A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

(Paperback)

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From the former U.S. Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winner, an illuminating dissection of poetic form for students, enthusiasts, and newcomers alike

A Little Book on Form brilliantly synthesizes Hasss formidable gifts as both a poet and essayist. In it he takes up the central tension between poetry as genre and the poetics of the imagination. A wealth of vocabulary exists with which to talk about poetry in traditional formal terms. But the more intuitive, creative parts of a poets work and processes are more elusive: if the most interesting aspect of form is the shaping power of the essential, expressive gestures inside it, how do we come to a language in which to speak about form as the search for the radiant shapes the wholeness or brokennesswe experience inside powerful works of art

In suggestive, informal notes, Haas thinks through the idea of a poem from its barest building blocksthe one line haiku, the brief epigram or prayerto the complex villanelle and sonnet, and beyond them, to the grand forms of elegy and ode through which poets across human cultures have investigated the shapes of grieving and desiring. His approach singularly employs postmodern perspectives on shape, thought, feeling, content, and movement, calling on Catullus and Allen Ginsberg, Kobayashi Issa and Czesaw Miosz. Begunb as a project for students of poetry, A Little Book on Form is anything butHass investigates the ancient roots of the poetic impulse, taking a wide-ranging look at the most intense experience of human thought and feeling in language.

Reviews

Hass is so supremely learned about and so deeply immersed in poetry, he is able to comport himself not just with incredible authority but also with casual humor. . . . Disguised as a reference book, this is actually a friendly tour of one poets mind. New York Times Book Review

Author Bio

Robert Hass was born in San Francisco in 1941. He attended St. Mary's College and Stanford University. His books of poetry include Time and Materials, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 and the National Book Award in 2008; Sun Under Wood, for which he received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1996; Human Wishes; Praise, for which he received the William Carlos Williams Award in 1979; and Field Guide, which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. From 1995 to 1997 he served as poet laureate of the United States. He lives in northern California with his wife, the poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches English at the University of California at Berkeley.