"I think this is a" Poetry

As poets expand the sense of what goes into poetry, and what can come out of it for us, we readers look for signposts that lead forward from our older sense of the poetic into the new. It helps to have a basis in what we are used to in order to begin moving forward. New Sutras is cannily balanced on the peak of what we look for in poems, and then it steps off into wide open spaces. The usual idioms of rhythmic expression, repetition with variation, hearing the self, questioning self-expression, relaying imagery, coloring experience, engaging the interplay of form and content, and suggesting wisdom, all are at work in New Sutras. Then comes the new. The book provides a special contemporary aspect in its use of today's machinery (Twitter) as a platform, but it is not just this aspect that makes it forward looking; it is the fresh meaning-making in it that makes it delightful, moving, and educational.

There are new moves in several aspects of our reading to catch onto here. Among the common elements of poetics, "voice" is one good old part of poetry that is put more challengingly at issue in this book. If one asks one's reading self what voice this poetry uses, varying answers may arise as we move through its pages. School tells us that "voice" matters in poetry because it lets us know who is speaking in the poem. Having a title like New Sutras ("sutra" is the term for a holy text or collection of aphorisms or instructions) suggests a truth-telling voice, with big truths being told. Those are here; my favorite example is at the top of the poem's second page: "no thing is just one thing."

Each line, like that one, is a kind of poem in itself as the larger form of this book unfolds. Each is a thread (the root meaning of "sutra") in a tapestry that is not pictorial. Having the plural of "sutra" as a title for the one big poem they form suggests that there are many truth-telling texts here or to be found through what is here. A simple but profound truth like the one above reaches out to inform the odd bits like the next line: "if u can hear me, dream." This line could be an address from a poet to her reader and it could underline the truth of that previous line by pushing us into the experience of how any one thing gets connected to others.

That truth stands out in the next three lines too:

commercialized baby shit greenpathless vivid greenfistular light bluish green

and in all the other similar sets of color namings throughout the book. Each of those colors embraces the activity of imagination on the reader's end of things; they are not just expressing some perception of the writer's.

Stein is writing with "languaging" in mind as much as anything else. This has been poetry's long-term job through all of its historic modes and devices. There are rhetorical moves in New Sutras that help keep the focus on how things are put into, and how they come out of, wording. Where we are used to grammar invisibly informing our understanding, Stein challenges us light-heartedly to become aware of what grammatical "errors" may imply. The book has incorrect-sounding lines like this: "doesn't this look like a reactivities," followed by "doesn't this seem like a leaseback."

Without the need for question marks, she has set up questions that are rhetorical in the sense of getting us to see and possibly agree with an evaluation of what we are doing in reading these lines. It is as if we have "an arrangement in which the company that sells an asset can lease back that same asset from the purchaser" (from Investopedia). This is the reactivity of engaged reading, the dance and business of language...