Richard Howard

Richard Howard was born in 1929 and has been producing poetry for over four decades and is still producing poems. He is also a critic, translator, essayist, and editor. His poems are dramatic and often monologues of imagined conversations with various famous figures. His poems can be a page and a half long to many pages, but his subjects are all interesting. I will give you a sample of one, the poem “Giovanni Da Fiesole on the Sublime, or Fra Angelico’s Last Judgment” dedicated to Adrienne Rich:

…You may have noticed how
Hell, in these affairs, is on the right
invariably (though for an inside Judge,
of course, that would be the left. And we
are not inside.). I have no doctrine
intricate enough for Hell…

This poem is out of the book inner voices by Richard Howard and I found it at the local library. These are poems from 1963 through 2003 and the poem above is my favorite so far in the collection. It is dark in a comforting way, I cannot describe the poem any other way. It speaks of death and heaven and crossing from the living to the dead. It is only a page and a half long and leaves you to ponder for much longer than it takes to read. I hope you stumble upon this book and find this poem on page 86, until then, please learn more at the following link:

http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=3295

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