Don't Muzzle the Ghazal

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.)