Ghazal

From October into early December, I participated in an eight-week poetry workshop with Mark Doty. It was hard work: I am not a poet. But it was also satisfying work: I love poetry (well, much of it . . . some of it is pretty opaque). Today, five of my eight fellow workshoppers met and shared a poem each—something that we intend to continue to do on a monthly basis. It was lovely to see them again, and to talk shop. 

Ana mentioned participating in a "living room craft talk" series hosted by poet Ellen Bass, and recommended it. I bit. (Of course I did!) After I signed up, I received a syllabus, complete with suggested reading. On the list was Tony Hoagland's Real Sofistikashon: Essays on Poetry and Craft. Which I happen to own. (Of course I do.) So I found it in the garage, and started reading. And am hooked. It's just what my seeking mind wants right now.

In the first chapter, on the "three centers of power" in poetry—imagery, diction, and rhetoric (these are Hoagland's construction, but they make sense in his explication)—I came upon a poem I love, immediately but all the more so after reading Hoagland's analysis. (It is included in the "diction" category: intrinsically semantic, consciously making reference to historical contexts and usages, providing personality to the poem.) And I felt moved to include it here in my blog, which has become far too book report–heavy.

Sheffield Ghazal 4: Driving West 

     by Galway Kinnell

A tractor-trailer carrying two dozen crushed automobiles overtakes a tractor-trailer carrying a dozen new.
Oil is a form of waiting.
The internal combustion engine converts the stasis of millennia into motion.
Cars howl on rain-wetted roads.
Airplanes rise through the downpour and throw us through the blue sky.
The idea of the airplane subverts earthly life.
Computers can deliver nuclear explosions to precisely anywhere on earth.
A lightning bolt is made entirely of error.
Erratic Mercurys and errant Cavaliers roam the highways.
A girl puts her head on a boy's shoulder; they are driving west.
The windshield wipers wipe, homesickness one way, wanderlust the other, back and forth.
This happened to your father and to you, Galway—sick to stay, longing to come up against the ends of the earth, and climb over.

What is a ghazal, you might ask. (I did, so I looked it up.) It is a form, often about the pain of loss or the beauty of love despite heartache, originally Arabic but popularized by Persian poets. Typically a ghazal is constructed of couplets, with repeating words (or phrases) at the ends of the first two, fourth, sixth, eighth, etc. lines, that word preceded by a rhyming word (or two)—and the last couplet always contains a proper name, usually the poet's own. From what I can tell, "Driving West" only adheres to that last rule. Here is a ghazal that follows the formal rules, if not necessarily the thematic one. 

Hip-Hop Ghazal

     by Patricia Smith

Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips,
decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.

As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,
inhaling bassline, cracking backbone and singing thru hips.

Like something boneless, we glide silent, seeping 'tween floorboards,
wrapping around the hims, and ooh wee, clinging like glue hips.

Engines grinding, rotating, smokin', gotta pull back some.
Natural minds are lost at the mere sight of ringing true hips.

Gotta love us girls, just struttin' down Manhattan streets
killing the menfolk with a dose of that stinging view. Hips.

Crying 'bout getting old—Patricia, you need to get up off
what God gave you. Say a prayer and start slinging. Cue hips.

I wanted to find a perfect illustration of singing, gliding, struttin', swinging blue hips in shells and splashes to illustrate this poem. But I did not. And really, in this case, no image could do this poem justice. But here's Patricia Smith, whom I found on searching for "shells + splashes + hips + hip-hop":