The ghazal in its traditional Arabic and Urdu is built of couplets, each self contained, but connected in the ear by both a refrain at the end of each second line, and a rhyme that occurs both at the end of the first line and just before the refrain in the second line. There are other formal requirements, too, but those are the main ones. It's traditionally an oral form: the poet recites it and the audience comes in for the refrain. The rhyme just before the
refrain helps cue the listeners.
Contemporary poets experimenting in English have made free with this. Understandable: English is so rhyme-starved, and most of us don't recite to enthusiastic, poetry-literate crowd, alas. As with the haiku, those of us adopting the form in English are missing some things, but finding others uniquely our own.
I am just beginning to play with the form, and have kept only the requirement that a ghazal be five to seven couplets long, and that each couplet be self-contained. (They are connected, but the connections are mysterious.) The addition of the borrowed first couplet is my own idea. Previous outings:
... beginning with lines from Szymborska
... beginning with lines from Roethke
... beginning with a couplet from Crozier
enjoy the form and recommend it to y'all. Crozier's Bones in their Wings (from which I borrowed the couplet above) includes a good essay on the ghazal in English in Canada. Plus it's a smashing collection of ghazals. Go get it.
