Update

I have another set of ghazals to publish this year--I expect those to be online in early December. I will also try to do another blog entry or two before the end of the year. (Just wait until the Winter vacation, then I will be productive here.)

I am preparing a review of An Audience of One, by Majid Mohiuddin, contemporary but traditional ghazals in English that will go online with the next set of ghazals. One of the new ghazals will also be by Majid.

It's not too early to send me ghazals, reviews, essays, notes or other items for consideration for The Ghazal Page in 2005.

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Late Blog

It's been too long a gap between blogs, so here's a brief one. A new set of ghazals will appear on TGP within the week. I know that you will find them challenging and rewarding. This set is a couple of weeks later than I had hoped, but they're worth the wait. There are poems by Alison Marshall and Tree Riesener, both of whom have appeared on TGP before, and poems by Teresa Middleton, who is new both to the ghazal and to TGP.

There will be another blog here soon as well. If I can get my schedule working right . . . .

An Audience of One: Islamic Ghazals in English

Of course, some readers of The Ghazal Page may be Muslim and would therefore share Mohiuddin's faith.

Mohiuddin's ghazals are personal and intense expressions of his faith. They are also exemplary ghazals in English. I've found it rewarding to study his use of qafiya especially.

The collection is organized by the times of required and voluntary prayer during the day. There are eight sections, plus an introduction, preface, afterword, and glossary. Each section begins with a beautiful water color.

Mohiuddin has designed a book to inspire and inform poetically and spiritually. It is perfect-bound and printed on good stock. At $12.00 (+ shipping and handling), this book is a bargain. The web site has a sample watercolor and ghazal.

If anyone reading here has or gets An Audience of One and wants to review it for The Ghazal Page, please let me know. I'd be glad to publish other reviews in addition to my own.

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Polyphemus Moth

Here's another "ghazal-prose." There's more explanation below. I hope to experiment more with this blending of forms from very different cultures. If anyone tries this form, I'd like to see the results.

I walked our dog the other evening. She stopped to sniff and nip at something. A dead leaf, I thought, and thought, why is this dog interested in a dead leaf? Then I noticed markings that weren't very leaf-like. I picked it up and found it was a moth--a moth with very tattered wings. Its wingspan was around six inches. I thought it was dead until it began weakly trying to move its wings. The moth was nearly dead but still twitching. Its rusty brown and tannish colors made it look like a leaf left over from last autumn. The dog still wanted to investigate this moving thing, but I dropped it on the grass and walked on. Today, I looked it up and found that it was a polyphemus moth. In few weeks, my World Literature class will be enjoying wiley Odysseus's encounter with this moth's namesake.

While Penelope wove and unwove to avoid the suitors' desire,
Odyssey used his wiles to defeat the giant's brutal desire.

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Reading Ghazals of Faith

There are three possibilities for the reader's relation to a "ghazal of faith":

• the reader agrees with position presented in the ghazal
• the reader disagrees with the position presented in the ghazal
• the reader neither agrees nor disagrees

If one agrees with the religious/spiritual content of a ghazal, then one must beware of missing the poem's real intent, the challenge that any good poem presents the reader. Also, the reader who agrees with the ghazal's position will be tempted to regard shoddy work as better than it really is.

If one disagrees with the religious/spiritual content of a ghazal, then one must beware of dismissing it as propaganda, as "wrong" or a sympathetic reader may misread the poem by looking for points of agreement where there are none. In either case, the reader also misses the challenge the ghazal presents.

If one is neutral about the religious/spiritual content of a ghazal, one must beware of missing the value of the poem through disinterest.

I'm convinced that one reads poetry for other reasons than to be instructed. Instruction can be provided more clearly in prose, after all. In the old, two-fold statement of poetry's value (to "teach and delight" [Sir Philip Sidney]), poetry seems mostly these days to delight.

A qualification here: I, as do many readers, delight in learning and in poetry from which I learn something. My grievance is with poets and readers who's first question is "What does it say?" and who wish to extract a statement of "meaning" from the poem.

"Delight" has several aspects:

• first, the aesthetic pleasure we take from poetry
• second, the pleasure of sharing another person's feelings and reflection
• third, the more alien the poem and poet are to us, the more pleasure we find in discoverying the range of human possibilities

I'm offering to links to a small selection of ghazals here; I hope you will explore these poems with my comments in mind.

1. Some Ghazals by Hafiz (I recommend "School of Truth")
2. Two Ghazals after Ghalib, by William Dennis
3. A Ghazal by Matthew Skelly
4. Some Ghazals by Alison Marshall
5. A Ghazal by Gene Doty

Full disclosure: I am Gene Doty.

I'm not going to comment on these poems now, but I plan to discuss this topic again soon. Meanwhile, you will find more ghazals relevant to faith on The Ghazal Page. And I welcome ghazals with religious/spiritual themes.

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A Geek by Any Other Name

There are several reasons:

• inexpensive software
• many applications
• stability
• security
• ease of use

Inexpensive Software

Many Applications

The applications I use for The Ghazal Page are

• Bluefish HTML editor
• GVIM, GUI version of the VIM text editor
• The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program
• GFTP or KBear to upload the files to my ISP
• an e-mail client, right now, KMail

Stability

Security

Ease of Use

All Linux desktops and window-managers are highly configurable. The user can set wallpapers, window decorations, color schemes, and so on very easily. After getting Windows XP on my office machine, I decided to add some eye-candy. Imagine my amazement when I discovered that desktop themes could cost more than my whole Linux set up, which includes two work-stations and a server.

There are other little things that make using Linux more convenient than Windows. (I'm not mentioning Mac because I'm not familiar enough with it.)

Some Links

Here are some links if you're interested. Of course, Google is always available.

• SuSE Linux
• The GIMP
• Fedora Red Hat
• Bluefish HTML Editor
• VIM Text Editor

VIM is admittedly somewhat geeky, even its GUI version. But it's my text editor on Windows as well as Linux.

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Metsämorfeus

I listen to music a lot, and to a lot of different kinds of music. It seems more and more that different kinds of music really aren't that different. What Veltti is doing seems more appropriate for the 21st century than a lot of other music because of its eclectic mix of electronic sounds and "normal" instruments. A few days ago, I listed to an eleven-second file of radio waves from Saturn, sent by the Cassini-Huygens space-craft. The sounds were very repetitive but interesting--fascinating. Some of Veltti's compositions incorporate very similar sounds along with others for a rich texture consonant with the space-age.

For context for Veltti's music, consider the 20th century composer, Edgar Varèse, who is a direct ancestor of contemporary electronic and other experimental music. If you're familiar with Varèse, you have some idea what to expect from Veltti's music. If you're not familiar with Varèse, one indication of his influence is that Frank Zappa's final project was Varèse's music. You can hear samples from this project at this site.

Veltti does music under the name Metsämorfeus. He says,

Metsämorfeus is like the forest Morpheus or woodsmorpheus, I like the sound and the feel of it in Finnish, it does refer to metamorphosis also.

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Copyright

Most people are confused by copyright. Essentially, if you create a copyrightable work (including graphics and text), you own that work unless you're "working for hire." You may sell the copyright or charge a fee for specific uses of the work. Work that you have created is your property.

Thus, using someone else's intellectual property without permission is theft, even if you leave that person's name on the work. "Fair use" allows limited and properly documented use of someone else's copyrighted work, as in reviews and scholarly work. As far as I can tell, "fair use" is a slippery concept that is interpreted differently in different media and different contexts.

When you give me permission to publish your work on The Ghazal Page, you retain the copyright. What I get is "first electronic rights." (And I prefer that the ghazal not have been published in hard-copy either.) Any other use of your work is up to you. I strongly recommend you read what the Copyright Office says and learn about the copyright laws in your country if you're producing work outside the US.

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Mantises

Something a little different this week. The following piece combines the Japanese haibun with the fard. A haibun has both prose and haiku. A fard is an isolated sher that could fit a ghazal. (The terms is used in an entry on Ghalib.) So "Mantises" has prose and a fard. In the spirit of haiku and haibun, "Mantises" is based on actual experience. I'm curious what you think.

Our house is receiving a new paint job. As a necessary preliminary to that painting, the workers are repairing both the front and the back porches. Behind our house is a small, L-shaped building, with both limbs of the L about the same length. One limb runs east to west, the other north to south, with the angle at the northwest. The southern limb is the "cottage," which we used to rent out, but now use for storage and visitors. The eastern limb is the "garage," where it is no longer possible to park cars. The lawn mower, ladder, axes, shovels, odd scraps of wood, and such go in there. And the cats sleep there during bad weather. The cottage has been nearly overwhelmed by vines this spring and summer, vines that have to be removed before the painting.

Cutting vines away from the cottage wall, I am suprised
By tiny praying mantises whom my pruning has surprised.

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Sailing to the Island

SpinDrifter's format is 8.5" x 11", comb-bound, printed in color on heavy stock. The page-layout is clear and clean. I'm normally dubious of comb-binding, but that on SpinDrifter is fine, certainly preferable to wire-stitching. The first issue has 24 pp.; the second, 32. Adroit use of columns gets a lot of content into these pages, with very accessible presentation.

Editor JeanPaul Jenack seeks to present several poems from each author, thus allowing the reader to get a fuller sense of the writer's work. Each issue has a featured poet, a "Friend of the Island." (SpinDrifter is published from Don Pedro Island, Florida.) The first issue features Norbert Krapf, the second Lyn Lifshin, and the Autumn issue will feature Jill Williams. As it happens, The Ghazal Page will present two of Jill Williams' poems in August.

As well as the featured poets, among those represented in either the first or the second issue are Jim Kacian, Holly Day, Duane Locke, Kirby Wright, and Sheila Murphy.

The Autumn issue will include Richard Konstelanetz and Ward Kelley, as well as Jill Williams as featured poet. (And, as I said, a varied selection of my own work.)

Subscriptions to SpinDrifter are $24 US a year; a sample copy is $6.50 US. The address is

The email address is spindrifter (at) hotmail.com.

The Spring issue offers a special subscription rate of $16 if you name your favorite poet, who should be someone who actually writes and publishes poetry. The deadline for that rate is August 15.

If you're interested in submitting work, I recommend you see SpinDrifter first and then query the editor. A simple query can save both editor and writer time and effort.

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Safe Browsing

The solution? Don't use Internet Explorer. Its problems, apparently, will never be fixed. There are several newer, more up-to-date browsers you can use that are much more secure (although, if you're using Windows, you still have to be careful). Mac and Linux users needn't worry.

There are basically three browsers to consider: Opera, Mozilla, and Mozilla Firefox. (The newest version of Netscape isn't substantially different from Mozilla and more commercial in its approach.)

My preferred browser is Mozilla Firefox. It is a sophisticated, stand-alone browser that in my experience is stable, secure, and light in its memory-demands. One of Firefox's nicest features is an "adblock" extension that lets you block advertisements that are part of the page. (Pop-up window blocking is separate and works by default. You have to add the adblock extension, which isn't hard.)

Mozilla is also a good browser, with pop-up window blocking. It includes an e-mail client and a calendar, although you can install the browser by itself. Mozilla would be my preferred browsing if Firefox weren't available.

An aside on e-mail: Mozilla Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Netscape Mail all have junk-mail blocking filters that learn what the user considers to be junk mail. I wouldn't read e-mail without them. Firefox and Thunderbird make a good combination: I use them on my Windows XP box at work.

Mozilla, Firefox, and Netscape are all free. Opera is free if you can tolerate modest banner-ads; if you register it ($39 US), the banner-ads go away.) In the past I have used Opera extensively and like it. Its features are noticeably different from the Mozilla browsers. Some people love them, but others hate them. Opera also has a mail client built-in. There's a fairly steep learning curve with the current mail program, a curve I haven't climbed all the way yet. But Opera is a solid browser.

As a final thought, being a devotee of eye-candy, all of these browsers are very configurable with styles and themes. Personally, I consider any one of them superior to Internet Explorer in all the ways that count.

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Flint Hills Imagism

But art has never been on the side of the purists.

Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, translated by Bernard Frechtman, Philosophical Library, 1948

My initial impulse in poetry was romantic. When I was about thirteen, an intense thunderstorm moved me to write a poem. (I had written verses as a younger child, but don't think these count as my "first" poem.) Growing up on a farm in the Flint Hills of Kansas, I found the natural world mysterious and vivid.

About that time--a little later--I began to read poetry. Louis Untermeyer's anthologies of modern poetry taught me a lot. I early loved Dylan Thomas's poetry (he was definitely a romantic responsive to nature); later I came to the Imagists, probably through Untermeyer's anthologies. I was especially taken with Pound's poems. (I had a paperback anthology with such items as "The Ballad of the Goodly Fere" in it [definitely not imagist]; I don't remember editor or title.)

Pound's principles of imagism influenced me a lot. I was not responding in terms of romantic vs. classical or modernism vs. Edwardian verse. I was excited by the focus, the clarity, the attention to the details of the natural world found in Pound, H.D., Williams, and other imagists. (I will return to Imagism as well as the romantic/classical dichotomy. You might find Imagists.org informative.)

In the same period (11th or 12th grades), I read a book on Dylan Thomas's poetics. (Again, I don't remembe author and title.) The discussion of alliteration and stress rhythms especially impressed me. Whitman, Ginsberg, and William Eversen are other romantic poets whose work I admire and been influenced by.

For better or worse, my own sensibilities developed between the poles of romantic longing and classical formalism. Right now, I'm rereading Emerson's "The Poet" with interest and profit. But I could pick up Hulme's Speculations and read it with similar interest and equal profit. Perhaps it is these mixed influences that keep me from being a purist of any school.

I conclude this self-indulgence with a poem around 35 years old that illustrates my Flint Hills imagism:

Song for the Santa Fe

this evening,
cool, dim,

we live
in caverns

of light.
Listen:

autonomous
sounds brown

against
storm-blue

stray sounds
overlaid

by a whistle
like an

Iron Cross.

from Geometries of Light, Harold Shaw Publishers, 1981. Published as "Eugene Warren."

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Hafiz in Concord

Emerson's attitude may be described as "Orientalism," a term used by the late Edward Said to describe complex and contradictory Western attitudes toward the "East." This discussion of Said's terms suggests how it can apply to Emerson, especially since he idealized the Persian poets as exotic embodiments of his Romantic image of the Poet.

Here are some key points relating Emerson to Hafiz:

Emerson

• Learned about Persian poetry via German translations.
• Wrote a long ode to Sa'adi.
• Translated at least one ghazal by Hafiz.
• Translated a number of other poems by Hafiz; a number are either quatrains (ruba'i) or partial ghazals.
• Saw Hafiz through his 19th C. American Romantic and Transcendentalist filter. (And in the ode, Sa'adi emobodies Emerson's idea of "the poet.")

Emerson translated at least one ghazal by Hafiz; in The Library of American edition of his poems and translations, it is titled, "Ghaselle: from the Persian of Hafiz." Online, it is "From the Poetry of Hafiz II." Note the internal rhymes in lines three and four of each couplet. This device allows Emerson to reproduce some of the ghazal's repetions in English verse.

Another of Emerson's translations of Hafiz is titled "The Phoenix." This allegorical poem seems to me to express an exoticism that contemporary writers of English ghazals fortunately avoid.

Early efforts to adapt Chinese and Japanese poetry (especially haiku) to English show a similar exoticism, being redolent of lacquer and joss-sticks.

In another translation from Hafiz, Emerson gives us an ode on wine. Emerson's headnote shows his debt to the German translator from Hafiz's Farsi. (Emerson's translations are, apparently, distorted by his not-entirely-adequate German.)

For a brief scholarly background on Emerson and Persian poetry, read this article.

I plan to investigage Emerson's connection to Hafiz and other Persian poets this summer; anything interesting will show up here. If you are more knowledgable than I (not a hard trick!), I welcome prose pieces on the 19th Century American Romantics and Persian poetry. Just send me a note with your idea and we can go from there.

Romanticism and Classicism

Of course, there's not space here for comprehensive definitions--that's work for a book or two. My intention is just to clarify what the terms mean to me so that my comments might be clearer.

Romanticism

Classicism

Modernism

And after that great generation of modernists, including many other poets, as well as artists and musicians, New Criticism dominated the academy and criticism and pushed poets like Robinson Jeffers, William Eversen, and Kenneth Rexroth to the periphery. Jeffers and Eversen were definitely romantics; Rexroth seems less easy to categorize. (Which is not a value-judgment.)

I see modernism as overlapping romanticism and classicism. Williams, for instance, focused on the local and particular, the individual and eccentric, in a very romantic way. Yet his techniques are straight out of the modernist tradition begun in English poetry by T. E. Hulme.

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A Mystic Opportunity

Deep Cleveland Press has issued a call for submissions for an anthology of mystical poetry. The preceding link takes you to a page with the basic specifications for submitting poetry for consideration. See also this page with more information on the project, which includes online poetry as well as the anthology.

This "water-fire-light mystic poetry" project makes specific allusion to Rumi and Hafiz, as well as Kabir, so it should be a natural for contributors to The Ghazal Page (given quality submissions and the editor's taste, of course.) One caveat: The page says, emphatically, a couple of times, "no rhyming poetry please!!!." How this stipulation relates to traditional ghazal form, I don't know. In any case, if you want to submit work, you should read the guidelines carefully and perhpas query the editor.

This paragraph has the contact info:

query, or send material by e-mail in the body of the message to submissions@deepcleveland.com or by snail mail to p.o. box 435, berea, ohio 44017. no, we can't return your work. but, thanks for asking.

Deep Cleveland offers a wide range of material, centering on the late d. a. levy. I expect to be exploring the site more fully and perhaps submitting some work myself. Thanks to Joshua Gage for bringing this mystic poetry project to my attention.

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Where is that poem?

For me, it isn't easy. A recent invitation to submit to a new hard-copy journal sent me sifting through files of poems and records of publication. Oh, my. I knew it was bad down there among the bits and bytes, I just didn't know how bad.

When I began sending out poems to journals, things were simpler and slower.

I kept track of submissions and so on in ledgers at first, and later on note-cards. I wrote first drafts often in long-hand and then typed them up on my girl-friend's portable Olympia. I made carbon copies. I used physical file-folders.

Big whoop?

It worked. Even as I produced more poems and published some of them, it was not that hard to keep track of them. (I married the girl and didn't have to return the typewriter.) I didn't do such a good job of keeping a record of publications, however.

I started using a desktop computer 15 years ago. Since that time, my record-keeping and filing of poems have got more and more tangled. I've tried a variety of systems; one problem with computers is frequent updates, changes of OS, and changes of software applications. As I write this, I've found some poems from several years ago that I can't open because they were written in WordPerfect, which I don't have any more.

I just "asked Jeeves," "How do I keep track of my poems?" Not much useful in the answer. One site gives good basic advice to the beginning poet, the things I was told when I began. The site advises the novice to "keep records." But the difficulty is how.

Another site seems to recommend filing hard-copies; not a bad idea. I plan to start printing and filing hard-copies more consistently. But electronic means seem so much more flexible and accessible (searching and re-arranging and so on).

Jeeves found a bunch of sites, of course, most of which don't look relevant; the ones I looked at required a lot of scrolling to find what I wanted (hyper-links, anyone?). You can "Ask Jeeves" yourself, of course.

No, I don't have the solution to record-keeping, nor am I going to layout the new system I've set up, which would both bore you and be irrelevant. But I do want to ask if you have any particularly sharp ideas about managing records of poems or know of any especially useful software. If you do, please send me a brief description and I will put it on The Ghazal Page. And use it myself, if possible.

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Numinous Art

I visited Juha's web-site and was impressed. I hope you will visit Juha's site also. There are many images there--his paintings, mixed media work, comics, and few music files. Throughout, there's an intensity of mystery, the numinous, birth, death, anguish. The comic that uses the Altaic material--"First Man"--is a moving account of a utilities worker who goes into a coma after coming into contact with a live wire. His wife is pregnant and gives birth in the fourth episode. The man experiences shamanistic elements of Altaic myth while in the coma.

Kabbalah plays a strong role in Juha's imagery and themes, especially in the series, "Adam," but elsewhere as well. There are, for instance, echoes of and allusions to, the sefirotic tree.

All told, the imagery on Juha Veltti's web-site narrates human experiences, moves the viewer emotionally, and points toward the transcendent.

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An Organizational Note

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Building a Library

Of particular note is the Library of America's American Poets Project. This series consists of individual volumes of selected poems by poets ranging from Whitman to Poe to Whittier to Muriel Rukeyser. You can see the full list and find subscription information on the web-site.

Each volume is introduced by a notable poet or critique. The list includes Harold Bloom introducing Whitman and Harvey Shapiro introducing an anthology volume, Poets of World War II.

This note is not a review, so I won't go into detail about the volumes, except to say I have all the volumes and have not been disappointed in any of them.

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Some Ghazals Online

Poetry occurs all over the Internet. Well, poetry and, then "poetry." A while back--two months or more, so you can see I haven't adjusted my speed to electronics--Martin DeMello clued me in to a ghazal from the 19th Century by James Elroy Flecker. "Yasmin" is a very nice example of the English ghazal; Martin's comment brings out its formal features clearly. I recommend you go there and read the poem and comment. Add your own, even.

Then, you might read this further ghazal, by John Drury, and the accompanying comment. Following the comment is an accurate summary of the formal features of the ghazal.

The site that hosts these ghazals is "The Wondering Minstrels," run by Anthony Thomas and Martin DeMello, with an accompanying mailing list. You will find the poems there less-anthologized, with many delightful discoveries, such as Mervyn Peake's "To Maeve."

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Back to the prose index

Back to the main page

• Update
• Late Blog
• An Audience of One
• Polyphemus
• Reading Ghazals of Faith
• A Geek by Any Other Name
• Metsämorfeus
• Copyright
• Mantises
• Sailing to the Island
• Safe Browsing
• Flint Hills Imagism
• Hafiz in Concord
• Romanticism and Classicism
• A Mystic Opportunity
• Record Keeping
• Numinous Art
• An Organizational Note
• Building a Library
• Some Ghazals Online

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Back to the prose index