New England Review

NER Recommends | Cy Twombly & Poetry

In the new issue of Gulf Coast, Sarah A. Strickley describes Cy Twombly’s relationship with poetry:

Twombly liked poets—Rilke, Pound, and Eliot in particular. They offered him the condensed phrase, the reference. To his thinking, it didn’t matter if he represented the lyric precisely in his pictures; the important thing was that it was there for him when he needed it. A case in point is the massive, 13-by-52-foot painting, Untitled (Say Goodbye to Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor). The painting began with several volumes of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholia, but only reached completion after twenty-two years of work when Twombly wrangled the use of a warehouse, unrolled the canvas, and came to a beautiful line from a Keats poem. He changed plains to shores, but dismissed the disparity as unimportant: “For me, it’s just a fantasy, you know. I mean it’s a way the mind works; it can’t occupy itself with just a brush all the time,” he said.

The issue contains a beautifully reproduced selection of Twombly’s paintings from the Cy Twombly Gallery, The Menil Collection, Houston.

NER Classics | Franz Boas on The Educated Classes

Franz Boas’s essay “The Mental Attitude of the Educated Classes” first appeared in the September 5, 1918 issue of The Dial and was reprinted in the Rediscoveries section of NER 26.4 (2005):

 …the desires of the masses are in a wider sense more human than those of the educated classes. It is therefore not surprising that the masses of the people—whose attachment to the past is comparatively slight and who work—respond more quickly and more energetically to the urgent demands of the hour than the educated classes, and that the ethical ideals of the best among them are human ideals, not those of a segregated class. For this reason I should always be more inclined to accept, in regard to fundamental human problems, the judgment of the masses rather than the judgment of the intellectuals, which is much more certain to be warped by unconscious control of traditional ideas. I do not mean to say that the judgment of the masses would be acceptable in regard to every problem of human life, because there are many which, by their technical nature, are beyond their understanding. Nor do I believe that the details of the right solution of a problem can always be found by the masses; but I feel strongly that the problem itself, as felt by them, and the ideal that they want to see realized, is a safer guide for our conduct than the ideal of the intellectual group that stands under the ban of an historical tradition that dulls their feeling for the needs of the day.

News & Notes | New York Times Notable Books of 2011

Frequent NER contributor Laura Kasischke’s book Space, In Chains (Copper Canyon Press) has been named a Notable Book of 2011 by The New York Times.

Three poems by Kasischke published in NER are available online:

“Miss Congeniality” (26.4), “Riddle” (29.2), and “They Say” (30.2).

From “They Say”:

one-twelfth of our lives is wasted
standing in a line.

The sacred path of that.

NER Community | Eleanor Henderson on Robert Cohen

At NPR Books, Eleanor Henderson talks about the influence of Middlebury professor Robert Cohen:

As an undergrad at Middlebury, I was one of the many students who hung on Cohen’s every word in class, but I suspect I was the only one to hunt down every word he’d written — ordering back issues of Story, Glimmer Train and New England Review, smuggling them hungrily into my dorm room like the desserts I’d sneak from the dining hall.

I read his stories again and again, then swallowed them whole when, to my delight, they were released in book form, and later I taught them to my own students.

Henderson’s novel Ten Thousand Saints was named a Notable Book and one of the 10 Best Books of 2011 by The New York Times. Cohen’s story, “The Next Big Thing,” originally appeared in NER (19.2).

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