The English poetic "set forms" are all imports, if you discount count Anglo-Saxon alliterative metre, which hardly constitutes a form, and, I suppose, the Clerihew - fun, but hardly a likely vehicle of profound expressiveness.
Perhaps it's not surprising that the few still-thriving forms (pre-eminently, of course, the sonnet) originate from Southern Europe and that the complex inventions of our nearest neighbours in Wales and Ireland never wholly made the transition - with the exception of the limerick, perhaps (though whether this jolly little tumbrel actually originated in Limerick is far from certain). Latin, the mother of the romance languages, is after all in our linguistic bloodstream.
The ghazal is a relatively new and farther travelled arrival, but for form-o-philes it is a wonderfully welcome one. Though its roots lie in 12th-century Persia, variants are found in many Middle Eastern and Asian cultures. Ghazals, in Urdu, are usually sung, in both populist and classical styles. Goethe made the form fashionable in 19th-century Germany. The word (which rhymes, roughly, with muzzle, its "gh" pronounced similarly to the "ch" in "chutzpah") is said to translate as "talking with women." This is where, we might suppose, the chutzpah of the ghazal begins, because the poems were traditionally love-poems addressed by men to younger males. The name itself is a smoke-screen. However, ghazals express divine as well as illicit love, and are closely linked with Sufism.
The strict ghazal is composed of five or more regular couplets. The couplet is called a sher, and must be self-contained. The second line of each ends with a refrain of one or a few words, known as the radif. This is preceded by the rhyme, the qaafiya. In the first couplet both lines end in the rhyme and refrain, so the rhyme scheme is AA BA CA, etc. The last sher contains the poet's signature, his name or a variant thereof.
I first discovered the ghazal in Adrienne Rich's Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib, and The Blue Ghazals. Hers are not strict ghazals, but they use the notion of the "closed couplet" to create a kaleidoscopic effect of "fragments, glimmers, exclamations." The form has been explored by many other American poets. But the writer who has done most to popularise and westernise the tradition was surely the Kashmiri-American writer, Agha Shahid Ali. His ghazals conform rigorously to the tradition, and are at the same time subtle and evocative love-poems, see, for example, the title poem of Call me Ishmael Tonight (Norton, 2203). Before his death in 2001 he produced an anthology of American ghazals, Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (Wesleyan University Press, 2000). His work is continued by such scholarly enthusiasts as Gene Doty (nom de web Gino Peregrini) who runs a lively e-zine and blog devoted to the form, to be found at The Ghazal Page.
In England, our leading exponent of the ghazal is Mimi Khalvati. Khalvati was born in Tehran, went to school in the Isle of Wight, and currently lives in London. She has published several fine collections of poetry, including Mirrorwork and The Chine, and writes in many other forms apart from the ghazal. She is one of that rather special band of poets whose first language is not English but who bring to the adopted tongue a particular feeling for its structure and nuance. Khalvati is a particularly fluent sonnet-writer, but her free verse, too, is effective. English and Persian traditions mix fascinatingly in her work.
Her ghazals are distinguished by a particularly light touch. Polysyllabic rhyme is wickedly difficult in English: it can seem destined for humour only, but even then it can sound clunky. Khalvati's ghazals have wit and grace.
I've chosen two from a section of ghazals in her latest collection, The Meanest Flower. One is an "imitation" (i.e. a very free translation) and the other an original poem. I like the emotional honesty of both these pieces. The poet seems to be completely at ease as she writes. Note the intimate tone of her address to her great forebear, the poet Hafez, and how unselfconsciously she introduces a word that would have puzzled him, a word that conjures her love of the natural scenery of the Isle of Wight, "chine". "After Hafez", she writes, "attempts an imitation of one of Hafez's most famous Ghazals, borrowing his radif and staying close to his conceits, but straying from the original metaphors." The second poem is her own, and, again, I love the wit, frankness and warmth, as well as the way the signatory stanza brings in a reference to La Boheme. It is easy to become self-centred in the ghazal's last sher - the form invites it. Khalvati gracefully deflects the invitation.
After Hafez
How ever large earth's garden, mine's enough.
One rose and the shade of a vine's enough.
I don't want more wealth, I don't need more dross.
The grape has its bloom and it shines enough.
Why ask for the moon? The moon's in your cup,
a beggar, a tramp, for whom wine's enough.
Look at the stream as it winds out of sight.
One glance, one glimpse of a chine's enough.
Like the sun in bazaars, streaming in shafts,
any slant on the grand design's enough.
When you're here, my love, what more could I want?
Just mentioning love in a line's enough.
Heaven can wait. To have found, heaven knows,
a bed and a roof's divine enough.
I've no grounds for complaint. As Hafez says,
isn't a ghazal that he signs enough?
Ghazal: To Hold Me
I want to be held. I want somebody dear to hold me
in the wind and the rain when nobody’s near to hold me.
I want to be touched as the tree touches sky
and sky touches earth so horizons appear to hold me.
I want to strike out as a flock strikes for home
and home is now this, now that, warm hemisphere to hold me.
I want to uncoil a long river of hair,
my beloved to sleep, to cross sleep’s frontier to hold me.
I want all that has been denied me. And more.
Much more than God in some lonely stratosphere to hold me.
I want hand and eye, sweet roving things, and land
for grazing, praising, and the last pioneer to hold me.
I want my ship to come in, hopes to run high
before my back’s so bowed even children fear to hold me.
I want to die being held. Hearing my name
thrown, thrown like a rope from a very old pier to hold me.
I want to catch the last echoes, reel them in
like a curing-song in the creel of my ear to hold me.
I want Rodolfo to sing, flooding the gods,
Ah Mimi! as if I were her and he, here, to hold me.
Notes on "Ghazal: To Hold Me"
Englishing the Ghazal
Agha Shahid Ali, the late Kashmiri-American poet who did so much to familiarise American poets with the ghazal, asked himself, while translating Faiz, if he ‘could make English behave outside its aesthetic habits’. Faced with the same question, I am particularly challenged by the very aspects of the canonical ghazal which seem to contradict our aesthetic criteria for writing poetry.
The form itself is difficult enough: the monorhyme (qafiya), the refrain (radif) and, most alarmingly, the final ‘signature couplet’ which requires the author to mention him/herself by name or pseudonym. But how to use the form without the stratagems of disguise we expect in contemporary formal poetry? Using strict and fully audible rhyme; gratifying the reader’s expectation instead of subverting it; employing a syntax that invites the audience to ‘join in’ the refrain, much like the ‘hook’ in song lyrics; avoiding, in the absence of enjambment, metrical monotony – these are some of the technical challenges.
But thematically, there is the ‘disunity’ of the ghazal, in which couplets move around on a lateral plane – from the personal to the political, the meditative to the satiric – rather than in a linear, sequential line of logic, with only the rhyme and refrain to act as binding. This is still beyond me. Then there is the perilous question of cliché. Translating an aesthetic in which images are relished less for their quiddity
than for their emblematic power, using a diction that is colloquial but also aphoristic or rhapsodic – how can I do this in English without being corny? More dubious still, how can I, a woman poet, address the Beloved from a submissive, even subservient, position, without irony, and call myself a feminist?
I remember a very old and well-thumbed copy of Hafez an Iranian friend showed me, interleaved with countless post-it notes in varying shades of yellow. These, she explained, marked the many occasions in her life when she had consulted Hafez, as one would the I Ching, on their auspices. Her life and Hafez’s ghazals were forever inextricably linked. Mine, without my mother tongue, forever diminished. I long to english the ghazal and do what I might do if I were writing in my first language.