by Tony Roberts

A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry,
      Robert Hass
The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them,
      Stephen Burt

from PN Review, September-October, 2017

There is a moment in A Little Book on Form in which Robert Hass offers his students (and now readers) 'a small exercise. Take an afternoon and reread Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and "Immortality Ode" and maybe one other Wordsworth ode or the first book of The Prelude and Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" and his "Dejection: An Ode" and then read—written about twenty-two years later, the five Keats odes—"Psyche," "Melancholy," "Nightingale,", "Grecian Urn," and "To Autumn.''' One's first reaction is that this is a demanding workout—but there is a point to it: 'I don't know if you will share my experience of them, but I found that when reading them in that order, the striking thing about the Keats poems was that they seemed so beautifully finished and a little old-fashioned.' This sort of statement is characteristic of Robert Hass's critical writings. It combines insight, admiration and commitment with an open personal touch.

In this highly stimulating, though hardly 'little', book the acclaimed poet and essayist goes beyond metrical rules and rhyme schemes, to consider the 'formal imagination in poetry'. He is searching for a language to explore its intuition and creativity. Hence the tentativeness of 'notes toward' in the following: 'It seemed possible to construct notes toward a notion of form that would more accurately reflect the openness and the instinctiveness of formal creation'.

Mercifully this is not nearly as abstruse as it sounds. In fact, Hass offers quite a comprehensive course, developed to guide young poets at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop through two years of intense study. Beginning in 1995 Hass has added to these 'notes' which have swelled with the addition of so many examples of the poet's craft that A Little Book on Form offers an annotated anthology worth reading in its own right. In the interests of accessibility his approach has been to begin with consideration of the single line (the completed clause, the line, the one-sentence line, the one-line stanza, the experimental one-line poem) and then to move to the two-line poems and stanza, to three and then four (from which 'almost all the likely formal propositions in both metrical and free verse poems can be derived'). He turns then to blank verse (one 'implicit model' for free verse), followed by poetic forms (sonnets, odes and elegies, etc.) to end with consideration of stress and how free verse works.

What is on offer, then, is distance learning at the hands of a Berkeley professor, complete with frequent reading lists and occasional exercises. There is a great deal of information along the way: the synoptic history of forms; examples from different cultures (including Asian, Chinese and Persian); explorations of craft. Hass's students took their course in three hour sessions, the second half—student-led—on form outside poetry. Seasoned readers will work out their own timetable, attracted by old favourites from Horace to Heaney and the pleasure of discovery. (I might note that English poetry effectively disappears from consideration in the twentieth century. There are an honoured few outsiders: Breton, Lorca, Heaney, Herbert, Milosz, Neruda, Yeats. Otherwise it's Americans from Whitman and Dickinson to, say, Lyn Hejinian and the poet's wife, Brenda Hillman.)

The book is commendable for its pithy explanations and insights: 'The term romantic is a convenience for observing a shift in the notion of the poem from the idea that the work of the imagination was to make vivid and attractive the ideas that are available to us through reason or an empirical common sense to the idea that imagination was not illustrative, but creative, that the imagination embodied its own kind of knowledge, deeper, phenomenologically fuller, than the kinds of thing the other labors of knowing afford us.' Discussing the ode—the longest and perhaps the most interesting part of the book—Hass turns to the inward journey of thought in 'Frost at Midnight', to the poem's structure: 'I wanted to call attention to this rivery movement in the verse of this period because it tracks a different sense of mind [anticipating surrealism and stream-of-consciousness] [ ... ] It represents thought as something nearer to what we think of as imagination, a proceeding by intuitions having to do with likeness, with mirroring and echoing, with an oscillation between thought and sensation, discursive and mimetic modes.'

In an earlier essay, 'Listening and Making', Hass remembered a friend taking exception to a comment he had made about 'metrical inversion' in a line by Robert Lowell. 'He said he liked the piece well enough, but that one phrase—that finical tic of the educated mind—had filled him with rage.' Hass added, 'I think I understand why.' Perhaps the good-humoured A Little Book on Form isn't for his friend, but it should be for many of us.
   

While Hass's chosen poems have largely been tested by time, Harvard professor Stephen Burt has the difficult task of illustrating contemporary excellence (1981-2015). The Poem Is You is a celebration, from sea to shining sea, of the current state of American poetry. (I venture the patriotic touch because Stephen Burt sees poetry's health and especially diversity as an image of America itself.) He illustrates its vivacity in sixty essays, each following the poem which is its subject, explicating, contextualising, biographising and venturing into other fields in support: psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary theory, phenomenology and so forth. Diversity is certainly the key to the collection: 'the recondite and the demotic, the accessible and the challenging, mingle'. At the same time Burt repeatedly cautions that the chosen poems are only his take on the poetic variety to be found today. Thirty years from now, he suggests, the chosen poems might be 'in Spanish, or in Hmong, or in American Sign Language'. For less adventurous readers what is here may be confusing enough.

Although Burt does not make the point himself, he acknowledges that there are those critics like Marjorie Perloff who have long argued that 'models of poetry as conceptual exploration, resistant to speech, or perpetual experiment [have] replaced or displaced models of poetry as "lyric," or rendered it obsolete'. Certainly many of the poems in Burt's book are claiming or reclaiming what he likes to call 'space' from what had gone before (Zukofsky and Oppen, Lowell and Bishop). He defends Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) as a bona fide recipient of poetry prizes as very sensible, 'if "poetry" means a text that brings together the many aspects of language in order to explore someone's, or anyone's, interior life, to challenge the transparency of common language, and to do something that mere exposition or narrative could never do'.

And so we have, in The Poem is You, an openness with forms—prose-sense deniers, a one-line poem, some computer speak, on-line alt-lit, a homophonic translation—but with common concerns and all, presumably, excellent. Burt's avant-garde choices are meant to open up questions of who is reading what and how we read it. Those gripping tightly to the lyric tradition may feel—using the old analogy of modern painting—that gallery walls alone confer status upon some of his chosen examples.

This is where Burt's admittedly excellent commentaries come to the rescue. He knows the poems; he knows the poet's background, techniques, and their public statements. He knows the poems that clustered around the one he chose for its representational nature. His method is to let us in on it all ('I chose this one because it shows how to read the others.'). Yet we may legitimately wonder at times if the ingenuity is in the poem or rather in Burt's exploration of it. Some of the chosen poems do not hold the reader's attention, or do not repay it. In these cases I felt—assuming I might be the mouldy fig—that an anthology served the poet poorly. Then again, shouldn't a poem be able to stand alone?

I seem to have fixated on the weaknesses of Burt's choices. Yet there are many excellent poems and poets too. There are highly informative essays on a number of poems by well-established poets like Milosz, Ammons, Charles Wright and Komunyakaa, for instance. And there are memorable poems, like Merrill's 'Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker', Gluck's 'Lamium' and C. D. Wright's 'Key Episodes from an Earthly Life'. I have had interesting introductions, too—to Linda Gregerson, Kay Ryan, Joseph Massey and Albert Goldbarth among others.

The Poem is You (shame about the title) compels serious attention as news from the poetry front. For that alone it would certainly be worth reading—and we have the extra benefit of Burt's enthusiastic ruminations.

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About the Author
Tony Roberts's fourth collection of poems, Drawndark, and his edited Poetry in the Blood were both published in 2014; his essays, The Taste in My Mind, appeared in 2015—all from Shoestring Press.

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