Second Set of Ghazals for 2003
I'm about to cast these files on the electronic waters. I know that some of the people reading The Ghazal Page dislike the Modernists, like Zukofsky. That's fine; the Modernists need no defense from me. But I cut my poetic eyeteeth on Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams--and also Whitman and Dylan Thomas.
If you take the trouble to find information on Zukofsky, you will find that he perpetrated what Karl Sahpiro called a "culture" poem, like Pound's Cantos or Eliot's "The Wasteland." Zukofsky's culture poem is A. I recommend you read his lyric poetry first, however, unless you have a real taste for the long experimental poem laden with references and allusions and requiring annotation.
The spring storms seem to have settled down here, at least for this round. I installed UPS support on my home system yesterday, so I'm ready for anything but a direct lightning hit.
As always, I appreciate comments, questions, and suggestions. In this new series of TGP, I haven't provided email addresses or biographical information on the poets. If you have an opinion about this kind of information, please let me know. My major concern is the poets' privacy. Also, I do plan to add (soon) some reviews and notes/comments. Submissions of that kind of material are more than welcome.
Another handful of ghazals ready to upload. The new layout is getting there, to the point I can add new material fairly quickly and easily and archive it with no major reworking.
Four ghazals this time. Three of them are in traditional form, at least with the radif. Christine Marie Umscheid's poem goes about as far from the technical niceties of the traditional ghazal as possible and still retain the name. Why have I included it?
Well, first, because it's a good poem.
Second, Umscheid's words flirt with rhyme; when a poem is this short, each syllable takes extra weight.
And, third, poems at the extreme of the definition of "ghazal" test the definition, test the form, challenge set ideas about what a ghazal can be or should be.
At another extreme is Fred C. Dobbs's ghazal. The very long lines fit the traditional idea of a ghazal quite well. The shers (couplets) twine nicely around a mood more than a theme.
Taylor Graham's brace of ghazals deal with the ancient themes of death and love (well, so do Umscheid's and Warren's). Is there anything new for a poet to say? Perhaps poets sing, rather than say. A new form, as the ghazal is new to us, opens new possibilities for singing.
Louis Zukofsky defined poetry as a function, with speech as its lower limit and song as its upper limit. His generous definition encompasses the four poems presented here.
Zukofsky , by the way, was one of the Objectivist poets, associated with William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff, and Carl Rakosi. While Zukofsky's poems are mostly experimental, they are as musical as any poetry I know of. If you want to learn more about the musical possibilities of poetry in American English, read Zukofsky.
I started adding a few more ghazals this evening. I'd like to get caught up before I have had some poems for a year without using them. I think I can do it.
We've had five days of tornadoes and thunderstorms in this region, with a number of deaths and much destruction. No one I know personally has been directly touched by the storms, although the indirect effect is intense. And listening to the warning sirens sound several times in thirty minutes focuses one's attention.
Roadside Markers
by Taylor Graham
Today off the side of our country road, a cross--roses in a wreath, tied and impaled on a cross.
Nothing but cow pasture, rocks and a
weedy pond,
a curve, an asphalt lane to intersect and cross.
A seasonal
creek giggles in the swale, a girl
in cutoffs with her whole new life to
cross.
No matter how many daughters in a house,
there are too many, or
few--a mother's cross.
A morning paper's full of obits, sports and
news,
and puzzles in form of a question or a cross.
Whoever finally
makes a peace with his own bed
and lies in the graveyard under a stone
cross?
Today a crow lights on the yellow warning sign,
shakes his wings, caws at the sudden cross.
Quest
by Taylor Graham
Last night she asked you for a passion flowerthat sweet lover's metaphor, a passion flower!
You wonder if you'd know one if you found it,
having never seen, before, a passion flower.
You search old books of myth and alchemy,
you study in convoluted lore a passion flower.
Still, it seems just outlandish and exotic,
blooming on a misty-far-off shore, a passion flower.
Why does she want it anyway, this Levi's girl,
the sort who'd call "a bore" a passion flower?
Maybe she'd be happy with a mountain meadow
bursting out with hellebore. A passion flower!
Better humor her for now, and write her wish
in a ghazal of rhymes galore, a passion flower.
Kidnapped
by Christine Marie Umscheid
Your name haunts as ashI hear your words in dreams.
Once a child turns to clay
there is no caressing remains.
Stolen in night's blackness
and wakened by gunpoint.
A kidnap turns sour
life search is in vain.
Body found
on desert terrain.
. . . sea
by Fred C. Dobbs
Cease lamenting, lift thine eyes up from the ground, and thou shalt seegods making sail for paradise, unfound beyond the sea.
Shout boldly--whisper not--announce the thunder of thy soul
And hear the echoes of thy voice resound across the sea.
When the sirens call thee softly, wilt thou bind thee to thy mast?
Or heed their song and cast thyself, unbound into the sea?
Storm winds took thee--stole thy compass, stole thy sails and bent thy path
Lost and foundered--make thou ready, to drown beneath the sea.
Turn thy gaze from lying stars and unto that abyssmal deep
Where all secrets lie in wait, gathered round within thy sea.
Set thy course for hidden waters, hoist thine anchor, spread thy sail
For thou hast loved a Siren goddess, crowned upon the sea.