Comments on the Ghazals
I've been seeing more submissions recently and hope to see even more in the future. Robert Bly's recent collection, The Night Abraham Called to theStars, indicates an increasing interest in ghazals in English.I hope soon to publish reviews of Bly's collection and of Agha Shahid Ali's anthology, Ravishing Disunities. If you've seen Bly's book, you know his formal interpretation of the ghazal is startling.
Two Ghazals by Joshua Gage
Each of Joshua Gage's ghazals displays adroit traditional form, including qafiya and radif, as well as the signature at the end. In the first, John the Baptist speaks as a lover and a poet— or a poet and lover speaks as John the Baptist. Instead of an axe-edge, the poet's tongue cuts and shapes.In his second ghazal, Gage uses traditional form and theme again. The voice here speaks as poet, lover, and prophet, disappointed in the first two cases and humbled in the third.
These two ghazals use traditional form and theme but contemporary language and attitude. They exemplify what can be done with a traditional approach to the English ghazal.
"Ghazal of the Literal Contradiction," Klipschutz
Klipschutz's ghazal uses full rhyme in the place of the radif; translators often choose this option for ghazals as do poets in English. It works well here and preserves much of the feeling of the radif without the intense repetition. The /ools/ syllable begins to live on its own, inhabits the ear with its many associations and overtones.With a "melting sun," the bath of "fossil fuels," the "cake-sweet-smelling night," this ghazal seems especially appropriate to August. It seems to be a kind of belligerent confession, a clumsy elegance, a colloquial formality, a "literal contradiction" in several ways, but successful one.
"ABC Discoveries," Jane Reichhold
Agha Shahid Ali rightly stresses the "disunities" in the ghazal. Part of the traditional means of achieving diunities is the independence of each couplet. What, then, when many of the couplets are enjambed, as in Jane Reichhold's "ABC Discoveries"?With a total of eleven couplets, there are ten transitions between couplets; I find four enjambments in this ghazal.
Jane Reichhold's ghazal is more than satisfactorily disjunctive; the disunities arise in the imagery and the phrasing. There are leaps aplenty here.
It is often hard to impose digital boundaries on an analog reality. A digital, either/or, boundary between ghazal and non-ghazal would be counter-productive, in my opinion. The opposite poles the ghazal/nonghazal are clearly distinct, although the sets ghazal and nonghazal are "fuzzy." In other words, the judgment of whether a poem is a ghazal depends on the one judgin. "ABC Discoveries" definitely fits my sense of what a ghazal is.
Nearly 3000 years ago, some anonymous Greeks added scratchings for vowels to the Phoenecians' scratchings for consonants. We humans are scratchers of the world; we mark our environment with shapes that inform, please, anger, and distract us. The fact that these scratches you are reading are electronic doesn't alter their fundamental nature as human marks on the world.
Our ABCs lead right to "D"—"discoveries." This ghazal meditates on the tracings, markings, shapes and forms we discover in and impose on the world. From the runic gestures of tree limbs through bones and feathers, Jane Reichhold calls us to attend to the mysterious meaningfulness of our world.
"The Key," G. Patrice Waltemate
The last ghazal in this issue returns to eroticism and loss. How can chastity ever by ensured? And where do all the lost keys go, what does this key rattling in a drawer open? Perhaps the beads fingered by trembling fingers are turning a key, unlocking a secret, unsealing an envelope with no return address.G. Patrice Waltemate's ghazal: Is it the key or the locked belt? The sealed envelope or the digit-worn beads?
Or mystery itself is the key, mystery of the tongue, the pen, the beheading strokes of the alphabet, the envelope's sharp edges.