An acute and deeply insightful book of essays exploring poetic form and the role of instinct and imagination within formfrom former poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author Robert Hass.Robert Hassformer poet laureate, winner of the National Book Award, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prizeilluminates 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 Hasss 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.
A wealth of vocabulary exists with which to talk about poetry in traditional formal terms. But the more intuitive, creative parts of a poet's work and processes are more elusive: if the most interesting aspect of the form is the shaping power of the essential, expressive gestures inside it, how do we come to language in which to speak about form as the search for the radiant shapes?the wholeness or brokenness?we experience inside powerful works of art?
In suggestive, informal ?notes,? former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award?winner Robert Hass thinks through the idea of a poem from its barest building blocks to the grand forms of elegy and ode through which poets across human cultures have investigated the shapes of grieving and desiring. Begun as a project for students of poetry, A Little Book on Form 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.
