some way doing both of these things, and at the same time. “It is not enough to always tell the truth in art,” writes Charles Baxter, “The truth can get dull.”

The truth is not dramatic enough on its own, Baxter argues, but it can be “if it is forgotten first.” And so we sit down, again and again, to write in the hopes that we might remind ourselves of all the truths we have forgotten.

Time exists on its own terms. Twenty years is, on some level, a major milestone, and on another, no time at all. This 20th issue of the Stonesthrow Review sees that work begun then and says that there is more to be said. What was strange then has become, now, familiar. What was once familiar has become strange again.

And so here are 35 poems, scenes, essays, and fictions, each one is a reception of the enlightenments of today, which our students have now made new, and done again.

Table of Contents

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