A Progressive Education

<p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>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!</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>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.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>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.</span></p><p></p>