Tag Archives: David Jalajel

Poems by David Jalajel in Shampoo Issue 39

Posted on by
Reply

Poems by David Jalajel in Shampoo Issue 39.

The two pieces published in Shampoo 39 are haibun, a form developed in Japan, combining prose and haiku. Jalajel’s pieces use the form to explore experimental syntax. Reading them you will find your expectations defeated by shifts of content/image. Yet, if the reader reflects, as one should, on these pieces, one will see that the sequences of images make sense beyond that achievable by a more normal approach.

It might help if you think of a word, a phrase, an image as having two contexts, a horizontal context and a vertical. For example, the word “drill” might be used in a dental context but the writer could leap to a different context, say agricultural:

The dentist’s drill prepares the field for rotating crops.

— just a lame example of mine but read Jalajel’s haibun with this leaping of semantic fields in mind.

David Jalajel is a contributing editor of The Ghazal page, whose research on the ghazal form enriches our understanding and whose own ghazals challenge us to extend our own practices.

The Poem You See Isn’t the Poem You Hear

Posted on by
3

Thirty to forty years ago, I taught a number of college courses in Missouri's prisons. One night, in a college composition course, I read a poem aloud to the class. I've forgotten the name of the poet and the title of the poem, but I know it was written in rhyming quatrains. (Right now, I'd guess it was Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz.")

When I finished reading, one inmate commented, that he didn't like poetry that doesn't rhyme. The poem I'd read rhymed; he just didn't hear them. I read the poem again, stressing the rhyming words and showed him the text.

Those who read poems silently miss the heart of the poem, no matter how sophisticated the poem's language or subtle its form. (Some poems are an exception to this rule, mostly concrete poetry.) Poets have long used typography and lay-out as components of a poems form. Ezra Pound's Cantos and many of E.E. Cummings' poems are well-known examples. Here's a sonnet by Cummings. as is Charles Olson's "projective verse," which relied on tab settings on a typewriter to compose poetry on the page as a "field."

The immediate occasion for this posting is the ghazal by Initially NO in the April 2010 issue of The Ghazal Page. Her "The Silence" uses the radif (repeated phrase) of the traditional Persian ghazal but lays the poem out visual in broken lines of different length. David Jalajel does the same thing in his ghazal, "A Frog" (scroll down to see this poem), although he is using the Arabic form of rhyme rather than a radif.

My intention in this post is to call your attention to the importance of the sound of poems. Your appreciation of the ghazals by Initially NO and David Jalajel will be much increased by reading them aloud.

New Chapbook by David Jalajel

Posted on by
Reply

David Jalajel, a frequent contributor to The Ghazal Page, has just published a chapbook of nine ghazals. It is Moon Ghazals, published by Beard of Bees Press. Moon Ghazals can be downloaded in PDF format from Beard of Bees. I recommend it highly: the ghazals are a sort of Magical Realist take on the moon, populating it with a variety of familiar objects and attitudes. I thought of Stanislaw Lem while reading this poems; there's a similar wit int them.

These nine ghazals are finely crafted, making adroitly varied use of the same radif throughout. Some ghazal purists may object to Jalajel's enjambing a number of the couplets. However, if you've read The Ghazal Page at all, you know that several poets writing ghazals in Engish explore formal possibilities beyond those of the strict Persian/Urdu ghazal. For more information, please see David's essay, "Enjambment in Arabic Poetry – a Practical Exploration for Poets."

Even more important, download this chapbook and read it. While you're at it, have a look at this list of poets published by Beard of Bees Press. There are some very recognizable names there.