Anthony Madrid at the Paris Review:
Everybody likes ghazals. Or they do when they learn what they are: A ghazal is a poetic form originating in and strongly associated with the Islamic cultural sphere. It is a medieval thing—or what Westerners would call medieval. Many famous Persian poets are famous for their ghazals. Likewise, Arabic poets, Turkish, Urdu … The ready-to-hand comparison is with the Italian sonnet. Ghazals are a lot like that: song length, rhyme heavy, lots of lovey-doveyness, lots of over-the-top cosmic reasoning.
It took forever for modern English-language poets to pick up on the existence of the ghazal, but once the word got out, plenty of smart people started trying to write original ghazals in English, with differing commitments to the formal rules. I’m one of these poets.
This piece is about translation, but it’s also about writing original poetry in one’s own language while following the rules developed for a different language. I want to talk about English ghazals, but (for lots of good reasons) I’m going to start in left field … with haiku.
more here.
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