Gino's Ghazal Blog

Industrial Pastoral

I'm (re)reading William Carlos Williams' long poem, epic poem, Paterson. Williams' poem has many dimensions, many voices, many perspectives, many types of content. It is, among other things, an homage to Paterson, New Jersey, to the Passaic Falls, to the location, its history and its people. There are historical documents, contemporary letters, transcripts of conversations, narrative interludes, and lyric reflections. I've loved this poem for fifty years, although I haven't read it for awhile. Rereading shows me how delightful, how challenging, how rewarding it is.

Williams' original design divided the poem into four books, with a kind of consistent pattern, flow, to them, following the Passaic River, following the life of Noah Faitoute Paterson, his alter ego and voice in the poem. Williams shows profound concern for poor and working people, narrating in Book II, an "Sunday in the Park," complete with young lovers and an evangelist.

On the first page of the Preface to Paterson, Williams defines his method:

To make a start,
out of particulars
and make them general,
rolling up the sum by defective means —

Williams' best-known definition of his method is also early in Paterson:

— Say it, no ideas but in things —

Williams' poetry is empirical, a "return to the thing itself." This is not to say that his poetry lacks ideas or abstractions, just to say that he expresses the general through the particular, always a good plan for a poet. If you've not read Williams' work, I strongly recommend that you do. If you have read him, I recommend a return to his pages. Even if your first contact with Williams' writing wasn't satisfactory, further acquaintance may well open new vistas to you.

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.

On Not Losing Track

Long ago, in another city in another state, I began writing poetry seriously and seeking to publish it. Okay, you say, then the big issue was getting editors to accept my poems. That is a biggie, of course, but only part of the process, and a part that depends on other things, such as filing and record-keeping.

Keeping records then, almost fifty years ago, and now, in another century in another millennium, are two different things. You probably won't be surprised to find that the old way worked better for me. Here are the essentials of that process:

• write something that might resemble a poem
• revise that something into resembling a poem more closely
• type up the best draft
• revise the best draft
• make a "final" draft and file it

Doing these things gave me a file of more-or-less poems that I could submit to editors. What editors where? Here's that process:

• research poetry publications and their editors
• select a publication to submit some of my poems to
• send off the poems
• get the editor's response (most probable response: rejection; sometimes, acceptance)
• do more research and submit more poems

I did mention record-keeping. Until I started using computers, I used file-folders, notebooks, and index cards to file final drafts and to track places to submit poems, submissions, and the responses to submissions. Most of those records still exist, in a box in storage somewhere. Several years ago, I wrote another blog post about this process.

I've had more trouble with tracking drafts and keeping records on a computer than I ever had with hard-copy files and notebooks. Short poems like haiku are especially hard for me to know (1) where they are and (2) what has happened with them.

I still use notebooks to write first drafts, but I type up subsequent drafts on a computer. Just this month, I've decided to record final drafts of short poems, and records of submitting them, in an actual physical notebook rather than casting them into the sectors of a hard-drive.

Here's a question to end with: If you write poetry, how do you keep track of final drafts and their records of submission? Someone has to have some good ideas out there.

The Poet's Disease

Here's a quatrain from Celebrating the Best of Urdu Poetry, by Khushwant Singh and Kamna Prasad (Viking Penguin Books 2007). The poet is Ghulam Rabbani Taban (1914-1993). The poem is a quatrain in Urdu. The translation works well in three lines.

The Disease

The doctor felt my pulse
And on my asking him, replied:
Symptoms show it's the same disease of which Majnoon the lover died.'

There is a place or two at which the translation's third line could be broken to make a quatrain; I like the way the last line runs on to its inevitable but surprising conclusion.

This brief poem illustrates the point of cultural context quite well. While one hopes that the story of Majnun and Layla's doomed loved would become part of our cultural context in the West, it surely hasn't spread far yet.

It is the poet's disease because it is madness caused by unfulfillable love.

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 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.

Surprises in August

With two exceptions, this fall is the first time in over 60 years that I have not been a student or a teacher. The beginning of the school year was a major beat in the rhythm of my year. It used to fall after Labor Day, but years ago was moved to August. As a child and teenager, fall signaled a change to intellectual and creative pursuits more to my taste than working in the fields. Fall has always been my favorite season and remains so.

My love affair with my wife began in the fall. Now, my grandchildren prepare for school while I sit back.

In our yard, August is marked by the blooming of surprise lilies, aka naked ladies. The woman from whom we brought our house told us, with slight embarrassment, that they were naked ladies; another elderly woman told me the same thing much later, but she seemed a little amused by the name.

Is there a reason for my linking naked ladies and the beginning of school? Not that I can think of, other than the simple flow of the seasons bringing these plants to bloom. For me, fall is not only the season of harvest but also a season of beginnings as a new school year starts. This year, it's not a new school year but a new year of exploration that begins.

Light & Shadow

Cleaning out my office when I retired, I sent a lot of material to the university archives. That included a number of old publications — journals with my poems in them. I glanced at some but not many. I can access them later, if I wish, in the archives. I did see the one below and photocopied to bring home and show to my wife. It spoke to me then; I hope it speaks to you now:

Psalm
Stepping down
From the curb
To cross the street
I think,
"I am not a good person"
And realize:
No need
        to whine.


The shadow
At my feet
Also
Praises
The shaping
Light.

This poem originally appeared in a Mennonite publication under the name Eugene Warren, my name at the time.

Sometimes, other times, then & now . . .

Stuff keeps changing. I've been retired for two weeks now; it's an eerie feeling. The old habits of planning classes and other things haven't gone away, nor have the habits of going to the office or contacting co-workers. Not that I'm planning classes or going to the office, but the impulses are still there.

My being retired is a main reason that the June and July issues of The Ghazal Page haven't appeared yet. I was exhausted when I retired and haven't recovered yet. The pattern of my days in retirement is beginning to take some shape now.

The June and July issues are not the only late items; the issue presenting ghazals from the tercet challenge is also overdue. June and July, together with the August issue, will make up a three-part summer issue, each part about the same size as the usual monthly issues. The tercet challenge attracted some excellent ghazals; that issue should appear in early August at the latest.

As my retirement progesses, I will either make more use of this blog or cancel it. By "more use" I have in mind more frequent posts on a wider range of topics. A new name for the blog seems appropriate, but I haven't thought of one yet. With a wider range, I may post more somewhat personal entries, without being autobiographical. Especially, I want to comment on some of the reading I expect to be doing. Perhaps we can discuss some poems, books, even music and movies.