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Comments on the Winter 2001 GhazalsMike BarneyMike Barney's ghazal shows how the radif can be used even more repetitiously to emphasize the emotional vectors of his topic. Between those who argue poetry as pure design of words and those who insist that the poet be politically engaged is the fertile ground where the poet is free for either stance and may shift between them or fuse them as the imagination leads.(By the way, Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the early advocates of political engagement for writers, specifically excluded the poet.) Barney's ghazal, with its enjambed couplets, violates the rule that the couplets be separate, as does his using the radif in each line. But the rhetorical power of this poem is enhanced by these devices. In his email about this ghazal, Barney says, This one is a little less ambitious and a little more polemical than my last submission, . . . , but I do think it has a certain power. It grew out of the terrible summer 1999 incident in which a crazed white-supremicist in Illinois went on a murder spree and killed, among others, Ricky Birdsong, former head basketball coach at Northwestern, who was just walking down the street with his two young daughters when he was killed. "Blue Ghazal for Ricky Birdsong" exemplifies a poet's responses to domestic terrorism. William DennisWilliam Dennis's version of Ghalib illustrates an opposite path, a syntactically complex meditation on love and hurt that continually slows the reader down to decode the nearly metaphysical turns of image and thought. At the same time, the particulars—beads of water, patches of bare skin—keep the poem concrete and present, not an exercise in abstract emotion.Formally, Dennis's ghazal uses an asymmetrical rhyme pattern that engages the reader's ear, creates expectation of repetition and fulfills it in unexpected and subtle ways. Noor KhalsaNoor Khalsa's ghazals express the insistence of change, flow, and the entropy of plants, people, emotions, loves, commitments. Lose and love—noise, silence, and stillness: Focii, hurricane eyes.Formally, Khalsa's ghazals move in "disunities," as Agha Shahid Ali says, but without the other formal elements (save the signature at the end of #1.) G. Patrice WaltemateG. Patrice Waltemate has begun working with ghazals only recently. The two presented here show her grasp of the essential disunity of ghazals. Waltemate uses the ghazal form to take the reader into her perceptions of place—the Sonoran desert, a raree show somewhere in a landscape of locust branches and cairns. Perhaps these landscapes are as internal as external.In "The Raree Show," Waltemate has used the rhyme scheme I proposed five years ago. Whatever the value of my proposal, Waltemate has used the scheme to good effect in this poem. In her second ghazal, while there's no radif or rhyme scheme, there are sound repetitions that help the reader's ear follow the flow of the poem. Willam Stafford says in an essay that any word rhymes with any other, since any pair of words are more like each other than either is like silence. Stafford makes an extreme statement to draw our attention to the resonances and echoes present in any stretch of language. Denise Levertov's poetry uses these tonalities with great effectiveness.The point, of course, is that the resonances, the echoes, the tonalities must be used effectively, even though they can be found in almost any random stretch of language. The infamous "poet's ear" is precisely sensitivity to these patterns. All six of the ghazals in this issue of The Ghazal Page use them differently and adroitly. I hope you enjoy them.
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