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.
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