Gino's Ghazal Blog

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!

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 Documentary poetry is exactly what it sounds like: poetry that uses contemporary or historical documents as its basis.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?"

The Best of Urdu Poetry

I've been reading two books recommended to me by Norman Darlington, whose ghazals appear in The Ghazal Page. I've already mentioned one, The Oxford India Ghalib and will comment on it again soon. The other book is also of interest to poets and to people interested in the ghazal. It is Celebrating the Best of Urdu Poetry, selected by Khushwant Singh and Kamna Prasad, and translated and introduced by Khushwant Singh. It is a Viking Penguin Book, published in India in 2007. It has a handsomely decorated hard cover. My copy is from the second printing, which is encouraging for the book's potential to attract an audience.

The book has a brief but informative introduction by Khushwant Singh. The poems are arranged chronologically, from Mohammed Rafi Sauda (1706-1781) to Zehra Nigah, a contemporary whose birth-date is not given. Each selection is presented with the original on the left page and the English translation on the right. The original appears in Devanagari script and transliterated into the roman alphabet. A paragraph introduces each poet.

By way of examples, here is a couplet from Ghalib's "Lament of Old Age,"

Where has the headiness of youth's evening drink gone?
It's time to get up and go, gone are the sweet dreams of dawn,

and a quatrain, "Silent Truth," by Hakim Momin Khan Momin,

There are some who remain silent
But are sunk in deep surmise,
Yes, they will speak the truth,
But when the price of truth is on the rise.

Khushwant Singh published an article about the contemporary significance of Urdu and Urdu poetry that you may find interesting in connection with this book.

The Poetry of Notation

I've just published a page on this blog with the title, "The Poetry of Notation." It presents a fairly simple idea about a possibility for poetry. It discusses some of the poetics of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson and offers some suggestions and questions about how these ideas apply to writing ghazals in English.

For the record, I have been strongly influenced by Ezra Pound's poetry and poetics, as well as those of Charles Olson and William Carlos Williams. I read Pound and Williams much more often than Olson now. I did work with Olson's ideas of projective verse or composition by field. 

Writing this page suggested some further possibilities that I hope to pursue soon in posts or pages. While there's nothing especially original about the ideas in "The Poetry of Notation," I think the phrase is original and I find the idea exciting. Perhaps you will also.

Maintaining the Pure Ghazal, Part Three

Perhaps the intended irony of this title, "Maintaining the Pure Ghazal," isn't clear. I could've put quotation marks around pure to flag my ironic intention: Maintaining the "Pure" Ghazal. There are a couple of reasons why maintaining a pure ghazal form is impossible.

First, the ghazal has taken several forms over its history in several languages and cultures. Second, as a poetic form migrates to a new language and culture, it is bound to change due to differences in the new culture and language. These differences include linguistic features such as the ease of rhyming or the basis of meters; the differences also include symbols common in one culture and not in another. Also, whether a culture is high- or low-context is an important feature. (See the second part of this series of posts for a brief discussion of high-context and low-context cultures.

None of that means that a poet can write anything and call it a ghazal — well, actually, a poet can do just that, but it is neither respectful of the ghazal's origins and history nor helpful in understanding the form as a possibility in English. (Once a form is established, poets can warp it, as Williams Carlos Williams did in "Sonnet in Search of an Author." (Maybe more on that poem in a later post.) There has to be a recognized form for the poet to warp or deviate from; the ghazal is not yet at the point in English.

My hope is that The Ghazal Page is helping to naturalize the ghazal in English and to expand understanding of its possibilities. I recommend two items for you to peruse, "When I say 'ghazal,' I mean 'guzzle,'" which I just recently revised, and "Rules for Writing Arabic Ghazals in English — a Summary," by David Jalajel. My essay gives as clear and accurate a description of the Persian/Urdu ghazal form as I can manage. It is the form that Agha Shahid Ali defended as the "real" ghazal. David Jalajel's article applies the results of his research; there are several other articles by him presenting his results.

The prose section of The Ghazal Page hosts several articles and reviews by poets who've contributed to the 'zine as well as some by me. I hope that you will read these offerings and find them useful. Further essays and reviews are always welcome. That includes perspectives that differ from mine or that of the other writers.

I plan to add a page here that summarizes the points about Persian and Arabic ghazals from the articles linked above.

Maintaining the Pure Ghazal, Part Two

This post is more general than the previous one, but it does bear on the adaptation of the ghazal form to English.

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall distinguishes between "high-context" and "low-context" cultures. This useful distinction points out that in some cultures, the high-context ones, people share a great deal of information — stories, beliefs, values, historical lore, cuisine, and so on, and in other, low-context cultures, people share very little information.

Poets in a high-context culture can assume that readers share a large amount of information; in a low-context culture, poets tend to write for smaller groups of similar experience and education. An oblique reference can convey a great deal to many people in a high-context culture. In a low-context culture, readers may well need explanatory notes.

While high-context cultures still exist, many of us live in low-context cultures, as anyone who has taught literature to American college students can attest. The ghazal originated, of course, in high-context cultures. Now, it is migrated to a low-context culture. I hope essays and book reviews on The Ghazal Page as well as the ghazals. and posts on this blog will help provide some context. Dedicated poets and readers will need to pursue more sources, of course. My own grasp of the context certainly needs development.

The question I want to end with: How does living in a low-context culture affect one's work with the ghazal form?

Maintaining the Pure Ghazal, Part One

Some of us are concerned with maintaining the pure ghazal (the "real" ghazal in Agha Shahid Ali's terms). We have several decisions to make. This post discusses only a few of those decisions.

The first decision is what stage of which culture of the ghazal's history shall we choose to represent the pure ghazal? Many consider Ghalib to be the ghazal-writer par excellence. His culture, 18th century Indian culture of the Muslim rulers, had several stereotyped images for poets to use, notably the nightingale, the rose, wine, and the unavailable Beloved. These images were laden with cultural meanings.

The theme of love goes further back in ghazal history, to the meaning of "ghazal" in Arabic, which I've seen variously translated as "talking with women" or "flirting with women," thus the theme of romantic love as central to the ghazal. The unattainable Beloved easily blends into the Divine Lover, becoming an image for the poet's relationship to God. There can be a lot of ambiguity in a ghazal as to whether the Beloved is another person or God, or an image referring to both.

In Ghalib's society, marriages were arranged and moral women were strictly secluded ("parda" or "purdah"). One couldn't fall in love with a "good girl," or if one did, one must love from a distance. The alternative was to love a courtesan. These were women who were not "good," but were educated, sophisticated, and available. {The link will open a PDF file of the most relevant article a quick Google search could find.)

What is the contemporary ghazal writer to do with this theme? Some still live in societies that practice arranged marriages and purdah; many do not. Personally, I've been married faithfully for almost 50 years. My Beloved is my spouse. Other poets are in different situations, many of which differ in many ways from Ghalib's. Poetry comes out of the poet's total experience, not out of a defined form.

I hope to post further "Maintaining the Pure Ghazal" pieces in the near future. Your comments are welcome.

A Twist in Ghazals

Here is an email that I received this summer from Aslam Karachiwala. It lead me to further exploration of Agha Shahid Ali's description of ghazal form and to recognize I hadn't read his comments carefully enough. I have just revised my essay on ghazal form, "When I say 'ghazal, I mean 'ghuzzle,'" in the light of this point about the relationship between the lines of a couplet (or sher) in a Persian Urdu ghazal. I'm also reading and writing ghazals differently.

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Hi, Gino.

I was delighted to come across TGP a few days ago. Although I can't claim scholarship on the subject, I grew up listening to ghazals and wrote some (very derivatively) in Urdu, using the Hindi/Devnagri script.

Your essay does not mention one aspect of ghazals, which I've always considered a characteristic: the twist in the second line of every maqda. Agha Shahid Ali described it as follows:

    ...the first line (same length) of every succeeding couple sets up a suspense, and the second line (same length but with the rhyme and refrain—the rhyme immediately preceding the refrain) delivers on that suspense by amplifying, dramatizing, imploding, exploding.

Particularly when a ghazal is recited or sung, it is this that "wows." While I concur that we ought not to be too rigid about the definition of a ghazal, particularly in terms of structure, I do wonder if any form can be called a ghazal then nothing would be identifiable as one. I am of course biased, but this "characteristic" might serve as a not too restrictive requirement, regardless of the structure.

Anyways, attached is my first attempt at an original ghazal in English. While the meter is not strict, it's very much in the spirit of the ghazals I remember. I welcome your comments. I've posted it on my blog, as well as on my page at deviantART.com. If it is acceptable for TGP, please do publish it.

— aslam

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I did publish Aslam's ghazal in the summer issue. The aspect of ghazal form he points out refines the concept of the Persian/Urdu ghazal, giving those interested in the form in English a better basis for exploration.

Special Issue of The Ghazal Page

The results of the tercet challenge are now on The Ghazal Page, over 20 ghazals by nearly 20 poets. For information on the tercet format for ghazals, visit this page.

Enjoy!

Haiku & Ghazals?

What do haiku have to do with ghazals? One connection is that some poets write in both forms. Joshua Gage is one of the poets who succeeds in both forms. In the past, Josh has contributed excellent ghazals to The Ghazal Page, along with some useful prose about ghazals. Now, Josh has published an impressive collection of haiku.

The collection is Breaths, published by vanZeno Press in its Professional Reading Series. Published in 2008, Breaths is a trade-sized paperback of 50+ pages, perfect-bound with a full-color cover: a professional publication in other words.

The haiku form is often misunderstood in the English-speaking world. Just consult some of the major handbooks of poetic form, for instance. If you'd like an overview of the haiku as an English form, I recommend the definition posted by the Haiku Society of America.

I highly recommend this collection whether you like haiku or not. Consider that your attitude toward haiku may be distorted by the misunderstanding so common in this country. Here are a few exemplary haiku from Breaths:

Cinco de Mayo
the moon wears
a shroud of clouds

blackout
I sit and listen
to her breathe

grey morning
a dead fish floats
on the waves of the lake

In reading these examples, please remember that haiku are intended to stimulate a train of reflections in the reader, to, in a sense, be completed as they are read. Also, it's important to recognize that haiku come from the poet's perceptions, not from sheer imagination. An experience lies behind each poem. The haiku in Breaths convey tender moments and also moments of life in an industrial city (Cleveland, Ohio) in the 21st century.