this from http://www.ahapoetry.com/ghazal.htm :
>>[John] Thompson wrote a brief introduction to the ghazal in his
posthumous collection Stilt Jack. He notes that ghazals proceed by
couplets, five to a poem (though he himself ignores the rule) and that
the couplets have "no necessary logical, progressive, narrative,
thematic (or whatever) connection." In other words, a strong
underground, so to speak, connection does and must exist, but the
association is beyond words, beyond our ability to articulate except
insofar as the poem itself articulates. As Thompson says, "the poem
has no palpable intention upon us. It breaks, has to be listened to as
a song: its order is clandestine."<<
the idea I have of a ghazal is so fractured already that blowing it
out of the water seems a little redundant!
but this is a good poem Candice. even if I be pinpointed in my lacking
verse by Bob again with this comparison, the ending strikes me as
powerfully WCW; especially the marked word 'cinquefoiled' & the
repetition of 'tiger', & the use of the dash.
and that's interesting about the coincidence!
KS
On 17/10/2007, MC Ward <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I'm interested in work like Hal's that reinvents a
> form by blowing it out of the water--BUT I'm getting
> real sick of sonnets, old and new. Maybe we could move
> on to other formal forms and blow THEM out of the
> water, for a change. My own attempt, successful or
> not, as you (my audience) deem it--a ghazal (is it?)
> that breaks the rules of ghazal form (the so-called
> American ghazal, that is, popularized--sorta--by
> Adrienne Rich).
>
> It's dedicated--avant la lettre--to Joe D., by the
> way, as he has also played with gazelle/ghazal in his
> poem "The Gazelles," which I swear I never read until
> after I'd written mine. (Do you believe me, Kasper?)
>
> Run-on Ghazal, Undone
>
> Naturally, you imagine her eyes of some maternal
> color
> brighter ahead than gazania as she leaps and takes you
>
> aback without a glance to keep you in stride; home on
> the run's your belvedere, her unexamined assumption
>
> in the face of tigers always behind, their oral
> tradition
> chatoyant in a running order where stripes taste
> blotched;
>
> _non gazebo, non videbo_, sums up this tiffin relation
> of
> savanna ecology: blindness and desire cinquefoiled as
> tiger's-
>
> eye theorizes hunger, the mother of all sandwiches in
> which you--
>
> Candice
>
> P.S. Sorry about the messy runovers--the poem's in
> couplets apart from the single last line.
>
>
>
>
>
>
|