Shine in that Vivid Isolation: A Case Study of the Ghazal in the Contemporary American Lyric

Tyler Mills | May/Summer 2013

Tyler Mills

NOTES

The beloved, or the "eternal feminine," appears in ghazals as an object of absolute torment for the speaker. The speaker's cadence is one of longing, grief, and loss, driven by the inability to join the "beloved"...

The ghazal, a poetic form that has intersected cultures as politically discordant as Indian and Pakistani, has become popular in contemporary American poetry. Five ghazals are included in Reginald Dwayne Betts’s Shahid Reads His Own Palm, for example. In “Ghazal (Breath),” “Shahid waits, listens to the stars— / His mind is a cell: blow through it ancient breath.”1 The imprisoned speaker addresses himself in the mode of prayer—for his creative, Aeolian harp of a mind. The lyre of this ghazal signifies a creative self, imprisoned by circumstance (he is in jail, but also a cell of self-definition). Another formal ghazal published in a recent collection is Shara McCallum’s “Ghazal” from This Strange Land. In the closing (and signature) couplet of this ghazal, the poet’s name evolves into a question: is poetry’s song capable of producing a cure for neglect? McCallum’s ghazal ends with a meditation on whether or not poetry can counteract the kinds of violence that endure in memory: “In Hebrew, Shara means she sings. / What song can offer the antidote for neglect?”2 Unlike Betts and McCallum’s ghazals, the ghazal in Rebecca Dunham’s Flight Cage is free verse—yet it still preserves the ghazal’s convention of independent couplets, as well as its signature closing line. Dunham’s ghazal ends with the urgency of address—biological and psychic—that comes to the self at the brink of childbirth: “Push, Rebecca. The doctor readies his knives and it is / as if the hand of God himself is there to set me screaming.”3 And, most recently, are the free-verse ghazals of Anthony Madrid’s I am Your Slave Now Do What I Say “that assault conventions while often reading like deranged love letters.”4 His ghazals interact with and dismantle a key tradition of the form, in which the speaker is a kind of performer. In “These Were Not Born To Be Lovers,” the speaker is self-conscious of the role his performance is supposed to have, that of bestowing an account of ardent love upon a reader: “It’s about time MADRID turned a few heads. Just look at him: you could read / The small print of your marriage contract by the light coming off his face.”5

For such an ancient form, the ghazal has only recently become widely available to poets writing in English. In 1968, Aijaz Ahmad invited a small group of respected American poets—such as W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, and Mark Strand—to translate Ghalib’s ghazals in honor of the centennial of Ghalib’s death; this pamphlet of poems ultimately became the anthology, Ghazals of Ghalib.6 This anthology is a valuable resource for English speakers. Ahmad first rendered each Urdu poem into “literal” prose English, and then several poets further translated Ahmad’s translation, in an attempt to recapture the emotional core for an English speaker through a variety of free and semi-formal verse versions. For example, from Ahmad’s prose translation of the fourth ghazal in the collection, William Hunt, Adrienne Rich, and William Stafford take three formally different approaches: Hunt’s poem is in three-line strophes, Rich’s is in unrhymed and unmetered couplets, and Stafford’s is in blank verse couplets.7 All three translations invite the ghazal into the present, especially Hunt’s line, “Dropped like a used light bulb, I won’t be shocked,” which originally was “I am like an extinguished candle” in Ahmad’s literal translation.8

While a valuable project, Aijaz Ahmad’s Ghazals of Ghalib set a precedent we must examine, especially since the ghazal is becoming such a popular form in contemporary American poetry. Many poets have published ghazals in recent collections (Reginald Dwayne Betts, Rebecca Dunham, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Anthony Madrid, Shara McCallum, John Murillo, Evie Shockley, among others), both rhymed and unrhymed free verse. However, in the poems of Robert Bly, this form has become a site open for inscription.

At the turn of the 21st century, Agha Shahid Ali gathered what he considered to be true ghazals into a valuable anthology: Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English (Wesleyan University Press, 2000). In his introduction to the anthology, Shahid Ali ascribes some blame to Ahmad’s translation project, Ghazals of Ghalib: “I have a suspicion that Aijaz Ahmad did not quite establish the primacy of the form when explaining Ghalib to those who collaborated with him in translating ghazals.”9 Even the name of this anthology, subtitled as Real Ghazals in English, implies a reaction to the “false” ghazals that were being published. The poems of this anthology by and large remain true to the form’s conventions, where the first couplet rhymes in an exact word repetition (aa) with itself and the second line of each couplet rhymes with this first couplet by repeating the exact same word: (Xa), and the a word becomes a kind of refrain.10 Shahid Ali’s anthology hosts an array of the best contemporary poets working within the ghazal’s formal strictures with intelligence and lyric virtuosity, such as Craig Arnold, Michael Collier, Annie Finch, Cynthia Hogue, W.S. Merwin, Paul Muldoon, Stanley Plumly, Ann Townsend, and Ellen Bryant Voigt. Yet, Robert Bly’s fairly recent book of tercet “ghazals,” My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, published five short years after Shahid Ali’s anthology, is still marketed as a collection of ghazals. One can only imagine what Shahid Ali’s reaction would have been to this label of a book of free-verse tercets, especially since he denounces the “free-verse ghazal as a contradiction in terms.”11

What exactly is a ghazal? The ghazal earns its name from an Arabic-derived word for a “lyric in eastern literature, especially Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, and Pashto, from the 8th century onward.”12 But by its Arabic origins, ghazal can also mean, “to woo, flirt, or engage in amorous conversation with women, paying tribute to their grace and beauty.”13 Historically, the ghazal has been used as a means of expressing the love and devotion between a speaker and the beloved object of worship (most often gendered female) beyond the speaker’s reach. The relationship between speaker/lover and self/other can be paradigmatic to that of an individual’s yearning for the divine. But importantly, “ghazal” can also translate as the catch in the throat of “the cry of a gazelle when it is hunted down and trapped.”14 The notion of the hunt and entrapment embedded within the meaning of the word mirrors the speaker-other relationship that is embedded in the form. This cry of the trapped animal is released in response to more than the absence of the beloved’s physical presence. The beloved, or the “eternal feminine,”15 appears in ghazals as an object of absolute torment for the speaker. The speaker’s cadence is one of longing, grief, and loss, driven by the inability to join the “beloved”—which in traditional ghazals can appear as a lover or a ruler—and is also invocative of the divine.

Traditional ghazals use such distant and unavailable figures of that which is other-than-self to express extreme devotional suffering. Such suffering led the early 12th-century Muslim philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali into a debilitating breakdown; he had been trying to seek a relationship with God through the logic and meditations of Islamic Falsafah when, as he writes, “God shriveled my tongue.”16 To find his spiritual identity, al-Ghazzali practiced Sufi mysticism for ten years. Karen Armstrong writes, “al-Ghazzali reminds his readers that… we can only discuss these matters in the figurative language that is the preserve of the creative imagination.”17 Suffering results in attempting to capture the divine in the logic (albeit, mysterious in itself) of metaphor. The creative exercise of the imagination is both an exploration of world and other-world, but also an entrapment of self. The ghazal, especially in the contemporary lyric, becomes the death cry of a being at the moment of realizing that one can only lose this struggle to free oneself—from oneself.

Ghazals perform this obsessive pursuit of the beloved/other-self/God via self-contained couplets that chime in momentary unisons. These unisons are created by rhyme and word-repetition linking the end of each closed couplet. Because the ghazal moves through closed couplets, the language is syntactically contained inside these dyads. Therefore, each couplet is isolated from the couplet both before and after it. The line length of the ghazal in Urdu, Turkish, or Arabic is ordered according to a quantitative scheme, like poems in a language like Latin, where long or short syllables last for a quantifiable length of time when spoken. Because this quantitative scheme is not applicable in English, where syllables cannot be quantified exactly according to how long they last in time (due to the accented nature of the English language),18 when writing in the ghazal form, the poet usually chooses either the syllabic or iambic line.19 Robert Bly takes the first approach, counting the syllables of Persian ghazals to justify his use of tercets. In Francis Quinn’s interview with Robert Bly in the Paris Review, Bly explains his method (italics added for emphasis):

The line that poets use most often in both Persian and Arabic tends to be sixteen or eighteen syllables. So if you have two eighteen-syllable lines, you really have thirty-six syllables. By contrast, the typical line in English, in the sonnets, for example, is ten syllables. A line in English becomes unwieldy if it’s extended into eighteen syllables. If one adopts three eleven- or twelve-syllable lines, you end up with about thirty-six syllables. I think the Islamic writers felt that thirty-six syllables is a useful and completed unit of expressiveness. That’s why I went to three lines.20

When Quinn challenges Bly with the statement “So the ghazal is not free verse,” Bly responds “Not at all!” and provides his rationale, which includes the image leaps within and between his thee-line strophes. (Oddly, this interview with Bly appears in the same issue of the Paris Review as Shahid Ali’s “A Ghazal for Michael Palmer”.)

Bly’s formal translation method is also troubling: essentially, he adds up the syllables in two lines of an average ghazal in Arabic or Persian, then divides it by ten (the basic number of syllables in a regular, pentameter line in English), and splits the resulting three groupings of roughly ten syllables into tercets. In contrast, the traditional ghazal structure is predicated on the dynamic within, and also between, the couplets, which “stand as independent units within the poem.”21 The traditional ghazal rhyme scheme is aa, Xa, Xa, where each couplet closes with the same word. The Arabic word for the a refrain word is radiif; the word for the internally-rhymed word is qaafiya.22 The she’rs are the “couplets,” which consist of two hemistiches each.23 Some of Bly’s “ghazals” end with a kind of radiif, sometimes with the internally rhymed word that customarily precedes it (the qaafiya), and sometimes not. But importantly, in Bly’s ghazals and his translations of ghazals, the entire schema of the couplet itself, where one line is in tension with another—like the self-other yearning of the subject itself—is abandoned.

Successful translations of ghazals into English can indeed show how the aa, Xa, Xa couplet structure of the ghazal enacts obsession, where the first couplet brings the radiif together into a kind of mirror, broken when each following couplet only contains the radiif (refrain word) in its second line. Consider the six opening lines from John Drury’s translation of a ghazal by Hafiz of Shiraz (1325-1389):

Where can I hear the news, so that out of desire I rise?
So that, like a homing pigeon from a snare, I rise?

If you command me to your service, I’ll renounce
the world and its worldliness, though it’s where I rise.

O Lord, loosen the rain from your thunderhead of mercy—
as long as, like dust that floats in the air, I rise.24

In this poem, “I rise” causes the reader to feel the poem pull to the gravity of the aa scheme closing the first two lines. “I rise” enters the poem in the form of a question: “I rise?” The speaker proposes worldly situations as solutions to the questions, and finalizes each situation with a pronouncement: “I rise.” In this way, the radiif shapes the poem’s meaning, between body and soul, between the world and the otherworld: “as long as, like dust that floats in the air, I rise”.

Najaat Black’s translation of a ghazal by Nesimi (d. ca. 1404) also illustrates the dramatization of the self’s desire for a beloved other: “Oh my idol of the temple, in the dark of night, in the early dawn, far from you—I burn / And when I long for our desired union, within an even greater fire—I burn.”25 A line such as this one conjures up the “star-crossed lovers” theme common to a cousin of the ghazal: the qasida. The qasida is a love poem or poem of praise written to be delivered in the context of the divan, or court. Some qasida poems follow the aa, Xa, Xa pattern of the ghazal and some maintain a single end rhyme rather than a single repeating end word at the end of each hemistich. As Ahmed Ali emphasizes in The Golden Tradition, unlike much-shorter ghazals, qasida court poems can be hundreds of couplets long.26 When we consider the ardent passion of Sufi mystics in their internal pursuit of that which is beyond the self, the ghazal’s roots in the qasida make sense. Socrates defines the “lover” figure in Plato’s Phaedrus as one who “gazes upward as though he were a bird and cares nothing for what is here below, so he is accused of being mad.”27 This passage could also describe a “mad” mystic, barely existing in this world, sick with love for the truth beyond tangible reality.

In addition to difficult syntax, the ghazal traditionally centers on a complex image system that when read through a 21st century, print-based lens might seem rife with symbolism that a contemporary reader could quickly deem cliché.

The ghazal’s complicated relationship with the qasida has caused some scholars to cast the ghazal aside as too saccharine to be serious—a fault of the especially Anglo-centric who overlook the ghazal’s relationship to the erotic/mystical dynamic associated with Sufi mysticism. An entry in the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, published as recently as 2006, condemns ghazals of the Arabic post-classical age:

The lack of dedication, the concentration on transient relations based on outward attractiveness, is one of the most unconvincing features of this period’s profusion of ghazal poetry. Despite this particular poem’s strong avowel of suffering in love, it is too unconvincing. It fails to arouse the reader’s deeper emotions about the universal experience of love.28

What reader’s “deeper emotions” does the ghazal “fail to arouse”? One cannot help thinking of Said’s definition of Orientalism: “the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures.”29 The underlying warrant in the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature is that “the universal experience of love” defines “universal” as Euro-centric, ignoring the mystical explorations of love, self, and universe that are the core of Sufism.

Translating ghazals into English, as Asif Farrukhi explains in the introduction to his anthology An Evening of Caged Beasts: Seven Postmodern Urdu Poets, is an arduous task because of the form’s strict conventions. Farrukhi laments not including ghazals by Afzal Ahmed Syed and Sarwat Hussain (two masters of the form) because he could not capture these ghazals in translation.30 It is important to keep in mind that Urdu, Turkish, or Arabic ghazals translated into nonrhymed couplets prevent English-speaking readers access to the drama created by the radiif. Ghazals were performed with music in competitions (musha’era) where poets spoke or sang their verses “in a circle.”31 Audiences of musha’era would begin predicting and preparing for the radiif (even joining in) that the poem taught them to expect. Contemporary readers of the ghazal, too, join in with the system of anticipation and participation that the radiif creates. For example, “By Exiles,” by Shahid Ali in Call Me Ishmael Tonight enacts a heavy, almost foot-stamping, reinforcement of repetition when the qaafiya, “by,” sets up the radiif, “exiles”:

In Jerusalem a dead phone’s dialed by exiles.
You learn your strange fate: you were exiled by exiles.

You open the heart to list unborn galaxies.
Don’t shut that folder when Earth is filed by exiles.

Before Night passes over the wheat of Egypt,
let stones be leavened, the bread torn wild by exiles.32

Shahid Ali weights the right side of the line’s balance beam with an extra internal rhyme in this ghazal: “dialed” (line 1), “filed” (line 4), and “wild” (line 6). These words flirt with the ear, preparing us for what we are truly expecting: the radiif, “exiles.”

In traditional ghazals, the syntax contorts in such an extreme way that the reader (and listener, during performance) must be guided to an understanding of the poem’s meaning through the poem’s rhyme structure and word-relationships.

The ghazal form creates meaning through associative jumps that occur between the couplets. Barry Lerner, one of the translators of a collection of ghazals by the 20th-century mystical poet, Sant Darshan Singh, observes the following about how the ghazal form accrues meaning: “more often than not, its verses are unrelated to each other, leaping from concept to concept, even giving expressions to thoughts that are at variance with what has appeared earlier in the poem.”33 The closed couplets essentially hold information together in a special kind of relationship, so the language within each couplet-unit, when juxtaposed alongside its neighbor couplets, enacts meaning in an associative gesture. Therefore, I argue that the ghazals of Rebecca Dunham and Anthony Madrid still activate an essential component of the ghazal tradition, even though these poems appear closer to free verse on a formal vs. free verse continuum. Why? These poets gracefully preserve the structure of the ghazal couplet (and importantly include the kind of signature that must appear in the last strophe of the poem). In Shahid Ali’s essay introduction to Ravishing DisUnities, he emphasizes that each couplet of the ghazal must constitute its own existence: “One should at any time be able to pluck a couplet like a stone from a necklace, and it should continue to shine in that vivid isolation, though it would have a different luster among and with the other stones.”34 For example, the following two couplets (lines 3-6) from a ghazal by Mohammad Taqi Mir (1723-1810) create such an associative gesture:

The morning caravan is ringing with the cry:
“Awake, O idlers, we are leaving, you sleep still.”

Barren is this land, never grows green here the grass;
In vain you sow the seeds of desire, toil and till.35

This whole second couplet informs the image in the previous couplet; the caravan travels the land that is bare because the speaker cannot cultivate his own desire. Both of these couplets are end-stopped—and also independent from one another both in terms of image and lyric narrative. Conceivably, one could lift the second couplet away from the first “like a stone from a necklace” and it would “continue to shine in that vivid isolation” of solitude. The final associative move within the ghazal occurs when the poet signs his or her name within the last line of the poem. In Arabic, this signature (sometimes as a nom de plume or named persona) is called the takhallus.36 We’ve already seen the takhallus: for example in Reginald Dwayne Betts’s “Ghazal (Breath),” where “Shahid waits, listens to the stars— / His mind is a cell: blow through it ancient breath,”37 and in Anthony Madrid’s “It’s about time MADRID turned a few heads. Just look at him: you could read / The small print of your marriage contract by the light coming off his face.”38 There are many ways that poets writing ghazals in English can close their ghazals with a takhallus—sardonically, playfully, or seriously in the self-reckoning mode of self-address. 

In traditional ghazals, the syntax contorts in such an extreme way that the reader (and listener, during performance) must be guided to an understanding of the poem’s meaning through the poem’s rhyme structure and word-relationships. Walter G. Andrews writes, “the rules of divan poetry do not appear to make a distinction between sentences and clauses, and the production of syntactic ambiguities is a regular and frequent feature.”39 The following example is the first two couplets of Andrews’s literal translation of a ghazal by Nabi (1630-1712):

The cup of red wine comes to the pleasure gathering and goes
Just as the sea comes and goes with the ebb and flow [of tides].

It gives news of your opening up to others like a rose
The swift footed breeze ever comes and goes to us.40

Andrews assigns each line a “context,” a “focus,” and an “action.” The action of each line of Nabi’s ghazal is the radiif. In the first line, the “gathering” is the context, “the cup of wine” is the “focus,” and the action is “coming and going.” Andrews constructs a chart of “Structural Pattern of Lines”; the first two rows of the chart that analyze the syntax of the first couplet is reproduced below:41

Parallel Lines Context Focus Action
1.a gathering the cup of wine coming and going
1.b ebb and flow the sea coming and going

The purpose of such a chart is not to reduce reading the ghazal to a kind of linguistic exercise, but is instead meant to show the significance of syntactical play to this poetic form. In Urdu, Turkish, and Arabic, word order is often rearranged to such an extent that the form of the ghazal (its couplet construction) is what makes the meaning of the poem decipherable to a native-speaker.42 In this way, not only do couplets channel the ghazal’s associative movement but also so do the relationships between words within each line of the poem.

In addition to difficult syntax, the ghazal traditionally centers on a complex image system that when read through a 21st century, print-based lens might seem rife with symbolism that a contemporary reader could quickly deem cliché. Andrews in his discussion of the “Poetic Vocabulary” of the ghazal tradition discusses how some scholars have not only exoticized the ghazal, but also cast it aside as an inferior form for this reason. For example, Andrews quotes E. J. Gibbs:

It is replete with what are called stock epithets; the “moon-face,” the “cypress-form,” the “ruby-lip,” occur with wearisome reiteration right from the very beginning. In the same way what we might term stock associations abound; when the “nightingale” is mentioned we may be sure the “rose” is not far away, and if we read of the “moth” in one line we may feel safe about meeting the “taper” in the next.43

However, the poet must negotiate the ghazal’s image bank (images such as “moon-face” and “ruby-lip”) carefully: “The Ottoman court poets merged the topoi of romantic love, the mystical yearning for union with God, and their longing for the psychological and material benefits of royal favor. They created a direct chain of metaphors linking the garden, the rose, the beloved, the sultan, the sun, and God.”44 Such a “direct chain of metaphors” would be immediately recognized and understood in a recitation or performance, especially where at the musha’era, the audience would use their expectations of the poem (rhyme and image) to chime in with the performer.

Because ghazals perform such nuanced musical systems and image matrices, a “free-verse” ghazal divorced from the most important formal aspect of the ghazal—the couplet—that marshals us through its syntactical maneuvers, and should “shine in that vivid isolation” as a dyadic unit,45 seems implausible. One could argue that Robert Bly’s ghazals are “American ghazals” in the way of David Biespiel’s nine-line “American Sonnets.” But David Biespiel, in his smart Preface to Wild Civility, renames his sonnets as American, and explains his adaptation of the form. Surely, I am not arguing that one always explain adaptations of form. Yet it is clear that in the case of the ghazal, Shahid Ali very much tried to preserve the form’s core structure when he invited contemporary poets writing in English to contribute to his anthology, Ravishing DisUnities. Therefore, what by and large looks like an American ghazal in the early 21st century—see Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s “Red Clay Suite” in her book by that name or John Murillo’s “Hustle” in Up Jump the Boogie—also dedicates itself to the form’s independent couplets and, in many cases, its rhyme pattern. Therefore, the translations of the ghazals of Hafez by Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn in The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door are, well, puzzling. Each poem moves in the three-line stanzas that Bly claims for his own version of the American ghazal. Importantly, Bly’s introductory essay to The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door explains how he rendered Lewisohn’s raw prose translations into poems, much like how the poems in Ghazals of Ghalib grew, flexibly, from Aijaz Ahmad’s raw translations. What Bly says about the form, that it requires a kind of reinvention at the beginning of each strophe, only scratches the surface of the form’s conventions and traditions. Bly writes, “Encouraged by the ghazal form, which asks for a poem to begin again with each stanza, Hafez constantly interrupts his own flow of thought in a way unusual to us.”46 What is problematic about such a translation approach as Bly’s is that what he describes as Hafez’s “flow of thought,” which behaves as a “way unusual to us” (in its method of beginning again? I am not so sure), activates this ancient form as a site that can be leveled and rebuilt in a way that is suitable for, dare I say, its new occupant. As Shahid Ali feared, it does seem that the method of translation for the Ghazals of Ghalib project has paved the way for a kind of risky appropriation. As poems, Bly’s The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door are successful and beautiful. There is also much to be admired in his book of “ghazals,” My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy. However, these poems are not true ghazals.

The ghazal's complicated relationship with the qasida has caused some scholars to cast the ghazal aside as too saccharine to be serious—a fault of the especially Anglo-centric who overlook the ghazal's relationship to the erotic/mystical dynamic associated with Sufi mysticism.

W.S. Merwin, of the same generation as Bly, was one of Aijaz Ahmad’s original translators for the late 1960s Ghazals of Ghalib project. Yet, in Ravishing DisUnities, Merwin contributes to the ghazal tradition in the American lyric with a ghazal that is true to the form’s conventions. “The Causeway” holds couplets in self-contained syntactical structures. The poem’s lyric arc drifts from couplet to couplet, suspending an almost narrative sensation through these independent units; the radiif is “voices” and the qaafiya “hear” (with one slight adjustment, where in the eighth line, “clear” represents the qaafiya):

This is the bridge where at dusk they hear voices
far out in the meres and marshes or they say they hear voices

the bridge shakes and no one else is crossing at this hour
somewhere along here is where they hear voices

this is the only bridge though it keeps changing
from which some say they always hear voices

the sounds pronounce an older utterance out of the shadows
sometimes stifled sometimes carried from clear voices.47

The exclusion of any punctuation at all is paradigmatic of Merwin’s work, yet each of the she’r lack syntactic enjambment. The final couplet of Merwin’s ghazal contains a takhallus where he substitutes “my own name” for his own, distancing himself from his self. “The Causeway” situates the speaker in a relationship with the otherworldly—the ancestral presences that call to the community haunted by the past, in which “this is the only bridge though it keeps changing / from which some say they always hear voices.” Merwin’s ghazal, in form and also subject, interacts with the relationship between self and beloved or divine that Arabic, Turkish, and Urdu ghazals enact.

Ultimately, the ghazal entangles the speaker in a performance where one must “woo” an unattainable other—the beloved, a sense of the universe, a sense of divine presence.48 In the contemporary American lyric ghazal, this unattainable other is also a version of one’s self, as in Shara McCallum’s “Ghazal,” where “In Hebrew, Shara means she sings. / What song can offer the antidote for neglect?”49 Sant Darshan Singh, the 20th-century Urdu poet and mystic, in one of his ghazals, writes: “Now my heart’s an assassin at my throat, beloved.”50 The idea of one’s own heart fighting itself at the site of speech—trapped in the throat—is the ultimate struggle for the lyric poet. No wonder so many contemporary poets have found the form so compelling. The “the cry of a gazelle when it is hunted down and trapped”51 is uttered at a threshold. As Agha Shahid Ali wrote, “[t]he ghazal is not an occasion for angst; it is occasion for genuine grief.”52 What threshold must we reach before we can call out in such pain—to ourselves? At what moment do we find our voice crying out against such confinement?     

Tyler Mills is the author of Tongue Lyre, which won the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013). A graduate of the MFA program at the University of Maryland, she is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Notes

  1. Reginald Dwayne Betts, “Ghazal (Breath),” Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2010), 37.
  2. Shara McCallum, “Ghazal,” This Strange Land (Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2011), 32.
  3. Rebecca Dunham, “Confinement Ghazal,” The Flight Cage (North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2010).
  4. Canarium Books. “Anthony Madrid,” http://canariumbooks.org/#Anthony-Madrid (accessed September 11, 2012).
  5. Anthony Madrid, “These Were Not Born To Be Lovers, I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say (Ann Arbor: Canarium Books, 2012), 70-71.
  6. David Caplan, “In That Thicket of Bitter Roots”: The Ghazal in America” in Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 43.
  7. Aijaz Ahmad, ed., Ghazals of Ghalib (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 16, 19, 20, and 21.
  8. Ibid., 16, 19.
  9. Ibid., 11.
  10. John Drury, The Poetry Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 2006), 124.
  11. Agha Shahid Ali, ed., Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 2.
  12. Alex Preminger, Frank J. Wamke, and O.B. Hardison, Jr. eds., The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 84.
  13. Barry Lerner and Harbans Singh Bedi, trans., Love’s Last Madness: Poems on a Spiritual Path (Prescott, AZ: Hohm Press, 2001), 20.
  14. Drury, 124.
  15. Asif Farrukhi and Frances W. Pritchett, An Evening of Cages Beasts: Seven Postmodernist Urdu Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 350.
  16. Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), 188.
  17. Ibid., 189.
  18. Paul Fussell. Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1979), 11-12.
  19. Ahmed Ali, ed. and trans., The Golden Tradition: An Anthology of Urdu Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 183.
  20. Francis Quinn, “The Art of Poetry LXXIX: Robert Bly,” Paris Review 42, no. 154 (2000): 74.
  21. Drury, 124.
  22. Lerner and Bedi, 21.
  23. Ahmed Ali, 8.
  24. Ibid., 125.
  25. Walter Andrews, Najaat Black, and Mehmet Kalpakli, eds. and trans., Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An Anthology (expanded edition) (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 27.
  26. Ahmed Ali, 8.
  27. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. E.C. Helmbold and W.G. Rabinowitz (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1956), 33.
  28. Roger Allen and D. S. Richards, eds., The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 51.
  29. Said, 7.
  30. Asif Farrukhi and Frances W. Pritchett, An Evening of Cages Beasts: Seven Postmodernist Urdu Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), ix.
  31. Lerner and Bedi, 22.
  32. Agha Shahid Ali, Call Me Ishmael Tonight (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003), 28.
  33. Lerner and Bedi, 21.
  34. Agha Shahid Ali, Ravishing DisUnities, 2-3.
  35. Ahmed Ali, 152.
  36. Lerner and Bedi, 23.
  37. Reginald Dwayne Betts, “Ghazal (Breath),” Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2010), 37.
  38. Anthony Madrid, “These Were Not Born To Be Lovers, I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say (Ann Arbor: Canarium Books, 2012), 70-71.
  39. Walter G. Andrews, Poetry’s Voice, Society’s Song: Ottoman Lyric Poetry (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985), 22.
  40. Ibid., 26.
  41. Ibid., 32.
  42. Ibid., 33.
  43. Andrews, 36.
  44. Walter Feldman, “The Celestial Sphere, the Wheel of Fortune, and Fate in the Gazels of Naili and Baki,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 no. 2 (1996): 194.
  45. Agha Shahid Ali, Ravishing DisUnities, 2-3.
  46. Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn, trans., The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), ix.
  47. Agha Shahid Ali, Ravishing DisUnities, 114.
  48. Lerner and Bedi, 20.
  49. Shara McCallum, “Ghazal,” This Strange Land (Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2011), 32.
  50. Ibid., 52.
  51. Drury, 124.
  52. Agha Shahid Ali, Ravishing DisUnities, 13.

No Comments