The Ghazal Page 2010
Home Page | Gino's Ghazal Blog | Prose | Links | Information | Email | Archives
Please remember the current ghazal challenge on the theme of books. Several good ghazals have already arrived; you have until 31 July to submit your own. I look forward to them.
There are five ghazals by four poets in the July issue. Thematically, they move from a dripping faucet to Eternity, taking a path through war, lost love, and Mother Teresa. Enjoy the journey!
There's a new ghazal challenge with 31 July as the due date. I hope to see ghazals in a variety of forms in response to this challenge — Persian/Urdu style, of course, but also Arabic and tercet ghazals, along with other variations that your poetic imagination discovers.
The June issue is online now. Please enjoy the six fine ghazals.
The May issue features six ghazals by four poets. These poems show a variety of ways to develop the ghazal form in English. Form and theme work synergestically in each of these ghazals. Enjoy!
The Arabic ghazal challenge poems should be published toward the end of this week.
Here's the April issue on time! I think you'll find that the four ghazals in it will reward the time and energy you put into reading them. I would always encourage you to read a poem aloud, especially if you find it resists you on a silent reading. In the case of this issue, I especially urge you to read the poems aloud. Silent reading can result in loss of meaning as well as music.
I have been working on the Arabic ghazal challenge issue, which I hope to publish in a couple weeks. Just as the challenge seems to have been more difficult than the others, involving radifs, so setting up the issue is a bit more demanding as well. The results will be very much worth waiting for. When the results of the Arabic ghazal challenge are published, I will issue a new ghazal challenge.
The March issue is available through the link on the right. This issue is unusual in that it consists of five poems by a single poet, "from American Amnesiac," poems that Diane Raptosh intends to develop into a longer sequence. The notion of a sequence of ghazals may be unusual in itself, but the sequencing of these five works quite well.
For readers concerned about purity of the ghazal form, I know that these depart in a couple of ways from the Persian ghazal as delineated, most notably, by Agha Shahid Ali. Readers who have followed the essays by David Jalajel will know that in its Arabic origins, the ghazal differed in many ways from its later Persian/Urdu form. I prefer not see the form as fixed at any one stage of its development but still capable of further
Here, finally, is the February issue. The poems themselves have been ready for about a week, but some personal issues kept me from publishing it until now. My apologies to the poets and to the readers for this delay. I'm certain you will find the poems worth the wait. The editor's comments for this issue use a reader-response approach. You may want to look at my brief explanation for students. There's also an over-view on the College of New Rochelle's Web site.
In any case, I hope that your response to these four ghazals includes surprise and delight.
This issue inaugurates the new design of The Ghazal Page for 2010. The design follows the same basic idea that I've used for a couple of years. I decided sometime ago to avoid glitzy design for TGP. There's no reason for any use flash elements, for instance, or javascript. My idea is keep it simple and plain: it will load faster and be consistent across a variety of browsers, platforms, and devices. If you encounter any problems, I would appreciate knowing what they are so I can address them.
The January issue presents six ghazals by five poets. When compiling an issue, I try to find a group of poems that work well together, then I find a good order to put them in. The grouping and order are more intuitive than rationalized, and contrasting ghazals work as well as ones that harmonize.
This set of a half-dozen fits together and flows especially well. Enjoy them!
Interested readers — for instance, seeking permission to reprint a poem — can always contact the poet through me.