Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

This week on nybooks.com: April is National Poetry Month, and in the April 3 issue of theReview, Dan Chiasson reviews three recent collections of poetry. On the NYRblog Diane Ravitch analyzes the battle over charter schools in New York City, Amy Knight looks at Obama’s misguided optimism about Russia, J. Hoberman endures Lars von Trier’sNymphomaniac, and Perry Link considers the lasting effects of the Tiananmen massacre twenty-five years later.

The Roar of the Charters Diane Ravitch Contrary to popular myth, New York City’s charter schools are more racially segregated than public schools and performed no better on state tests. How did a privately managed school franchise manage to hijack the new mayor’s education reforms?   ADVERTISEMENT   China After Tiananmen: Money, Yes; Ideas, No Perry Link What happened in and around Tiananmen Square twenty-five years ago haunts the memories not only of people who witnessed the events and the families of the victims, but also of those who stood, and still stand, with the attacking side.   Obama’s Putin Delusion Amy Knight Washington officials have described the possibility of Russian actions in eastern Ukraine and Transdniestria as a radical shift in Russia’s relations with the West. But to anyone who has followed the Kremlin closely over the years, none of this should come as a great surprise.   ADVERTISEMENT   Sex: The Terror and the Boredom J. Hoberman Although too capricious (or should we say promiscuous?) to be a taxonomy, Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac is designed to illustrate and exhaust every popular theory of nymphomania, including, of course, the idea that the condition exists only as a male fantasy.   Go Poets Dan Chiasson One big intervention modern poetry made was to change our sense of the word “song,” which for aeons was a relatively uncomplicated synonym for “poem.” Surely poets couldn’t simply “sing” in the midst of war, chaos, historical belatedness, mass production, bottomless anxiety—all the bad things that supposedly came into the world after the moment in 1910 when, as Virginia Woolf put it, “human character changed.”   Why Some People Do Not Read Poetry W.S. Merwin Because they already know that it means stopping and without stopping they know that beyond stopping it will mean listening listening without hearing and maybe then hearing without hearing and what would they hear then what good would it be to them like some small animal crossing the road suddenly there but not seeming to move at night and they are late and may be on the wrong road over the mountain with all the others asleep and not hitting it that time as though forgetting it again   William S. Burroughs on Film April 3–6: A suitably outré mixed bag for the Burroughs centennial   Visions of Early Christianity April: A series of lectures byAnthony Grafton