Pdf Agha Shahid Ali
A Gift of Ghazals*
W Agha Shahid Ali starts to write a poem, he chooses between two entirely different approaches. At times, he selects a pattern-breaking individualism that roams among prose-like lines, elliptical epigrams and quotations; at others, he cleaves hard to tradition by taking up archaic and technically demanding forms such as the villanelle, sestina, canzone and the like. Then, as if to repudiate all such polarities, he may also plunge into a ghazal, an Eastern poetic structure whose “formal disunity” he first heard from his Urdu-speaking mother in his native Kashmir.
“For me,” says Ali, “ ghazals are first and foremost about my feelings, whether from the distant past or from yesterday, that I need to put into a form with special meaning to me. I want to contain those feelings in a singular way, where I can revisit them again and again. Ghazals were the first poems I ever heard, and the form itself returns so much to me.”
The late poet James Merrill once compared Ali’s poetic works to
“Mughal palace ceilings, whose countless mirrored convexities at once reduce, multiply, scatter, and enchant.” W.S. Merwin has found in them
“our own lost but inalienable homeland.” To John Ashberry, Ali is simply
“one of America’s finest younger poets.” Ali earned the accolades of these three Pulitzer Prize winners before even bringing out what he considers his best ghazals, a collection of which he hopes to publish under the title
Call Me Ishmael Tonight.
Although the form is an old and extremely disciplined one, Ali says, ghazals “do not demand long elaborations and consistency of thought. In that respect they match the inclinations of the young. But to be good
Gratefully reproduced from Saudi Aramco World, . (July–August ), pp. –.
*
L W • requires years and years of distillation. I am only now getting to that point.” Ali’s first two collections, published in Calcutta in the early
A Gift of Ghazals*
W Agha Shahid Ali starts to write a poem, he chooses between two entirely different approaches. At times, he selects a pattern-breaking individualism that roams among prose-like lines, elliptical epigrams and quotations; at others, he cleaves hard to tradition by taking up archaic and technically demanding forms such as the villanelle, sestina, canzone and the like. Then, as if to repudiate all such polarities, he may also plunge into a ghazal, an Eastern poetic structure whose “formal disunity” he first heard from his Urdu-speaking mother in his native Kashmir.
“For me,” says Ali, “ ghazals are first and foremost about my feelings, whether from the distant past or from yesterday, that I need to put into a form with special meaning to me. I want to contain those feelings in a singular way, where I can revisit them again and again. Ghazals were the first poems I ever heard, and the form itself returns so much to me.”
The late poet James Merrill once compared Ali’s poetic works to
“Mughal palace ceilings, whose countless mirrored convexities at once reduce, multiply, scatter, and enchant.” W.S. Merwin has found in them
“our own lost but inalienable homeland.” To John Ashberry, Ali is simply
“one of America’s finest younger poets.” Ali earned the accolades of these three Pulitzer Prize winners before even bringing out what he considers his best ghazals, a collection of which he hopes to publish under the title
Call Me Ishmael Tonight.
Although the form is an old and extremely disciplined one, Ali says, ghazals “do not demand long elaborations and consistency of thought. In that respect they match the inclinations of the young. But to be good
Gratefully reproduced from Saudi Aramco World, . (July–August ), pp. –.
*
L W • requires years and years of distillation. I am only now getting to that point.” Ali’s first two collections, published in Calcutta in the early