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I can only now answer this mail (11.07) by Michael Snider, as I've been cut
off from the internet for a week by our incompetent provider. The qasida is
a usually tripartite verse form originally developed orally by the Bedouin
that was more or less superseded by the ghazal; there are imitations by
Tennyson ("Locksley Hall") and Platen, according to _The Princeton
Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics_ ~ I can only find ghazals among Platen's
work. It seems to me to be totally unrelated to the sonnet in either
rhyme-scheme or structure. The Occitanian word "trobar" means to find, as in
French "trouver", in the sense of invent. The theory of the influence of
Arabic love poetry on the so-called troubadours remains unproven, as far as
I know.
Martin