Gino's Ghazal Blog

Welcome to Gino's Ghazal Blog!

Browse this blog for reflections about ghazals, poetry, music, fiction, nonfiction, ideas . . . . also announcements and information about The Ghazal Page: please visit it. Your suggestions, comments, and observations are welcome.

Writer vs Reader

Since my retirement, I've been reading a lot of Kierkegaard. "Re-reading" would be more accurate; I began reading Kierkegaard over 50 years ago when an Uncle, a Methodist minister, became concerned that I was reading Nietzsche. The local Methodist minister gave me Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing; since that I've read Kierkegaard regularly.

The point here is a comment Kierkegaard makes in Concluding Unscientific Postscript and how that comment relates to the issue of the writer's relationship to the reader through the text. Here's the comment:

I have always conceived of the author as a man who knows something more, or knows something otherwise, than the reader; that is the reason he is an author, and otherwise he has no reason to be one. But it has never occurred to me to think of the author as a supplicant, a beggar knocking at the door of the reading public, a peddler who with the aid of a devil of a ready tongue and a little fancy gold stuff on the cover, which quite catches the eyes of the daughters of the family, succeeds in foisting his books upon them.

I trust you'll overlook the sexist attitude of a Dane writing over 150 years ago. There are other significant social and technological differences, but the core of this comment raises an important issue.

The issue is the writer's relationship with the reader, or, perhaps, the writer's intentions toward the reader (via the text). Does the writer — does the poet — cater to the reader, making it as easy as possible for the reader to grasp the text? Or does the writer ignore the reader and write concerned only with her intentions and satisfactions? Perhaps you have experienced the kind of writer's group in which someone is always concerned whether a poem will confuse or offend the reader. Should the reader's response be the poet's main concern?

For much of my teaching career, I used reader response theory in my courses. Students found this approach to be relief from the standard academic "I'm the teacher, and I tell you what this poem means" approach. The question Kierkegaard raises, though, is about the writer's responsibility, or lack thereof, to the reader. Poetry is an especially difficult case, therefore, a good one to consider. Should the poet be primarily concerned with difficulties the reader might have? Should the poet completely ignore the reader?

Poets do have, or hope to have, readers. There is a spectrum of concern, from total immersion in the poet's concerns to a total effort to anticipate and cater to the reader's responses. Which is best? Which do you think is best? This topic will likely be revisited in future posts.

December Issue of The Ghazal Page

Friends,

The December issue of The Ghazal Page is now published, with six good ghazals by four poets. I hope you enjoy them.

I'm working on the issue for results of the color radif challenge and hope to publish it in a couple of weeks. I'm also redesigning The Ghazal Page for 2010 and cleaning up some (a few) of the older pages.

Gino

The Whirl of Repeating Form

You may well be interested in a new web page devoted to poetic forms with strong repetition, such as the villanelle, pantoum, sestina — and, of course, the ghazal Kate Bernadette Benedict is host of Tilt-aWhirl: a Poetry Sporadical of Repeating Forms. There is also a "cheat sheat of repeating forms" to guide you in exploring forms that may  be new to you.

Give it a whirl: you'll be exhilarated!

What I Learned and From Whom

I taught writing and literature courses for 42 years. Teachers in higher education receive little to no training in how to teach. That's good, actually. While a novice university teacher may be relying on a year or two as a teaching assistant, at least the cumbersome bureaucracy of public education hasn't tampered with the novice's common sense. (That's a whole other topic that I probably will never take up here.)

I was a graduate teaching assistant for a year and summer at Emporia State University. My mentors there, Bill Elkins and J. D. Lester, taught me a lot. In the summer, they supervised a course in composition for students with low test scores. There were three of us GTAs and the two faculty members. A main thing I learned from that experience was confidence in my ability to design assignments and grade them well.

In the remainder of this post, I will briefly three teachers who taught me some important lessons about teaching, even though their focus was elsewhere.

Cliff Wood, a poet and editor, taught at the College of Emporia (Kansas) during my five-semester stay there. Cliff modeled openness and enthusiasm for me. For instance, he assigned students in a modern poetry class to select a poem and present an interpretation to the class. I chose Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." My interpretation was an abstract expressionist painting; I did discuss it in relation to the poem. Cliff accepted my "interpretation," an example to me of allowing students latitude in responding to assignments.

After College of Emporia, I attended Emporia State University, which actually awarded me degrees. I received Bachelor of Arts degrees in both English and Art. One of the art teachers was Rex Hall, from whom I took a painting class. Rex had students working at easels in a studio. During our class time, he walked around, observed students' work and interacted with them. He allowed each of us to pursue our own idea -- landscape, abstraction, figure, still life, and medium -- oils, water-color, collage. What I learned about teaching a creative art was: allow students to follow their intuitions but interact with them, and even interfere. Rex would often add a daub of paint to a painting for the student to respond to. I tried to emulate the classroom/studio format in my creative writing classes, having students write in class while I observed and interacted.

The last teacher about teaching I want to acknowledge here wasn't in a university at all. Scott Linn taught taekwondo 25 years ago. He was an effective teacher, and, while I'm sure he had no awareness of teaching me about teaching, he did. To learn taekwondo, one must master the moves and the forms that combine them. There is a very specific goal, a desired outcome. Scott was open, clear, and responsive to students' individual abilities and limitations. He modeled the moves and forms very well, had a good sense of humor, and a friendly presence. I took unintended lessons from him about teaching that enriched my own courses.

The National Book Foundation will present its annual National Book Awards in downtown Manhattan Wednesday night, at a gala event in the glittering, Greek-revival setting of Cipriani Wall Street. The ceremony's organizers labor mightily to bring glamour to a notoriously dowdy industry, and no doubt the evening will be thrilling for both nominees and winners.

via www.salon.com

Folks, here's another sump to drain money from inexperienced/unsuccessful writers. I knew about vanity publishers, but vanity book awards is new. Please be careful about sending your money to folks who promise what they can't (and don't intend to) deliver.

Fish and Snake Poetry Anthology

A contributor to The Ghazal Page, Azam Abidov, has just released an international anthology of poetry, Fish and Snake poetry anthology, published in 2009 by Muharrir nashriyoti, in Toshkent (more familiar in English as Tashkent), Uzbekistan. The ISBN for the book is 978-9943-354-50-0. It has nicely designed hard covers in gray, silver, and white. Each page is decorated with borders depicting fish. The size is approximately 5" x 7" (13 cm x 17.5 cm), with a total of 127 pages including front and back matter.

Each poem in the anthology relates to fish or snake in some way. In "A Short Notice on the Project," Azam explains the traditional symbolism of the theme: the snake symbolizes wisdom, and the fish symbolizes transparency. The poets' national origins range from Uzbekistan to the US to Egypt to India. Each poem is presented in English and Uzbek. The anthology is part of Azam's goal of bridging "Uzbek literature and World Literature." As such, Fish and Snake poetry anthology makes a strong contribution.

As a contributor to the anthology, I won't go further with a review except to recommend it if you can get a copy.I don't have more information about ordering it. I will also quote a poem by Bahrom Ruzimuhammed, an important Uzbek poet, born in 1961.

A striped snake
passes through the dream
something whispers in the distance

it seems the devil giggles
right in the center of an open palm
a dark yellow grass
grows greedily as it springs to skies

Passes through the dream
the dream messes until it passes to the end
the color of the snake turns pale

The November Issue of The Ghazal Page

The November issue of The Ghazal Page is now online. It has six fine ghazals by five effective poets. While the issue isn't exactly seasonal, there is a kind of sobriety or starkness about these ghazals, or about some aspects of them, that seems appropriate.

Where I live, we've had a lot of rain, with the danger of flash floods and the streets of one small river-front town flooding. Waking after midnight to the roll of thunder is pleasurable to me, but the rain seems more than sufficient. The general trend of the daily temperatures is downwards. One morning soon, I'll go out to the car and find I have to scrape ice off the windshield before I can drive it. The ghazals in this issue feel appropriate to this season. I hope that you enjoy them.

Documentary Poetry

This post is an sibling of the post on The Poetry of Notation. It also connects with previous comments on Ezra Pound's ideogrammic method. Documentary poetry is exactly what it sounds like: poetry that uses contemporary or historical documents as its basis. Philip Metres has an excellent article, "From Reznikoff to Public Enemy: the Poet as Journalist, Historian, Agitator," on the Poetry Foundation's Web site. Metre gives links to examples. Especially significant are those from Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, poems based on court records.

Documentary poetry connections with the poetry of notation by taking "found" and observed materials and working them into a poem. The poetry of notation is more immediate to the poet's personal life; the documentary poem is more social, political, historical. It's especially significant that Philip Metre mentions the rap group, "Public Enemy," in his title, and gives Bob Dylan's "Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" as an example.

I'm not going to replicate Metre's links here; he provides a rich network of poets and examples. If you follow them, you will, in the way of the Internet, find yourself lead on to other sites, writers, and aspects of the topic.

One of my long-time favorite poets, William Carlos Williams, wrote poetry both of notation and documentation. His long poem, Paterson, includes both. The Poetry Foundation has a good, somewhat lengthy, overview of Williams' life and work.

Consider this post to be an informal, undated challenge to try your hand at ghazals using documentation or notation and submit them to The Ghazal Page. As Williams would say, "What do you have to lose?"

Hey! Beatnik!

I just ran across, as one does on the Internet, the Museum of American Poetics. It's a complex, multi-layered site, with links leading far beyond it. There's a definite focus on Beat poetry and poetics: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ed Sanders, and others, as well as what the site calls "Post-Beat," apparently poets influenced by the core Beat group. There's some Black Mountain influence too, and an overall counter-cultural feel to the site. You can read Alice Walker's "Letter to Obama on Torture" or browse The Beat Generation Video Archive.

I was 16 when On the Road was published. Even on a farm in Kansas, I was able to get a copy. I read all the Kerouac, all the Ginsberg, all the etc. I could find. I continue to read some of these, especially Kerouac's poetry (yes, his pomes!) and Rexroth's poetry. (Rexroth was not a Beat although associated with them initially in the San Francisco Renaissance.) I've browsed the Museum of American Poetics a little so far. Found some things I really like and a pretty awful poem or two. That's the way it goes.

I plan to revisit this "Museum" and encourage you to have a look or two or three, whatever you currently think about "beat."

Modernism and the little magazines reviewed in the TLS by Stefan Collini

"The first function of a literary magazine is to introduce the work of new or little-known writers of talent.” There is an appealing modesty about this brisk declaration, even a kind of impersonality in subordinating editorial ego to the larger good; it seems likely to provoke a murmur of agreement, not least from new or little-known writers. But this is not, of course, the only way in which the function of such publications may be conceived. The editor of one of the many new literary periodicals established in the 1920s announced a no less definite sense of purpose in quite other terms: “I shall make its aim the maintenance of critical standards and the concentration of intelligent critical opinion”. The goals expressed in these two quotations are not necessarily in conflict: editors might, it is true, maintain “critical standards” in a practical way by identifying new literary talent. But the tendency is for the pursuit of these two purposes to result in periodicals of rather different types. One, often thought of as the classic “little magazine”, largely carries new poetry and fiction, mostly by as yet unrecognized writers, often exemplifying a style of writing that is self-consciously, even determinedly, insurgent and unfashionable. The other, committed to upholding the critical or reviewing function, is largely filled with essays and book reviews, taking in the literature of both the past and the present, as well as taking in more than literature; it aspires to shape intelligent opinion and to combat the slackness and puffery of mainstream literary journalism.

via entertainment.timesonline.co.uk

This is a review of the first volume of a series on "little magazines" associated, even if loosely, with Modernism. The volume comes from the Modernist Magazines Project in the UK. The review gives a good overview of the project and this voiume. Since it's US price is $180, it's aimed at libraries.

There's a similar project in the US, the Modernist Journals Project at Brown University. This project hopes to put full, searchable texts of the journals online, a worthy if difficult goal. 

Little magazines and small presses are still an intrinsic part of the literary scene, even if much of the activity has moved to the Internet. These publishers are an important part of the literary dynamism of a culture. Perhaps, despite problems of quality and confusing numbers, the Internet versions will carry on successfully as the print publications are squeezed out by costs and the shifts in media, the reduction of poetry series in university presses and "major" (ie, corporate) publishers. Whaddayathink?