Color Radif Challenge
The color radif challenge closed on 1 November. I am compiling the issue and hope to publish the results by mid-December. When I've done that, a new challenge will appear here.
This challenge will use the radif again, this time with a bit more leeway. Use any color that you wish as the basis for your radif. You may use the color-word in different parts of speech (different grammatical functions) and may use synonyms or words for closely related colors.
Use of the qafiya (mono-rhyme) and opening and closing (matla and makhta) couplets is optional. Ghazals submitted for this challenge should be written in couplets, although you may put each couplet on a single, long line. Alternatively, you may submit a tercet ghazal for this challenge.
Here are the details:
Please use the formal guidelines outlined below:
- Deadline: November 1, 2009
- Radif: a color word or words
- Format: a Persian/Urdu ghazal of five to twelve couplets
or four to eight tercets - Limit: no more than three ghazals per poet
- Prize: publication in a special issue of The Ghazal Page
- Submission: Use the link below to submit a ghazal:
Please use "color radif challenge" as the subject line of your email so that I can filter it. The mailto link adds that subject line automatically.
A Sample Color Radif Ghazal
As a child in Kansas, I sought seclusion in green
Places where shifting breezes revealed many shades of green.
Vocabulary only extends so far: both thesaurus
And rhyming dictionary lead only to "green."
The old teacher adapts to many changes in the classroom,
Yet has never learned to call a blackboard "green."
A camp on a limestone bluff above a quiet lake,
The scouts' fire smoked them out: the wood was green.
Oh, Gino! This challenge will encourage reversed phrases
To place the radif last, to put the grass before the green.
Background of the Challenge
In an article in Reorientations/Arabic and Persian Poetry (edited by Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych and published by Indiana University Press in 1994), Franklin D. Lewis describes how poets used the same radif in a number of poems, showing their skill and wit.
Lewis's article suggested the radif challenges for The Ghazal Page; the challenge is to write a ghazal using a set radif. The results of the previous challenges show how adept ghazal poets can be at using common imagery.
