Don't Muzzle the Ghazal

"The Road Goes Ever On"

Tolkien and Kerouac? Why not: the 1960s generation of college students and hippies made The Lord of the Rings a major phenomenon by devouring the illicit Ace edition. A few years before, their elder siblings were reading Kerouac. Tolkien's Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are both major road novels, leading to dangers, exploits, and exultations that Kerouac's late 1940s characters couldn't know.

R. W. Watkins posted a short comment on "On the Electronic Road" and mentioned is piece on Kerouac on "Outside Writers."  He gives a good discussion of some of the less-known aspects of Kerouac's influence, achievements, and lapses. Rob mentions  Kerouac's right-wing attitude toward the end of his life. That's implicit as early as On the Road, where he rails against Communism. I believe it was William Buckley who listed Keroauc along with T. S. Eliot and others as conservative writers. Those ideological boxes are too confining, of course, for any reasonably good writer.

Would Frodo or Bilbo have hopped freight with Jack? Only if it moved them closer to completing their missions. Kerouac's mission was of a different order.

Rob and some of his commenters mention Kerouac's poetry. Against a strong wind of opinion (including Denise Levertov, whose poetry I admire greatly), I really like Kerouac's poetry, from Mexico City Blues through the various other collections that have surfaced. There's a lightness, a zaniness, a freedom in what he does that continues to appeal to me. He also has a sharp eye for the telling detail.

And that's not mentioning his skill with haiku or the haibun embedded in some of his novels.

At the end, I don't care about labels such as "beat," "hippy," "great writer," "right-winger," "left-winger," and all the other notations of the sorry mind. If you don't like anything Kerouac wrote, adore his every scribble, or simply don't care, literary reputations wax and wine, are completely lost and rediscovered by happenstance. Life's too short to fight the battles many of us choose.

I like Tolkien's poetry too.

On the Electronic Road: 50 Years of Kerouac

My idea is to post here at least once a week, but it's been two weeks. I plead business, but then that's not a very good excuse, really, for not doing an hour's work. (Not work: these entries are a privilege and a pleasure, not a task, not a chore.) I was having some trouble coming up with a topic, all I could think of were things I couldn't yet write about. And then . . .

. . . then I picked up the new Library of America volume of Jack Kerouac's "road" novels. This fall, as you may well know, is the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road. The volume, Road Novels 19757-1960 includes On the Road, The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, Tristessa, Lonesome Traveler, and selections from Kerouac's journals, 1949-1954. The first three of these books I read when they were first published, and read, and read, and reread. Talked about, fantasized around, and shared with friends.

Kerouac despised the commercial trivialization of the beats, the term "beatnik," and the simple-minded criticism he received. He refused to be the spokesman for a generation of hoodlums (paraphrased from my leaky memory). Yet his writing had an enormous effect on many people, including me. I was in high school when On the Road was published. I doubt I did anything subsequently that I wouldn't have done without Kerouac's book, but I did it in a different context, with a different attitude. His writing encouraged my developing interest in Buddhism, jazz, and poetry.

A grove of locust trees in November in east-central Kansas. (Honey locust trees, with long sharp thorns but a good firm bed of leaves under them. A moonlight night, a night filled with stars. The boy under the trees, stiffly cross-legged, can recognize Orion, the dippers. He's come here fresh from reading Dharma Bums, ready to meditate. Enlightenment escapes him, as it has ever after. On returning to the lit and warm house, he does, however, scribble some verses. Kerouac has focused for him an excitement that is coded somewhere in his constitution. A pattern, a direction otherwise unavailable in rural Kansas.

I found Dharma Bums in a wonderful bookstore in Topeka, the state capitol. I don't remember the name of the store, but it was of a kind that hardly exists any more. Not a chain, not large, but crowded with books, fiction by Borges, issues of The Evergreen Review. My journeys on the road were to the closest cities of any size — Topeka, Manhattan, Emporia — seeking literary and aesthetic stimulation that the small towns ("pop. 600") just didn't have.

Well, I've wandered, and been unfair to those small small towns. In those days, I bought Plato, Thoreau, and Bertrand Russell from revolving racks in drugstores where they were displayed with romances, cowboy stories, and detective novels. Something for another entry, I guess.

I'm slowly reading On the Road. Kerouac's enthusiasm for America is delightful, his descriptions blaze with colors just like the roman candles he so famously mentioned. This novel is very well-written.

Louis Menand wrote a fine piece on Kerouac, "Drive, He Wrote," in the October 1, 2007 issue of The New Yorker. (Yes, his title riffs on Robert Creeley's best-known poem.) I recommend this piece.

Who Said That?

Voice and persona are related issues: in a poem, who is speaking? Is it the poet? Is the poet speaking as him or her self? That is, is the poem autobiographical?

I leave fiction aside for this post, although the same points apply to fiction and even to much nonfiction.

This topic comes up now because of the poem that opens the October issue of The Ghazal Page "After Persian Ghazals Are Explained to an Arab Poetaster." This poem satirizes two attitudes: the person who dogmatically asserts that the Persian ghazal is the "only" ghazal form and the Arab poetaster (dabbler in verse) who can't believe that attitude yet produces a Persian ghazal to refute it. Ever since I first read this poem, I assumed David Jalajel is speaking as the Arab poetaster, but he tells me that he identifies more with the proponent of the Persian form.

Satire is tough — not so much if the satirist doesn't care what the target of the satire feels. Neither David nor I, though, want to offend anyone who is an advocate of the strict Persian form, nor do we want to start a feud between the two approaches to the ghazal. (That raises the question of how many approaches there are — I hope we see many!)

Ezra Pound was one of the early modern proponents of the persona in poetry, one of his early volumes being titled Personae. The confessional poets (Robert Lowell, John Berryman, others) and the Beats (notably Allen Ginsburg) resisted the domination of the persona idea, that the poet spoke through a mask, a fictional self, rather than as his or her self.

I prefer to invite numerous possibilities: the ghazal is a form fit for both the distanced, more intellectual persona poem, and the more immediate, personal confessional or Beat poem. (Among the many possibilities.)

"Who said that?" Who, indeed?

Poetic Seasoning

What is poetic about a hot, humid July morning?

Not much. The dog enjoys it though, poking her head into the flower bed, hoping to surprise the very small rabbit who hides there (sometimes). Since the dog is on a leash, the rabbit is safe — safe and knows it, hopping only a few feet further away from the dog and then sitting motionless.

Is it poetic to arrive at work (after a 15 minute walk) wet with sweat?

I hear my long-ago English teachers, all the way into college, rebuking me for using a vulgar word like "sweat"; I remember showing one a poem in which I used "guts" — she thought "intestines" to be much more poetic.

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I wrote that fragment in mid-July; now it's almost the end of September in a different season, at least at this latitude. Fall has long been my favorite season. Since I grew up on a farm, in ranching country, the seasons and weather have always been important. Rainy weather meant my work was limited to regular chores and emergencies. When school started in the fall, my summer of hoeing crops, making hay, harvesting wheat was over. Always a compulsive reading, I enjoyed gifts of leisure time from the weather and structured study in school. (Well, the structured study not so much.)

As you may know, seasons are essential to traditional Japanese haiku — to the point that there is an accepted vocabulary of "season words" and almanacs listing them with examples. American poet and editor, William Higginson compiled two related books on season words from around the world: Haiku World: an International Poetry Almanac, Kodansha International (1996) and The Seasons: Poetry of the  Natural World, Kodansha International (1996). Each of these volumes has excellent poems and very useful  information.

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It's a warm, clear September morning. I walk our dog along the edge of a small parking lot, with a railroad running along its north edge. The right of way and grassy areas are thick with crown vetch, assorted grasses (Timothy & Johnson mostly), and moss thistle, an invasive plant not native to the Ozarks. I'm charged with the joy of autumn, its resonance in my life. (I fell in love with my wife in autumn, which is the best part of it for me.) What does all this have to do with ghazals? The seasons are not, to my knowledge, a traditional part of the ghazal, but perhaps there are ghazal poets, like me, who write with a continuous awareness of season and weather. If so, and if you have ghazals that use seasons and weather thematically, I'd love to see them. Send them!

A Radif Challenge

First, here's a book recommendation; the challenge is based on an article in it. Reorientations/Arabic and Persian Poetry. Edited by Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych and published by Indiana University Press in 1994. David Jalajel recommended this book to me largely because of the article, "The Rise and Fall of a Persian Refrain," by Franklin D. Lewis. In this article, Lewis traces the rise in popularity of the radif "fire and water" ("atash u ab"). Lewis describes how poets used a radif in a number of poems, showing their skill and wit. Eventually, of course, a specific radif declines in use.

Lewis's article suggested a challenge to me; the challenge is to write a ghazal using a set radif.

I will provide a radif and challenge poets to use it in a Persian-style ghazals of five to twelve shers. Then I will choose several submitted ghazals using the refrain and publish them in the April 2008 Issue of The Ghazal Page.

• Deadline: February 14, 2008
• Radif: clouds and rain
• Format: a Persian ghazal with five to twelve shers
• Limit: no more than three ghazals per poet
• Prize: publication of any accepted poems in The Ghazal Page
• Submission: Use the link below to submit a ghazal if you wish

use this link to submit a ghazal

This challenge will also appear on The Ghazal Page soon and, if you're in my mailing list, your should see it in your email box soon. I hope to see so many good "clouds and rain" ghazals that I can use them in a double issue.

"Musicality in Verse," Part 2

The previous entry on this topic discussed consonants. This entry discusses vowels.

I've posted a new page, "A Game for Your Ears," which applies these ideas. The game is an exercise I wrote for my creative writing classes.

Consonants are formed by altering the flow of breath, stopping it, making it hiss, directing it through the nose, and so on. Consonants are formed in different parts of the mouth (& nose); some are voiced, others not.

Vowels are formed also by altering the flow of breath at specific points in the mouth, using positions of the lower jaw, the lips, and the tongue. Vowels are not stopped or subjected to friction. Vowels are voiced unless one is whispering. Vowels are defined, like consonants, by "minimal pairs": two words which differ only in one sound. The difference defines both vowels as phonemes (meaningful sounds) in that language.

For instance, "pit" and "pat" define the minimal pair, /i, a/. The inconsistencies of English spelling mean one has to actually pronounce the words to hear the vowel. The phonemic alphabet for transcribing English is fairly straightforward for consonants, needing only a few non-alphabet symbols; transcribing vowels requires more special symbols. For those interested in more specific information, antimoon.com presents English phonemes with corresponding symbols.

Disclaimer: One does not need to know the phonemic alphabet or be able to transcribe English into that alphabet in order to write good poetry. What one needs is a good ear for the language.

Kenneth Burke shows us how sets of consonants, such as m - n - b - p - d - t - f - v, can create the music of a poem. Burke doesn't discuss vowels, merely quoting Coleridge to suggest that consonants are primary. So, what about vowels? Vowels can not be organized in sets as Burke does the consonants. Vowels are grouped by linguists into front, middle, and back, and into high, mid, and low — relative positions in the mouth. Here's sentence illustrating the front vowels:

"He will wed her." In order, the vowels are high front, mid front, low front, and then a mid vowel (an "r-colored schwa"). These vowels aren't related in the way that, for instance, the consonants in "Many bold friends told of Paris." Yet the sequence — the flow — of vowels is obviously essential to the music of a poem.

I don't believe that poems, good poems, begin in calculation. A good poems begins in intuition, in a hunch that a sequence of words, an experience, an idea, a feeling is worth writing about. The sounds, along with the other elements of the poem follow from that hunch (inspiration, if you will). Conscious thought enters in revision, is not part of the initial vision.

By way of a closing example, here are the first two couplets of Brandy Bauer's "Ghazal (Kabul)," from the July 2007 issue of The Ghazal Page. She uses both consonants and vowels very effectively.

A bleak season arrived when I alit at Kabul.
Plunged into nothingness, a skeleton, this Kabul.

Here in the street, festering water and dust.
Whose fires now choke the qanats of Kabul?

I won't do detailed analysis of these lines; you will be rewarded by reading them aloud carefully. Note the subtle, and effective, relationship of "arrived" and "alit" in the first line or of "street" and "festering" in the third line.

I plan to return to this topic soon. If you have comments, including examples, please send them along.

 

"Musicality in Verse"

The title of this post is the title of an essay by Kenneth Burke, a great literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's contributions have been somewhat overshadowed, perhaps, by the dominance of postmodernism for a numbe of years. Burke just wasn't fashionable. A Google search on "Kenneth Burke" produced a gratifying number of hits that look good. I'll provide only the University of Minnesota site linked above from his name.

The essay this post is based on, "Musicality in Verse," appears in Burke's The Philosophy of Literary Form, Louisiana State University Press, second edition, 1967. In the post, I put Burke's insights into my own words with my own examples. The topic is significant enough for working poets that I may follow it up in a later post. I highly recommend that you get Burke's essay, if possible, and read it.

Burke's main point is this: some speech-sounds closely resemble others, differing only in one or two features. These speech-sounds form sets and are used by poets as they use alliteration. Burke calls these patterns "concealed alliteration by cognates." Sounds in the middle or at the end of words also count as part of this approach.

Every language's sound system consists of phonemes — speech-sounds that make a difference in the meaning of words. Phonemes are defined by "minimal pairs": two words with different meanings in which the only sound difference is the pair of sounds being defined.

A common example is the two English words "bit" and "pit." These words differ only in the /b/ and the /p/ sounds, so they define /b, p/ as phonemes in English. Both /b/ and /p/ are made by stopping the flow of breath with the lips and then releasing it. The difference is that /b/ is voiced and /p/ is unvoiced. When you say "b," your vocal chords vibrate (unless you're whispering); thus, /b/ is voiced. You hear these differences or you couldn't understand English. Try saying both "bit" and "pit" with your hands over your ears. You will hear the buzzing of your vocal chords on the /b/ but not the /p/.

Webster's 1913 dictionary has this example in its definition of "alliteration":

Behemoth, biggest born of earth, upheaved His vastness. – Milton.

The /b/ and /v/ alliterations in this line are obvious. Less obvious to one's analysis, although obvious to one's ear are the b, p. and v cognate alliterations. (I'm dropping the slashes, used to mark phonemes.) V is alliteratively cognate with both b and p because of its phonemic features: it is made with the upper lip and lower teeth and is voiced. The unvoiced -th in "Behemoth" and "earth" also alliterate cognately with v (lips and tongue). The medial /g/ in "biggest" is also part of this group of cognate sounds.

Milton's play with vowels are also important to the effect of this line (which is, remember, out of context). I won't go into vowels now, so I definitely will discuss this topic again.

Poets Online — Ghazal Archive

Among other topics related to ghazals and to poetry more generally, I will comment on relevant Web sites. The first of these is the ghazal archive of Poetry Online.

The first thing you'll notice about the Poets Online Ghazal Archive is the brown text on a white background. On my Macbook, at least, this color combination makes reading a little difficult. But only a little.

The archive begins with a paragraph defining/describing ghazals. Essentially, this paragraph defines the Persian ghazal and repeats the usual misinformation that the ghazal began in Persian, when it began in Arabic, as David Jalajel shows.The author couldn't have known about the Arabic ghazal, however, since it has been difficult for us monoglot English speakers to get detailed information about the ghazal. The opening paragraph also provides some brief information on Adrienne Rich and ghazals. A second, brief paragraph provides links to some other sources — actually, books for sale on Amazon.

The ghazals that follow use various forms: some radif, some qafiya and radif, one rhyming couplets, and a couple no rhyme (what can be called "free ghazals"). I'm going to quote a few shers here, but you really should visit the archive and read all the ghazals in their entirety. It will be worth your while.

from "Ghazal"
by Laura Shovan

Late summer an unexpected crop:  beans veiled by hand-shaped leaves.
I lift one veil: green leaves, green vine, the bean a hidden lover.

The imagery in the sher above is especially rich. Read the whole ghazal and see how she carries it through.

from "Parent Versus Child Ghazal"
by Catherine M. LeGault

We drink and smoke away our leisure-time as couch-
potatoes; and we wonder why our children slouch.

The enjambment between lines works very well and recalls what David Jalajel says about enjambment in the Arabic ghazal; this would be enjambment between the first and second hemistiches.

from "Ghazal at the Equinox"
by Lianna Wright

At the waterline, the taste of salt, sound of water,
feel of cold autumn, the sight of my daughter.

The shortening daylight makes me think
that the plant's turning sunward is even sadder.

The rhymes — qafiya — work nicely here. Perhaps it is "microrhyme" on "-er."

I hope posts like this one will extend the conversation on the ghazal in English and its possible forms.

Poetry and Science, 2nd Post

The general direction of the posts on poetry and science is on their relationship as modes of knowing, of understanding, and expressing. This post, though, deals with science as a subject for poetry. First, for your pleasure, I propose David Lunde's ghazal. "Of Stars," which appeared in the fifth issue of The Ghazal Page for 2004. A Persian ghazal in form, "Of Stars" traces the human fascination with the night skies and their bright, dazzling inhabitants. ("Of stars," as you might expect, is the radif.)

Here are the first two shers of the poem, but you really should read the entire piece:

    The Milky Way swirls, a wizard's cloak of stars;
    Around we wheel on a slim spoke of stars.

    Honor that most clever, most sapient ancestor--
    When first he spoke, he spoke of stars.

"Of Stars" can be seen as a science fiction or speculative poem. The Science Fiction Poetry Association is devoted to the SF genre of poetry. The SFPA is an active organization, with a journal, prizes, and other avenues into SF poetry. Their Dwarf Star prize anthology for 2006 was edited by Deborah P. Kolodji, whose work has appeared on The Ghazal Page. Her ""Dark Matter" explores scientific imagery in an open ghazal form. Kolodji also has a poem — a cinquain — on Astropoetica. David Jalajel also has a poem scheduled for Astropoetica.

A cinquain is a five-line form invented by the American poet, Adelaide Crapsey in the early twentieth century. Deborah Kolodji is editor of Amaze: the Cinquain Journal.

Another genre of science-related poetry is "lab-lit," which I just learned about through a discussion list. The lab-lit site seems interested in fiction and factual prose, not poetry. It is worth your time to visit, with a serialized novel and other items.

Finally, from The Scientist magazine's Web site, here's an article that explores the questions:

"What good is science to poets? And what good is poetry to scientists?"

Those questions are close to the ones I want to explore further in posts on science and poetry.

Why Bother?

Why should I, you, or anyone else continue to write poetry? Haven't all the poems already been written? There are love poems, nature poems, narrative poems, and on and on. What do you and I and anyone else have to offer new in the way of theme or content or form?

Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate in Emporia, Kansas, another undergrad and I shared our "poems" (ironic quotation marks). The other fellow — whose name I've forgotten — surprised and shocked me by saying that there was no point in writing poetry because everything possible had already been written. I don't know about him, but, for better or worse, I've continued to scribble verses.

In a sense, my friend was right: the world probably has enough love poems, nature poems, etc etc. So, if I write a love poem for my wife, as I've done many times, why should I bother? Why not find the appropriate lines in the Song of Songs which Is Solomon's, in William Carlos Williams' The Desert Music, or Cole Porter? If I'm feeling blue, why not listen to the blues rather than scribbling a verse about it?

What makes the poem I write today — that you write today — different from the hundreds of thousands of existing poems?

The difference is that that theme, that content, that form is embedded in this situation, in the moment(s) in which you write. In other words, I haven't written this to this woman before, nor has anyone else. It is the situation, the personal, cultural, and historical context that makes it worthwhile to keep writing poetry. It is, of course, possible that  I or  you or  someone else will write something radically new. Ezra Pound's adage, "Make it new," is always relevant if difficult to achieve. Falling short of the adage, as I surely do, I can at least write in my situation.

This entry was prompted by a point of Friedrich Nietzsche's. I've been reading The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, in which an unpublished early essay of Nietzsche's is quoted. Trained as a classical philologist, Nietzsche wrote that classicists could keep their field alive by keeping it connected to their lives: understanding of the past is always vital in the context of the present (p. 30, my paraphrase).

If you wish a label for my position in this post, it is — existentialist. That's a label that's really a refusal to be labeled. Just keep writing, okay?