He refuses to kill, so
the black flies eat him alive.
We burst like Viet Nam
over the heads of the planters.
The Rainbow Tribe dances and
dances and dances.
The owl flicks his dish
to the wet glove, the soggy lunch.
Our faces become moons in ten days
communing with slag heaps.
Six in the third place means:
All are in accord. Remorse disappears.
Author notes
"It is [the ghazal's] 'alien design,' this multi-faceted disorder, that most intrigues contemporary writers and that says the most about the essence of the form. It brings out a poet's magpie mind, it encourages the audacious and the saucy. Daring as a thief, the poet steals the bright particulars wherever he or she finds them and puts them in the poem's many-storied, twiggy nest." ~ Lorna Crozier, from "Dreaming the Ghazal into Being," the afterword to "Bones in Their Wings."
Comments
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flies that eat flesh
painted in remorse oil or ink
no matter how dark(ened) the skin
they're always blacker
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I hope you are enjoying yourself.
It is about 8 degrees or so here. The ocean looks like a giant hungry freezing monster.
I wouldn't call them ghazals. I think that is a problem. The ghazal IS something and it isn't this. If Lorna is calling them ghazals and doing this, she should also be told they are not ghazals. I have now spent a considerable amount of time researching ghazals (thank you very much ..
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To extrapolate out only the easiest parts of the very ancient mystical and difficult form and yet still call it the Form just seems plain heretic to me. I know, I can't help myself, that is exactly how I feel.
I could see a ghazal modern but it isn't this. I have a book of Hafiz poems by the way and I LOVE almost all the poems in that book and I bet you would think they are as hokey as hell.
Okay, I'll get off my soapbox now and talk about your poems.
I'm have discovered something about myself, I am not Hip at all. I am tragically, unHip.
These three poems full of 5 disconnected but somehow connected lines sure feel modern and avant garde. And I keep reading them and reading them and they've become like Worm's Walrus Puzzle to me, and not at all like reading a poem.
I somehow feel like I need to find an answer and that is causing me to experience them on a very different level than this Reader likes to read poetry. I'm a sensual reader first I think. I'm a Romantic and Old Fashioned.
I read about the person who doesn't kill and is getting eaten by flies and I want to invest my time in him
only to be tossed out of his world into the world of We's exploding like Viet Nam over planters ...which if part of something bigger seems like it might be a fantastic image that takes me somewhere but alone it feels like it doesn't aspire to anything more important. It feels lazy, undone. And I know it is not but that is my reading experience. Perhaps I'm lazy.
The problem is mine. I'm sure these would do fantastic in the modern experimental journals - send them out and shove your acceptance notices in my face, PLEASE.
Keep leaping My Favorite Antelope ...
Lisa
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I thought I would have some Hafiz in my collection, but apparently I don't, not even in the Confucius to Cummings Anthology Mr. Pound put together. So I looked him up, and on one site I found eight translations of his first ghazal or Ghazal I, and NOT ONE of them had the supposedly requisite refrain or qadif and only a few of them had the qafia or monorhyme, and those were in the "wrong" place.
So I'm thinking if Hafiz, the supposed master, didn't do it in the 14th Century, when the form was 600 years old, why would we do it now, another 600 years later?
I'm also thinking this could be a problem with the translation, not Hafiz himself, but when I looked at the original Persian, I couldn't discern the repeating pattern I'd expect to see in each sher.
I'm thinking that to be heretic is a very good thing for a poet.
But mostly I'm thinking I wish our scrabble dictionary would include Persian!
p.s. I was reading Ovid a couple of days ago, and talk about corny! Snowy white breasts! But that was probably original 2000 years ago when he was writing. OR it could have been the lousy translation, which I found clunky and forced, and by which I cannot judge Ovid.
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The Subject Tonight Is Love: Sixty Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky is the book I have and I definitely recommend it.
It is not written in Persian but an "inspired translation" by Ladinsky. I do think the Master did write traditional ghazals but in his native tongue and most of the time we are reading, in English "inspired translations." But I could be entirely wrong. I believe I once read a translation by someone who attempted to "keep the traditional form" and translate Hafiz to English and it was very awful. I had a Hafiz Summer once but not so much studying the ghazal form (because my book is not translated using the strict form) instead being inspired by his words.
Translations have always been of interest to me especially after reading Pound's and Yeats'translations of Chinese Poetry and Japanse Noh plays. It is something I've always thought about experimenting with. I've read some awful Chinese translations, I have a book, the guys name is Arthur something but it is out "on loan" at preset and his translations are incredibly incredibly stale and unmoving compared to Pound's translations but each "went after" the process in different ways. Also, a great book I found at that bookstore we were in when you were here by a guy named Yip, I think (also out on loan) all about Pound's translations of the Chinese and Fenollosa's notebooks (lots of stuff and examples about poetic language translations in there including many translations of the same poem by various poets/translators).
I seem to be off on a tangent but perhaps there is a connection between modern language forms and translations somewhere .. especially in the Eastern poetic forms ?? I dunno just thinking.
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I give you the link I gave to Lute: http://www.poetics.ca/poetics01/01weaverprint.html
No, I'm still not hitting the mark with these, but now I'm seeing that I'm not. There are some new ones, but maybe I'll practice my aim a bit before I post more.
Thank you, I will leap, because I have to.
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In any form you do that requires vignettes (almost) you seem to be able to pick something like a specimen of life and hold it in a pair of tweezers , study ot from all angles then set it down in relation to the other specimens just so.
I read about ghazals ages ago when Erin (Zahhar) was writing them. Got a bit bogged down and lost the beauty I knew should be there. This is not like that. Maybe I should go read about the form again now I am a little further along the road.
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Oh don't look too hard. I've abandoned many of the rules, radifs and rhymes and all that, but am trying to keep to the essence of the form: each sher (couplet) a poem unto itself, strung like unrelated pearls, something like that. I've been dry or distracted for months, and the ghazal form has been picking at me, so I'm giving it a whirl. I'm having fun, so far. Thanks you, FerretMan.
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yes
all are in accord
this is good
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Thanks, Elaine.
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