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

by Robert Hass

Overview

An acute and deeply insightful book of essays exploring poetic form and the role of instinct and imagination within form—from former poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author Robert Hass.

Robert Hass—former poet laureate, winner of the National Book Award, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize—illuminates the formal impulses that underlie great poetry in this sophisticated, graceful, and accessible volume of essays drawn from a series of lectures he delivered at the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

A Little Book on Form brilliantly synthesizes Hass’s formidable gifts as both a poet and a critic and reflects his profound education in the art of poetry. Starting with the exploration of a single line as the basic gesture of a poem, and moving into an examination of the essential expressive gestures that exist inside forms, Hass goes beyond approaching form as a set of traditional rules that precede composition, and instead offers penetrating insight into the true openness and instinctiveness of formal creation.

A Little Book on Form is a rousing reexamination of our longest lasting mode of literature from one of our greatest living poets. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062332448
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	04/04/2017
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	636,469
File size:	796 KB

About the Author

Robert Hass was born in San Francisco. His books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema (Ecco, 2010), Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Time and Materials (Ecco, 2008), Sun Under Wood (Ecco, 1996), Human Wishes (1989), Praise (1979), and Field Guide (1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation, including Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer's Selected Poems (2012) and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994). His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984) received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

One 9

Two 27

Three 53

Four 85

A Note on Numbers 109

Blank Verse 115

Sonnet 121

Reading the Sonnet 133

Victorian Medievalism: Sestina and Villanelle 187

A Note on Genre 197

Ode 209

Reading the Ode 223

Elegy 293

Reading the Elegy 303

Satire 325

Georgic 335

Variable Stanzas and Organic Form 345

Difficult Forms 353

Collage, Abstraction, Oulipo, and Procedural Poetics 365

Mixed Forms 381

Prose Poem 385

A Note on Stress 393

How to Scan a Poem 399

How Free Verse Works 413

Acknowledgments 431

Credits 433

Editorial Reviews

Hass's Little Book on Form is no normal prosody guide. Unlike classic books by Mary Kinzie, John Hollander and Mary Oliver, it will not be of practical use to students hoping to write sonnets, elegies or iambic pentameter (though it's packed with plenty of examples of each). This is not a handbook or instruction manual. Instead, Hass aims to help readers deeply fathom poetry through considering how a poem's formal structure, and its interaction with poetic history, enable the poem to embody "the energy of the gesture of its making." This is the subjective pursuit of a practitioner rather than that of a scholar…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 poet's mind…the book isn't merely a master class on form. It's a jump-starter for that most necessary of tools for the artist or lover of art, if not for everyone: the sensibility.

The New York Times Book Review - Craig Morgan Teicher

02/06/2017
With specificity, clarity, and inspired insight, Hass (Times and Materials), a Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate, painstakingly dissects and analyzes poetic form. Hass’s reading is extensive, as shown by references to and quotations of dozens of poets, ranging in period from Caesar’s Rome to the Renaissance and 21st-century America. He includes the greats—Bashõ, Dickinson, Rudaki, Shakespeare—and a wealth of lesser-known talents. Hass discusses how poetic form synthesizes many subjects, including math, music, religion, and sexuality. Throughout, he justifies and asserts the place of order in poetic form, which is often accused of being chaotic and abstruse. The first fourth of the book alone is dedicated to the significance of line count. He instructs that a single line is whole, in addition to being “light and heavy”; that two lines introduce dependent relation and can be seen as an aspect of one; and that three lines, due to their lack of symmetrical relation, evoke mystery and infinitude. He also includes intriguing etymologies and translations, delineating the evolution of specific words, poems, and poetic forms. Hass has produced an emotionally and intellectually nurturing work of analysis, suited for academia and ambitious leisure readers. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

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 poet’s mind.” — New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

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 poet’s mind.

New York Times Book Review

03/01/2017
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Hass (Distinguished Professor in Poetry and Poetics, Univ. of California, Berkeley; Time and Materials) has assembled a polished version of his notes and thoughts since 1995 regarding the existence and use of form in poetry. He begins by analyzing single lines of poetry, eventually building on that by adding additional lines until he is writing about four-line stanzas. Throughout this study, the author explains the history and circumstances of the forms that he is evaluating as well as the significance of the syllables and patterns that make up a poem. He uses examples from many different types of verse (sonnets, haiku, etc.) and cultures all over the world in order to show the connections among poems, types of poetry, and how a poet may have improvised to create something unique. VERDICT This book is for readers curious about the history or analysis of literature, and especially for library collections focused on poetry and poetics. [See Prepub Alert, 10/31/16.]--Jeremy Spencer, Univ. of California, Davis, Law Lib.

Library Journal

★ 2017-01-10
What makes a poem tick.Weighing in at more than 400 pages, this hefty book on poetic form is anything but little. It's an impressive accomplishment by Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner and past U.S. Poet Laureate Hass (English/Univ. of California; What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World, 2012, etc.), who is one of only a handful of contemporary poets who could even think of taking on such a monumental task. As he notes in the brief introduction, this has been a work in progress for two decades. His modest goal is to explain how the "formal imagination actually operates in poetry," the "way the poem embodies the energy of the gesture of its making." Hass begins with analyses of a single line, then two, three, and four, which take up the book's first 100 pages. Next, he moves on to form (blank verse, sonnet, etc.) and genre (ode, elegy, satire, prose poems, etc.), finishing up with stress and rhythm. Along the way, he draws on hundreds of examples of lines, stanzas, and complete poems from the history of poetry, which he carefully selects to illustrate his points. There are also hundreds of asides, lovely little insights, and strong opinions. The first sonnet on a political theme is by Milton. Ted Berrigan's book-long Sonnets "tries to get something of Jackson Pollock's method…coming at you." Other topics: what are the four best villanelles? Who wrote the best pantoum? Answer: Donald Justice. And, the "American prose poem in English probably begins with Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons (1914)." There's much fodder here for poet lovers to discuss and debate. Look for this book on the short shelf of classics that includes Annie Finch's An Exaltation of Forms and Eavan Boland and Mark Strand's The Making of a Poem. Erudite, witty, and well-informed, this encyclopedic labor of love will become the go-to book on poetic form for years to come.

Kirkus Reviews