A Little Book on Form Quotes

“It seemed possible to construct notes toward a notion of form that would more accurately reflect the openness and the instinctiveness of formal creation by starting with one line as the basic gesture of a poem, and then looking at two lines and”
― Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

“Aquinas believed in the soul, as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins do not; but one reason he did so was because he thought it yielded the richest possible understanding of the lump of matter known as the body. As Wittgenstein once remarked: if you want an image of the soul, look at the body. The soul for Thomas is not some ghostly extra, as it was for the platonizing Christians of his time; it is not to be seen as a spiritual kidney or spectral pancreas. The question “Whereabouts in the body is the soul?” would to his mind involve a category mistake, as though one were to ask how close to the left armpit one’s envy was located. For Aquinas, the soul is everywhere in the body precisely because it is what he calls, after Aristotle, the “form” of it, meaning the way in which it is uniquely organized to be expressive of meaning. The soul is not some sort of thing, but the distinctive way in which a particular piece of matter is alive. It is quite as visible as a club foot. To claim that a spider has a different sort of soul from a human being is in Thomas’s view simply to say that it has a different form of life. What distinguishes an animal body from a hat or a hosepipe is the fact that it is signifying, communicative, self-transformative stuff, in contrast to the meaninglessly dumb matter of so much contemporary materialism. It is, in Turner’s phrase, “matter articulate.”
― Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

“All things in the sun are sun.”
― Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

“One line is a form in the sense that any gesture is a form. Two lines introduce the idea of form as the energy of relation.”
― Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

“Principle underlying all of the solutions = question we ask”
― Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

“Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter (Creation, Preservation, Destruction, Quiescence).”
― Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

“From galactic silence protect us.”
― Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

“Many of the haiku poets gave their poems brief superscriptions that function like Ginsberg’s titles to create a context.”
― Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

“Allen Ginsberg had the idea that the image in a blues refrain was the American haiku.”
― Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

“In Buffalo, Buffalo she was praying, the night sticks together like pages in an old book”
― Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

“you’ll also notice that inside what is apparently a single line, there is a play of one, two, or three elements, balanced or unbalanced in various ways that are expressive in relation to what the poem is saying.”
― Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

“the haiku. It has, of course, a three-part prosodic structure, five syllables–seven syllables–five syllables. But, as written in Japanese, it is usually represented in a single line and there is a long controversy about whether it should be translated as a one-line or a three-line poem.”
― Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

“In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye proposes a way of looking at narrative genres based on the seasonal circle of our lives. Comedy is associated with spring and fertility ritual, tragedy with autumn and rituals for allaying the ghosts of harvest. Romance, stories that tend to flatter a culture’s values, belong to high summer, and satire belongs to winter. It is the world stripped bare.”
― Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form: An Exploration Into the Formal Imagination of Poetry