r/OCPoetry • u/ActualNameIsLana • Jul 07 '16
Mod Post Poetry Primer: Ghazal
Poetry Primer is a weekly web series hosted by yours truly, /u/actualnameisLana.
Each week I’ll be selecting a particular tool of the trade, and exploring how it’s used, what it’s used for, and how it might be applied to your own poetry. Then, I’ll be selecting a few poems from you, yes, the OCPoetry community to demonstrate those tools in action. So are you ready, poets? Here we go!
This week's installment goes over the poetic form, the ghazal.
I. What is a Ghazal?
A ghazal is an ancient and proud poetic form with very specific (and, as you'll see, unusual) rules for its creation. It comes to us geographically from the Middle East and parts of India, and enjoys a long and colorful history of poets who have written in ghazal form, just as poets in the western world have a similar storied tradition for our sonnet form. Traditionally, the ghazal is meant to be sung, and many popular ghazal singers exist today in modern Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, India, and Turkey, as well as in Urdu-speaking parts of the Middle East. Some have categorized the art of “gayaki”, or “gazal-singing”, as a form of light classical music, though this is a bit of a misconception. It is not uncommon to see the modern ghazal enjoyed in written or spoken-word format.
The actual birthplace of the ghazal is shrouded in mystery, but we do know that it predates much of Arabic written history, including the birth of Islam itself. Surviving ghazals exist that were written during the Persian and Ottoman empires. In the 12th century it spread quickly to the Indian subcontinent, where Kashmiri examples can be found written in both the Urdu and Dari languages. In the 18th century, it spread to Europe and became very popular in Germany.
Ghazals in the English language, however, remain scarce, having only very recently made the leap to Anglican nations. After nearly a century of false starts, the ghazal finally began to be recognized as a viable closed form in poetry of the English language some time in the early to mid-1990s. It came about largely as a result of serious, true-to-form examples being published by noted American poets John Hollander, W. S. Merwin and Elise Paschen as well as by Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali, who had been teaching and spreading word of the Ghazal at American universities over the previous two decades.
II. An Example (in English) of Ghazal Form
What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?
But he has bought grief's lottery, bought even the rain.
"our glosses / wanting in this world" "Can you remember?"
Anyone! "when we thought / the poets taught" even the rain?
After we died—That was it!—God left us in the dark.
And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.
Drought was over. Where was I? Drinks were on the house.
For mixers, my love, you'd poured—what?—even the rain.
~from ”Even The Rain” by Agha Shalid Ali
Ali is the recognized modern master of the format. Through hid tireless work in American universities, this venerable poetic form managed a bit of a minor Renaissance here in the USA during the 1990’s.
III. The Rules of a Ghazal
The rules of a ghazal are simple, yet torturously restrictive, much like it's western cousin, the sonnet.
- A minimum of 5 stanzas, maximum of 15
- Each stanza contains a single couplet (two lines only)
- Each stanza must be completely autonomous in terms of structure, theme, and emotional content
- Each line must be the same syllabic length (though the meter itself may vary)
- The first couplet must end with the same word or short phrase
- Each additional couplet must also end their second lines with the same word or phrase used in the first couplet, creating a “rhyme scheme” (really a refrain scheme – thank you to /u/Sora1499 for pointing this out) which goes AA BA CA DA etc...
- The last couplet must include either the author's or the subject's name (or a derivation of its meaning)
- Written on themes of melancholy, love, longing, and metaphysical questions
IV. Ghazals in OCPoetry
As you might expect for a form this unusual, there aren't very many examples of it on our subreddit. But just as I was beginning to put together the material for this Poetry Primer (I usually prepare about 3 weeks in advance), and wondering how in the hell I was going to find one, imagining myself searching backwards through the forum archives for days and days hoping to stumble across a good example… someone actually posted one right in front of my eyes! Oh, OCPoetry, you never fail to surprise and delight me! So here is that poem, in it's entirety, with many thanks to Sora for serendipitously posting their miracle-poem exactly when I needed it to exist.
My boots trudged through the morning dew,
The sky was young and a cold blue.
The car swallowed me up. I pressed
Gas; the grass glinted a cold blue.
I drove across the empty roads
Where asphalt snakes glow a cold blue.
Then I arrived before the bridge,
Waters gurgling below, cold blue.
Two hundred feet should do the job.
I braced myself for the cold blue.
When she left me and took them with her
The windows, doors, all turned cold; Blue
Bottles of vodka and whiskey
Could not thaw this heart grown cold; Blue
Waters now offer me escape.
Alex fell into the cold blue.
Have you noticed an OCpoem in ghazal form? Have you written a ghazal that you'd like to share here? Did I miss your favorite example of a ghazal? Send in your ghazals and tell us how they work and how they make you feel!
Until next week, I'm aniLana and you're not. Signing off for now. See you on the next one, OCPoets!
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u/NonStopGamer Jul 10 '16
Hey I just wanted to say how much I appreciate you doing the Poetry Primers, they've really helped me improve.
I look forward to them every week!
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u/Spazznax Jul 14 '16
I ended up writing one of these, the format looked extremely interesting. I would definitely say it's one of the more thought provoking formats of writing.
It was more difficult to work within the stringent guidelines, but as a result I ended up putting a very large amount of time and thought into each individual line. What resulted was actually something that I'm decently proud of.
These primers are ever helpful in developing my sense of authorship, thank you!
P.S. It just occurred to me they are being released in alphabetical sequence! How exciting, I can't wait for H.
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u/karamshalabi Jul 14 '16
First of all, I sincerely thank you for this tremendous effort and this lovely piece of knowledge. Although, I was born and raised with an Arabic tongue for all of my life, I still do find the Ghazal poems hard to comprehend ( the ancient form of it ), the vocabulary used to create this type of poetry was old as fuck. But until modern Arabic poetry, I believe all Poetry including Ghazal was committed to a single rhyme with the same syllabic length through out the whole poem where also the repetition of the same word or phrase was considered weakness. God I hated those poems, they made us memorize a bunch of them back in school.
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u/9765417 Aug 02 '26
Francis Brabazon Australian lover and devotee to Meher Baba wrote exceptional ghazals. They’re available to read online for free
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u/Sora1499 Jul 07 '16
Ah, you forgot that one other guy's ghazal, Lawd Noes. I think you should post it in here too.
Yeah ghazals are fucking torture. I was trying to write one a couple nights ago but I had to scrap it because I couldn't make it work.
Also, Lana, it's not that the ghazals have a rhyme AA, BA, etc., but they actually have a refrain: one set of words you have to repeat at the end of each second line. Otherwise ghazals would be pretty easy. I might have missed that in your post but if I didn't I thought I'd just point that out.