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Boston Herald: Poetry’s power in fast-paced world
Three-term U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky, a CAS professor of English, tells the April 15 Boston Herald that there is both time and space for poetry in today’s fast-paced world. “In a world where we’re surrounded by mass media, entertainment on a mass scale, machines and instruments on a mass scale, horror on a mass scale, there’s a craving for something that’s on a human scale,” he says. “Poetry satisfies that craving because it is, by the nature of the art, something that exists on a human scale.” Poetry, he adds, can have tremendous power. “The power of language not merely to communicate but to move, persuade, inflame, or soothe is tremendous.”
New York Times and Boston Globe: Partisan Review ceases publication with tribute issue to William Phillips
Partisan Review, an influential quarterly journal of culture and politics, founded in 1934 in New York’s Greenwich Village and housed at Boston University since 1978, publishes its final issue this month as a tribute to cofounder and editor in chief William Phillips, who died in September 2002. In its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, the journal provided readers with an introduction to abstract expressionism, existentialism, new criticism, and works by young writers such as Robert Lowell, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, and Elizabeth Hardwick, reports the April 17 New York Times. The journal’s influence had been supplanted by such high-profile competitors as The New Republic and the New York Review of Books, and its dwindling circulation, recently down to about 3,200, combined with Phillips’ death, proved decisive to its fate. In a Boston Globe interview on April 17, Chancellor John Silber says he surveyed a dozen or so intellectual and literary figures in deciding what to do with the magazine. “The general attitude was that Partisan Review was a reliquary. What it needed was a new editor and purpose and direction.” In the New York Times, Silber says that the journal “was magnificent when it was the left’s response to Stalinism. Following Stalin’s death it continued to still have relevance because we were in the Cold War period. But after perestroika, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the breaking down of the Berlin Wall, the magazine lost its purpose.” Still, he calls the journal “a valuable name,” adding, “I would still hope that it could be revived.” BU, which owns the rights to the journal’s name and archives, hopes to eventually resuscitate it. “The Yale Review was discontinued some years ago, and after there was some reconsideration they found a new editor, a new direction, and they revived it,” says Silber. “I suspect something similar might happen with Partisan Review.” Phillips’ wife, Edith Kurzweil, who has overseen the journal as executive editor since his death, says that she and the magazine’s advisory board decided to cease publication with the new issue and make it a tribute to Phillips. “We thought we should go out with a bang rather than whatever we had on hand,” she says.
Daily News Tribune (Newton, Mass.): State air quality improving
Four years ago tougher automobile emissions standards
in Massachusetts resulted in rejection stickers for nearly 10 percent
of all vehicles. Today while less than 4 percent fail the test, more
cars on the streets could increase smog-producing chemicals in the air,
says the Newton, Mass., Daily News Tribune on April 21. “It’s
not what’s coming out of individual cars’ tailpipes,” says
Richard Clapp, an SPH professor of environmental health. “You can
have even lower emissions per vehicle, but if you have more vehicles
or more vehicle miles, the aggregate emissions can go up.” Environmental
advocates warn that new emissions standards might not mean cleaner air,
but Clapp, who has studied air-quality standards for 20 years, believes
air quality in Massachusetts has improved in recent years. Power plants
and industrial boilers are now required to use air scrubbers, he says,
and with the advent of cleaner-burning diesel engines on some trucks
and buses, air quality has begun to move in the right direction. “It’s
a good thing to keep doing, and we’ve been doing it, thank God,
and things are getting somewhat better,” he says.
25
April 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations