Review by New York Times Review
POETRY IS A BIT like Dungeons & Dragons, scuba diving or gardening in that its adherents love nothing more than geeking out over its rules, necessary gear and best practices. To the uninitiated, these conversations might sound like a cacophony of meaningless jargon. But poets aren't talking about unearthed arcana, buoyancy compensators or controversies over Roundup. When poets jabber about clerihews, tetrameter and negative capability, they're exchanging trade secrets about the most definitive and common of human paraphernalia: emotion, thought and, perhaps, the soul itself, things everybody can relate to. Two of our best and most famous poets, Robert Hass and Louise Glück, both former United States poets laureate, have new books of prose that delve deeply into the esotérica of the poetic craft, which, for some, will be as necessary as a diving regulator. 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. It's also, at more than 400 pages, not a little book. Hass gives innumerable answers to the questions that obsess poets and readers of poetry: What is poetry, and why does it do what it does? He begins with a primer on stanzas, organized by the number of lines and the uses of those stanza lengths in poetry from various cultures. He stops at stanzas of four lines, though of course poets can use much longer stanzas, too. But, Hass says of four, "this number expresses and stands for evenness and completeness." Next, Hass moves on to a section on form, beginning with blank verse (think of Shakespeare), followed by a lengthy explanation and history of the sonnet, "the one durable, widely used form in English poetry in the last 500 years." 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. Of the Pindaric ode, one of the earliest incarnations of the ode, he writes, "As a strict form, it has not had legs." He explains, with startling clarity, Gertrude Stein and others' forays into abstraction, which are at the roots of pretty much all experimental poetry. Stein, he says, worked to "discover by experiment... that syntax was the formal principle that organized language." Hass concludes with a guide to understanding the workings of stress in poetry, one of the most confusing technical aspects of poetics. Disguised as a reference book, this is actually a friendly tour of one poet's mind. Along the way, Hass offers glancing insights like this, on the difference between visual arts and literature: "Form in the visual arts is spatial and in literature it is temporal. A poem has a beginning, a middle and an end. A work of art - whether sculpture or painting - has edges." In this way, 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. Few would debate Louise Glück's stature as one of America's most extraordinary poets. Unlike many of her peers, though (Hass among them), Glück has not made a habitual practice of prose writing. She is a writer for whom, one feels, words are always scarce, hard won and not to be wasted. Prose is most likely at least as difficult for her to write as poetry, and she has professed that poetry is very hard for her to write. "American Originality" is only her second slim volume of essays, containing 10 mostly short, starkly titled pieces - "On Realism," "On Revenge" - as well as 10 introductions to debut volumes by other poets. Fans of Glück's own poems will recognize her trademark severity. In her extreme focus and clipped, uncompromising sentences, Glück recalls no one so much as Susan Sontag. Like Sontag, Glück assumes her readers know the texts under consideration - she often omits the customary quotations critics use to illustrate their points. Yet she writes with such mesmerizing authority that her claims feel unimpeachable. Unlike Sontag, Glück has not cultivated the ability to write about any subject; she confines herself to the practice of poetry in America. Yet her thought accommodates extrapolation in many directions, toward broader aspects of American identity. When she writes that "original work, in our literature, must seem somehow to break trails, to found dynasties ... be capable of replication," it's hard not to remember that we were, relatively recently, "the new world," and that mass production was born here. Glück's 20th-century America is fallen, equipped with - and diminished by - the tools of modernism, especially psychoanalysis. "Contemporary literature," she writes, is "a literature of the self examining its responses." Modernity strove to explain our dreams, always the province of poetry, and so perhaps explained away their magic. Glück's analyses seem to derive from this grief; she is wary, and sometimes darkly funny about, poetry's temptation toward grandiosity. "We have made of the infinite a topic," she notes. "But there isn't, it turns out, much to say about it." And yet, one also always feels that, for Glück, poetry is a matter of life or death, the only salvation. So when Glück writes that "contemporary poetry affords two main types of incomplete sentences: the aborted whole and the sentence with gaps," one senses a heavy moral choice behind her distinction. This is not just a description of how American poets write; it's a mandate for rigorous, difficult, even painful reasoning over lazy, incomplete thinking. Specifically, she is differentiating between the fragment in poetry and the non sequitur, which she calls "a more complicated maneuver." Non sequitur, she writes, "is lively, volatile, skirmishing, suggesting (at its best) simultaneity or multiplicity, loosing a flurry of questions." Of course, this could also be said of Twitter "at its best," while, at their worst, both Twitter and fragmentary poetry can "begin to seem like swimmers competing to see how long they can stay underwater without breathing." The frenzy of social media doesn't explicitly enter into Glück's essays. But, in the guise of a poetry critic, Glück shows herself to be a kind of dark contemporary conscience. "The glory of the lyric," she claims in a review of recent books by her peers Robert Pinsky and Stephen Dobyns, "is that it does what life cannot do." Put that way, poetry sounds like something everyone can use. In the guise of a poetry critic, Louise Glück shows herself to be a kind of dark contemporary conscience. CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER'S latest book of poems is "The Trembling Answers."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 27, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
There is nothing little about this intricately informative and inspiring master class on poetic forms. A distinguished poet and scholar with a global literary fluency and a passion for sharing his knowledge and awe, Hass (What Light Can Do, 2012) establishes the traditional rules for composing sonnets, villanelles, and other forms based on a precise number of lines and other fixed elements, but what he hopes to address is the formal imagination that is, the creative force fueled by emotion and intuition that brings poetry to life. He constructs his guide sturdily, beginning by examining one line as the basic gesture of a poem, then moving on to stanzas and blank and free verse, all the while tracking the evolution of forms over time and providing powerful examples by a thrillingly diverse range of poets ancient and modern. Hass then shifts from structure to genres and subjects, analyzing lyrics, odes, elegies, and more in erudite yet conversational commentary. Form meets the artistic spirit in this zestful and invaluable mix of lucid instruction and vibrant anthology.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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-Basho, 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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 methodcoming 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
