A Progressive Education

by Richard Howard

Overview

How extraordinary that the only poetry collection devoted to the trials and tribulations of an entire class of sixth graders is written by the eighty-five-year-old MacArthur Grant and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Howard!

Although loosely based on the poet's own progressive education in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1940s, the poems are set mostly in the present day.

Richard Howard is a poet of personality, of history, and of a sensibility rooted in knowledge. In his fifteenth collection, Howard captivates the reader as he and the class grapple with science and literature, teacher and principal, and the hard facts and comic fancies of life itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933527826
Publisher:	Turtle Point Press
Publication date:	10/14/2014
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.75(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Richard Howard is a poet, scholar, teacher, critic, and translator. Inner Voices is published simultaneously by FSG with Howard's Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965-2003. He teaches at Columbia University and is poetry editor of The Paris Review.

Editorial Reviews

09/15/2014
“This, dear Miss Husband,/ is our Class Poem/ composed in your honor,” begins the penultimate poem in this intelligent, funny collection from Pulitzer-winner and renowned translator Howard (Without Saying). Presented as letters to teachers in the voices of precocious, delightfully ironic children at a liberal Cleveland private school (much like the one he attended in the 1940s), the poems chronicle the children’s sixth grade year as they raise questions nobody can answer. After a science-class field trip: “we long to learn/ at Park School—or elsewhere if necessary—/ how some people manage (or how they/ might manage) to/ keep from Behaving/ like animals.” One student wants to be a doctor “to see lots of/ naked people all the time.” Adorably curious yet repelled by sex ed, the children also hate Peter Pan and Our Town; they deplore bullies but also want to reform them. Propelled by layers of allusion and irony, Howard’s account of the children is a comedy with a plot. Howard gained fame for verse in the voices of literary and historical characters, often very sophisticated ones: the sixth-graders here are as much fun as any characters in any poetry this year, even as their improbably long sentences ask, seriously, “how the system we’re trying/ to live by operates.” (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 10/01/2014
Using letters as a way of speaking, Howard, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, examines progressive education in poems set in the present but referencing the education he received in the 1940s. Howard's letter writer is smart and erudite, often to the point of hilarity as the narrator reveals his sixth-grade experiences upon learning about sexual intercourse, the dark side of nature, religion, self, and creativity. He writes, "we long to learn/ …how some people manage…to/ keep from Behaving/ like animals, not/ just Becoming them./ Is all Science a history of death?" In lines that march to metered drums, these poems are conversational: full of commas, ellipses, and dashes that create a breathless romp. One classmate bemoans flushing the urinal as an act of selfhood, "a kind/ of creative presence …Arthur probably feels that if you flush/ yourself away, you might not exist…." When addressing the science teacher, the narrator asks, "Have you noticed that/ boys prefer asking questions with no girls/ present at all?" Howard's epistolary poems examine what it's like to be a child on the verge: all questions, few answers that satisfy, and cockeyed reasoning that seems to. VERDICT This is a seriously funny book, wonderfully conceived and crafted.—Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

Library Journal