Poetry is a difficult form of writing to love. It is short, something most people usually find pleasing, but it is not satisfyingly short in the way an Instagram reel or TikTok can be.
The ghazal is not a sonnet or a haiku. The ghazal originated in Persia and is one of Arabic’s main forms of poetry. Classically, the ghazal ends each two-line stanza, or each line, with the same word or phrase and rhymes.
Poetry's brevity compared with novels has caveats. The deep sandpaper quality poetry possesses keeps most readers from sharing a connection with the imagery and language. To delve fully into a poem the reader must attune themselves to silence.
When I read a poem. I savor each line. Alone. Then with the following line (and if it’s more than a two-line stanza I squint at it), I sit in silence with the line, the gathered words, not reading them but thinking about them.
This can be frustrating. Tiresome. Creating an amount of boredom for the reader instead of stealing it away and whisking our attention to something stimulating.
In sad news, the New York Times Magazine has ceased its poetry section (a small half-page allotted to a single poem each week).
But when I’m sitting alone at my desk and I drag my finger over a line of printed words that make me smile outwardly, all of the squinting and forced quiescence feels rewarding.
I was first introduced to the ghazal in Robert Hass’ ironically titled encyclopedia on poetry called A Little Book on Form. This guide to poetry is supposedly for the graduate student studying poetics, but I disregarded that claim and will say that if you have an interest in what poetry means then a few of the beginning chapters will advance your appreciation of the art form.
One of the first ghazals I read which remains one of my favorites (although now I look for their form everywhere I go and I have found the ghazal to be a very user-friendly type of poetry as the word ghazal is often in the title of the poem) is Craig Arnold’s “Ghazal for Garcia Lorca”.
Here are the first two stanzas of that poem.
“GHAZAL FOR GARCIA LORCA
Still you came back knowing you must die in Granada,
intricate, tricky, disapproving, prying Granada.
One hand grips the collar, the other sounds the pocket.
They make no room for the shameless or the shy in Granada.”
Read the rest of his poem here.
To keep poetry alive, read it. And if you're brave, write it.
Cited:
Hass, Robert. A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry. Ecco, an Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2018.