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

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

In addition to his magisterial poetry, Robert Hass is beloved for his incisive, meditative criticism. A Little Book on Form takes up the central contradiction between poetry as genre and the poetics of the imagination. A wealth of vocabulary exists with which to talk about, map, and explain poetry in rigorous formal terms. But the more intuitive, creative aspects of a poet’s work and processes are more elusive: if the most interesting parts of form are those expressive, essential gestures inside it, how can we come to a better understanding of form as passion, as art?

A Little Book on Form brilliantly synthesizes Hass’s formidable gifts as both a poet and a critic. In suggestive, informal “notes," Hass breaks the idea of a poem down to its barest building blocks, from the one line haiku to the villanelle and sonnet. His approach singularly employs postmodern perspectives on shape, thought, feeling, content, and movement, calling on Catullus and Allen Ginsberg, Issa and Czeslaw Milosz. Begun as a project for students of poetry, A Little Book is anything but—Hass 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.

A Little Book on Form is a rousing reexamination of our most enduring mode of literature from one of our greatest living poets, who “writes prose every bit as zestful, penetrating, and sure-footed as his poetry” (Booklist).

 “This is a book about the formal imagination in poetry.

It began as a series of notes and reading lists for a seminar I was invited to teach at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in the winter of 1995. . . .

The class was three hours on an afternoon. For the second half of the class, I asked each student to make a presentation on an idea of form in some discipline or craft other than poetry. They approached this task in many ways, and their informal talks entered the conversation alongside the readings proposed here. One student taught the class to waltz. One played a recording of and analyzed the structure of a raga. One, working part-time as a dessert chef in a local restaurant, demonstrated the construction of an apple galette. There were talks on the formal ordering of 1970s disco albums, form in the photographs of Cartier-Bresson, the building of a wooden canoe, and of a computer program, the plots of films noir, and the architectural design of mosques. . . .

These were the impulses with which I began these notes, these and the feeling that we do not have a very good language for the ways in which it seems most interesting to think about form.”

“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.” - New York Times Book Review

“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