Don't Muzzle the Ghazal

Follow Up to Format for Submitting Ghazals

When I wrote the post below about the format for submitting ghazals, I was in a cranky mood. (I'm sure you noticed that!) It is frustrating sometimes to have to clean up a file that has been formatted, to reformat so that it will display well in HTML. However, if I insisted on strict plain text for submissions, I would have fewer.

Here's a non-cranky qualification: I much prefer true plain text submissions; I will probably return submissions already marked up for HTML and submissions that are heavily formatted and ask that they be resubmitted without the formatting if I'm interested in publishing them.

Please do not be discouraged from submitting ghazals. Do so in plain text if at all possible; if it isn't, use a minimum of formatting and tell me separately how you'd like it to appear.

The Ghazal Page has grown over the last nine years; I hope to see it continue to grow and to publish good ghazals and encourage the adaptation of the ghazal as a form for poems in English.

And the Clouds & Rain Just Kept Comin' . . .

In the course of the clouds and rain radif challenge, several poets sent ghazals that got lost somehow. They were good ghazals, too. When I announced that the issue was up, I got several emails: What happened to my ghazal?

Fortunately, the poets sent the ghazals again, and they are now in the Clouds and Rain Special Issue: Ahmed Masud, Tree Riesener, R. W. Watkins, Bill Batcher, and Margaret Bell.

Another brief note: You may find The Ghazal Page not working right for awhile this evening. I'm changing it to a different host. That change should've been seamless, but I'm not familiar with the procedure. It should return to normal in a few hours. (It's 7:30 PM CDT, USA, March 14, 2008 as I write this post.)

The clouds and rain issue really is wonderful, with a wide variety of themes and styles. I'm really tickled with it and am looking forward to the results of the "moon radif challenge." There are 18 poems by 16 poets in the clouds and rain issue. Give me a real challenge and double that for the moon challenge.

Format for Submitting Ghazals

Here're a few comments on submitting poems to The Ghazal Page. If you follow these points carefully, there will be fewer problems.

• Submit ghazals in the body of a plain text email. Why? Plain text isn't formatted; if you send poems that are formatted, I have to remove all the formatting marks and add the ones I need to use.
• If you must send an attachment, save it in text-only format. Why? Same reason as first point.
• Please do not try to help by tagging your ghazal for HTML. I'm moving toward complete compliance with XHTML standards, including CSS. Inevitably, I would need to make changes. Using HTML editors will not help.
• Indicate what special formatting you want. You may enclose text that /you want to appear in italics/ in front slashes and text that *you want in bold* in asterisks. (These are ancient conventions in email.)
• I always post proof copies of an issue before publishing it. You can see what your ghazal looks like formatted. I'm willing to work with you to get it as close to the way you want it as XHTML will allow.

Please know that, if I open a submission and find it is heavily formatted (script font, colored text, and less noticeable things), I will return it.

Having said that, I look forward to an increasing flow of increasingly good ghazals.

"Clouds & Rain" Online

The clouds and rain radif challenge has reached its goal: a special issue of The Ghazal Page, presenting 13 excellent ghazals using the phrase "clouds and rain" as the radif. I'm very pleased with the results. Please have a look: I hope you'll be pleased as well.

The second radif challenge will be to use the radif "moon"; poets may add an adjective — full moon, autumn moon, hunter's moon, and so on, but the same adjective should be used consistently throughout.

The deadline is 2008 June 30. Please use "moon" in the subject line of an email submitting your ghazal(s) (up to three). Also, please send entries in the body of a plain text email, not as attachments or in formatted email.

Meanwhile, I plan to publish monthly issues; the next one will be about April 1.

Clouds & Rain in March

Two exciting items are coming up on The Ghazal Page.

The March issue should go online next weekend, perhaps Friday evening. The issue has six ghazals by three quite different poets. C W Hawes and Sukhdarshan Dhaliwal have appeared before; Bernard Gieske is new to The Ghazal Page, with a couple of very strong ghazals.

The other exciting item is the special Clouds and Rain issue. I've begun compiling it and hope to publish it within two weeks. Some of the poets are new to The Ghazal Page, and others have appeared here before.

The results of the radif challenge were very satisfying. I plan to announce another soon. Different poets using the same radif leads to some exciting contrasts. When the special issue is online, I will post a notice here.

Urdu Studies in Wisconsin

The University of Wisconsin at Madison publishes the Annual of Urdu Studies, sponsored by its Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia. Click on the link and you'll find several items (articles, reviews, poems) related to the ghazal and its cultural context in Urdu. (Thanks to David Jalajel for pointing me to this site.)

One item that particularly caught my attention is the article, "The Rama Story of Brij Narain Chakbast," by Neil Krishan Aggarwal. Toward the beginning, Aggarwal says,

Several generations ago, scholars spoke of Valmiki's Ramayana as the "original" and all others as "variations" (Hopkins 1926), a tenet which Ramanujanlater disputed in his suggestion that texts be treated on their own terms as "tellings," to be read intertextually to examine "what gets translated, trans-planted, transposed" (1991, 24).

This quotation clearly addresses the issue of canonicity: One of India's two major epics, Ramayana exists in numerous versions, with the one traditionally ascribed to Valmiki being the "original." The epic continues to be an important scripture for Hindus.

My concern isn't Ramayana, but the notion of the "real" version of anything, which is to say the canonical version, the authoritative version. I recently discussed this issue on my blog, NotesETC: "Which Is the Real Story?" This post talks about The Lord of the Rings, novel, movie, radio drama.

The traditional view is that, in the face of different versions, one version is the "real" one. Aggarwal's point is that, rather than canonizing one version as the real one, we inter-relate all versions, study them and compare them and profit from difference, likeness, and variation.

Does the same approach apply to the study of the ghazal form?

The Process of Canonization

Joshua Gage's comment on "Canon Fire" gives a good look at how the ghazal is faring in English. (I wonder how many of the few ghazals he sees are Persian or free in form, and if any are Arabic.) Those of us who believe the ghazal can be an important form in poetry in English have to keep advocating and keep writing ghazals and publishing them.

There is a long ways to go. I'm teaching creative writing this semester. For poetry, I use Creating Poetry by John Drury (Writer's Digest Books, 1991). I've used it as a text before; Drury provides good, basic information and advice on a variety of issues related to poetry. However.

However, his material on the ghazal is very inadequate. The book hasn't been revised since 1991, and much more is now available about the ghazal than then. Drury focuses on the ghazals by Adrienne Rich and Jim Harrison — accomplished poems, of course, but working only one possibility of the form. He does advise using the same rhyme throughout, a reference to the qafiya, I suppose. One could do worse than starting with Drury's description of the ghazal, but it would be nice to see the book updated.

As side comment, Drury's account of the haiku is very inaccurate. In 1991, even, much better information on the haiku in English was available. He doesn't understand the difference between haiku and senryu and the only genuine English haiku he cites are Jack Kerouac's. Etheridge Knight and Richard Wilbur are both excellent poets, but the poems they chose to call "haiku" simply aren't.

For more on haiku, see the Haiku Society of America's definition and AHA Poetry's material on haiku. (Their information on tanka, sijo, and ghazal is good also.)

Canon Fire

Poet and critic Anthony Hecht makes a brief comment on the canonization of poetic forms that we might apply to the ghazal. The comment occurs in Hecht's essay, "The Sonnet: Ruminations on Form, Sex, and History." The second section, "The Form," begins

As any form becomes canonical, it invites experimentation, variation, violation, alteration.

from Melodies Unheard, 2003, p. 53

Hecht goes on to briefly mention sonnet variations by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop, Mona Van Duyn, and Rimbaud. Many others could be listed.

The application to the ghazal's migration into English is obvious. I take Hecht's remark to be historic and descriptive, not a stated goal. The open question is, "Has the ghazal become canonical in English?" If so (or if when), how will we know? What do you think?

My thanks to Steffen Horstmann for pointing out this essay. Hecht's critical essays are well worth reading.

Tornadoes & Cricket

It's been too long since I posted here. Now that we're past the first of the year, and I'm (almost!) ready to begin a new semester, perhaps I can post more regularly and more frequently.

A week ago, we had unusually warm weather here. My wife and I went to southern Kansas and northern Oklahoma to visit family and friends. It was shirt-sleeve weather. Some days before, we had some snow and ice. Right now, the weather is more seasonable.

We walked on the Oklahoma State University campus and enjoyed watching an informal cricket game played by a group of Indian students. Like sandlot baseball, the game was clearly more for fun than for serious competition.

a pickup cricket game
on a warm Saturday in winter:
the wicket a domed lid
from a trash can
"Walla! Walla!

(I think I caught the encouraging cheer correctly.)

We returned to the Ozarks on Sunday. Monday night we were under tornado warnings from around 5:00 PM until after midnight. The sirens blew frequently after about 10:00 PM. The only shelter we have is a small closet under a stairway. Every time the sirens sounded, Rose, the dog, and I went into the closet. Our house dates back to the American Civil War — 145 years. Union cavalry officers were billeted in our house back then.

taking shelter
in an old closet
we breath dust
from an officer's coat

The storms extended from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Rolla, Missouri, a distance of about 290 miles. We didn't suffer any damage, but further southwest there was serious property damage and a few deaths. We listened to a radio station from Camdenton, Missouri. The announcer talked on the telephone with several trained weather spotters: Baily, Meatman, Donny, Router, Rev are the names I remember. These folks called in from various locations, including interstate overpasses from which they could see the storms roaring up Interstate 44.

Could You Stand a Poetry Stand?

It's an icy, snowy Saturday afternoon in the Ozarks, not bitterly cold but below freezing. Putting off some work, I poked around on the Internet and found "Poetry Stand," by Douglas Goetsch, in the Autumn 2007 issue of The American Scholar. Goetsch writes about a poetry field trip he took a group of students on, when he was teaching poetry at the New Jersey Governor’s School of the Arts.

Goetsch had the students run a poetry stand in Princeton, before the gates into the campus. Anyone could come to the stand and request a poem in any form about any topic. The students used scouts to bring some "customers" to the stand (there was no charge for the poems), but many people approached voluntarily. It would seem that if you offer people poetry that relates to their concerns, some of them will take you up on the offer.

I recommend Goetsch's article because it raises issues of poetry and the general public, of the attitude of poets toward "ordinary" people. His work with the students went a long way, apparently, to dismantle their initial perception of themselves as strange and wonderful and other people, non-poets, as dull and boring. Is the poet really a winged being from another realm, someone excruciatingly special, or is the poet a human much like others, but with the talents and training to voice human experiences in meaningful and moving ways? The statement of the opposites is mine, but I believe they reflect "Poetry Stand" accurately.

Goetsch sees poets as humans who can articulate human experiences into poetry. He is thoroughly focused on craft. I pretty much agree, with the qualification that there are as many ways of being a poet as there are of being human. And perhaps the phrasing is misleading: if "being a poet" means that one is a person who can write poems, that's fine; if "being a poet" means one is a person who is strange and wonderful and unlike the ordinary — well, ultimately, all of us are strange and wonderful, not just those who designate themselves as such.