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 for students, enthusiasts, and newcomers alike A Little Book on Form brilliantly synthesizes Hass’s 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 poet’s 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 brokenness—we experience inside powerful works of art? In suggestive, informal “notes,” Haas thinks through the idea of a poem from its barest building blocks—the one line haiku, the brief epigram or prayer—to the complex