This blog provides advice to writers on their literary work.
See the end of this post for links on these topics: How can you get the full benefit of workshops? How can you work best with your mentor? What, when, and how should you publish?
This is a guest post from poet, essayist, and playwright Alison Luterman.
I was walking with a novelist friend in the woods the other day and she was telling me about how she’d had to tear apart the structure of her draft (which I’d read and loved), change the point-of-view of several characters, eliminate some extraneous material, and was now, basically, rewriting a very different book. I asked how she was feeling about it all.
“Oh, you know,” she shrugged. “At first I was pissed at my mentor for telling me my structure wasn’t working, and then when I accepted that she was right I was sad that I’d wasted so much time polishing that early draft, when I should not have been polishing it at all, I should have been restructuring it. Then I was overwhelmed with how much work I’d have to do to make this new draft work, and feeling doubtful if I could even pull it off. But now I’m into it, and one of the main characters is emerging as more twisted and interesting than he ever was before, and I’m enjoying getting to know him. This new book is going to have a very different tone than the draft you read. It’s going to be much darker. Actually, I'm loving working on it."
I did know. My dear friend Leslie Absher just published her remarkable memoir Spy Daughter Queer Girl, a book she worked on for more than sixteen years. The layers of living and feeling and research and growth really show in the story. Sure, she didn’t think it would take that long when she embarked on this project, but she stayed with it and she stayed with herself and her own changes and the work shows the benefit of that patience and care and earned wisdom.
Alison Luterman
I’ve got students and writing clients who are concerned about this. They ask, How long does it take to get a book out? The answer, infuriating as it is, is “It takes as long as it takes.” Each of my books of poems has taken years longer than I thought it “should.” I always fondly imagine things are ready long before they are. I’ve sent out so many manuscripts to contests only to realize, five minutes after paying the thirty dollar entry fee and hitting Send, that it was really just a lump of raw dough rather than a fully baked loaf.
On the other hand, sometimes lightning strikes and a poem comes out whole. The writer Ruth Stone contended that her poems came to her whole, like tornados on the horizon. She would sense one coming and run as fast as she could back to her house, in order to grab a pen and scribble it down. If she didn’t outrun the poem it would blow right past her.
And Bob Dylan sometimes wrote three songs a day at the height of his powers. There was apparently a conversation between him and Leonard Cohen about writing. Cohen confessed it had taken him seven years and zillions of drafts to write “Hallelujah.” “How long did it take you to write ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’?” Cohen asked Dylan. “Ten minutes,” Dylan replied. So, there you have it!
Alison Luterman’s books include the poetry collections In the Time of Great Fires (Catamaran Press), Desire Zoo (Tia Chucha Press), The Largest Possible Life (Cleveland State University Press), See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions); and a collection of essays, Feral City (SheBooks). Luterman's plays include Saying Kaddish with My Sister, Hot Water, Glitter and Spew, Oasis, Touched; and the musicals The Chain (with composer Loren Linnard), The Shyest Witch (with composer Richard Jennings), and the song cycle We Are Not Afraid of the Dark (with composer Sheela Ramesh).
On the one hand…I’m absolutely thrilled. It feels like an
incredible affirmation of the beliefs and aesthetic that I cut my teeth on. I
remember listening over and over to Dylan’s albums Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited in the late 1960s.
One of my most vivid Dylan memories
is hanging out in a café in Marrakesh, Morocco, in the summer of 1970 with the
temperature 125 degrees Fahrenheit (52 degrees Celsius), drinking a peach and
kefir drink over ice and listening to Dylan’s John Wesley Hardingalbum again and again, since it was the only
record they had.
Bob Dylan’s music was so much a
part of the counterculture and radical politics of the 1960s that it feels like
the Nobel Prize went to the entire movement, as if the award actually belongs
in that café in Morocco or to the be-ins in Central Park with acid heads
gyrating like helicopters in clothes as multicolored as reptile skins.
Dylan is the master of the
kiss-off-your-old-lover song, a particular variation on the ballad that he
perfected:
Bob Dylan freed poetry from the
prison of the page. He is a modern troubadour, a true successor to the Provençal poets who roamed the hill towns of Southern France
in the Middle Ages using their lutes to find rhyming forms that had never
existed, even in Granada.
On the other hand…every literary prize always makes me think almost
more of the writers who didn’t win or
have never received that honor. What about the novelists and essayists and
poets who’ve done the hard work of assembling a lifetime of work, an entire
shelf of words. What has Bob Dylan written to compare to Ann Patchett's novel Bel Cantoand memoir Truth & Beauty, for
instance; or Tawara Machi, who has remade the ancient tanka form; or
Argentina’s Ana María Shua, the master of flash fiction and author of more than
forty books?
Ana María Shua
Not to mention Leonard Cohen, who,
like Bob Dylan, has married poetry and song lyrics in his own way, maybe with
more compassion and wisdom.
In the end, isn’t the whole point
of the Nobel Prize for Literature that it gets us to read writers whose work we
wouldn’t know otherwise? And since we already know Dylan, every phase of his
work from folk to rock to neo-country, more numerous than Picasso’s periods,
what has the world gained by this award? Isn’t this a missed opportunity to
introduce the community of readers to a neglected genius?
Maybe. But I still get a thrill
every time I hear “Tangled Up in Blue.”
Every
poet has fantasized about starting a rock band and becoming the next Bob Dylan.
Poet Cornelius Eady didn’t just dream about it, he went out and found some
great musicians and a sweet-sounding back-up singer (the poet Robin Messing) and cut a double album he
calls Book of Hooks.
Cornelius Eady
He also
published a double chapbook to go with it, so you can read his lyrics like
poems. His topics run from the moving and serious “Last Known Address,” about
an eighty-year-too-late pardon for a black man wrongly executed in Maryland for
the murder of a white woman, to “Bed Bug,” a hilarious song about the critters
in your sheets in the Big Apple:
Mama sighs, and shakes her head
But mama don’t live in New York City
Eady
isn’t alone among serious poets who are turning to performance to find a wider
audience for their verse. Poet Kim Addonizio shows up to her readings with a
harmonica.
Kim Addonizio
I attended a reading Kim gave at the low-residency writing program I teach in at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and a dude with a beard like a
porcupine stood up in the middle of the reading and shouted to the whole
audience that he was heading after the event to the Tap Root bar for a blues
jam, and who was coming with him? Kim was the first to volunteer. Not only did
she close her poetry set that night with a song she wrote that included a
harmonica solo, she played a mean blues harp with the band at the Tap Root
afterwards.
Hey,
poetry started as a performing art, right? Homer’s epics were chanted to the
lyre, the closest thing to a folk guitar in ancient Greece. Greek drama was
written in poetry and performed in an amphitheater with a chorus. What’s this
fetish about poetry only being on the page? I’m not talking about spoken-word
poets, who are sometimes great performers, but often talk faster than the guy
reading the fine print at the end of a radio ad for a car lease, so I often
wonder what these poets’ work would look like if it was slowed down enough to
read it. But “page-poets” are turning to performance now, too.
So
next time you hear a song you like, you might actually be hearing poetry.
First of all, how is it pronounced? The ghazal exists as a
poetic form in many languages, and depending on the language, it’s pronounced
differently. I just pronounce it “huzzle,” to rhyme with “puzzle,” for the sake
of simplicity.
Agha Shahid Ali, who played a major role in bringing the ghazal form into English. Photo by Margaretta K. Mitchell
The ghazal can be traced as far back as about 600 C.E., in
the period of Arabic literature before the advent of Islam. The form was
originally a lament sung by nomadic troubadours, part of a longer poetic form called the qasidah. The quality of
lamentation is still an important part of the ghazal. For more background on the origins of
the ghazal, see David Jalajel’s essay “A Short History of the Ghazal.”
Like many North American
fans of poetry, I first came across the ghazal through translations of the work of Federico García Lorca. That
great New Directions volume of his Selected
Poems first published in 1961, has several magnificent poems that Lorca calls gacelas, Spanish for ghazals. These were
part of Lorca’s last book of poems, Divan
of the Tamarit, a book he never got to finish or publish in his lifetime
because he was tragically murdered in 1936 during the fascist coup in Spain. This book
consisted of poems that Lorca called casidas
and gacelas, but in reality the poems were only partially related to those forms in Arabic, which Lorca may not have
known well. Lorca did stay true to the spirit of lamentation
in his gacelas, and he used couplets, also a feature of the ghazal. Lorca’s embrace of Spain’s Moorish history seems
prophetic to me even today, when we see Western politicians and media so often
demonize the Muslim world. This is one of the reasons I find the ghazal so
fascinating—it spotlights a wonderful feature of the literature of a part of
the world that the West seems to have very little use for now except to make
war on. For a couple of decades, the translations of Lorca’s poems stood as the
only well-known model for a ghazal in English, a model that led many astray,
since Lorca didn't use most of the form in his poems. (For more on Lorca, please see my essay, "Lorca's Local Modernism.")
That lack of information in the English-speaking world about the actual ghazal form changed as the result of one person: Agha Shahid Ali. Shahid was an enormously entertaining and brilliant poet who grew up
speaking the Urdu language in his native Kashmir. He chose to write in English, and he became the first poet to write
excellent ghazals in English that followed the form. Through Shahid’s publications, readings, and
workshops, something closer to the real ghazal form finally became known and practiced in English.
The ghazal consists of a group of
couplets or two-line stanzas, often on unrelated or loosely linked themes, like
a series of two-line haikus. Part of what ties the stanzas together is the
rhyme scheme. It’s not a “moon, June, tune” rhyme scheme, but one that involves
a rhyme (termed the “qafiyah” in Arabic), directly followed by a repeated sound or series of sounds at the end of a stanza (called the “radif” in Arabic).
Remember “q” comes before “r.” In the first couplet of a ghazal, this rhyme
scheme occurs in both lines. In subsequent stanzas, only in the last line.
One
other feature I like about the ghazal is that the poet has to mention his or
her name or pen name (called a “takhallus”) in the second-to-last line of the
poem, one of several features of the form that seems surprisingly contemporary for a form that is fifteen centuries old.
In South Asian languages, where the ghazal has flourished, there are also very
specific meters for the form.
When I began exploring the ghazal in my own writing, I had
enormous difficulty trying to use a qafiyah and radif in English. That
intricate rhyme pattern seemed impossible to me, and contrary to the lyrical traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry. I just couldn’t get my mind around this rhyme scheme,
until I started to hear it in something very unlikely and very
American—Broadway show tunes. I started to realize that a rhyme before a
repeated sound or word is actually a very common form, not in U.S. poetry so much as
in the American Songbook. Here’s part of Lorenz Hart’s great lyric to the song
“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”:
I’m
wild again,
beguiled
again
A simpering, whimpering child again
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I
Couldn’t
sleep
And
wouldn’t sleep
Until
I could sleep where I shouldn’t sleep
Bewitched,
bothered and bewildered am I
Do you see the qafiyah—“wild,” “beguiled,” “child”’—right
before the radif, “again”? And then in the next verse, the qafiyah is
“Couldn’t,” “wouldn’t,” “shouldn’t,” right before the radif, “sleep.” If that
isn’t similar to the ghazal rhyme scheme, I don’t know what is. So many of the
Broadway show tunes were penned by Jewish writers that I
suspect that there is some place in history where Jewish popular song meets the
ghazal. Possibly both were influenced by Hebrew prayer, maybe in Medieval Spain or Persia. For instance, the Jewish blessing for new experiences, the Schehecheyanu, includes ghazal-like rhymes, and it was written down as early at 1,500 years ago in the Talmud.
Thinking about this connection between the
ghazal and popular music, it occurs to me that this link exists not just in English. In the poetry of South Asian
languages, this link is very much alive. I started attending mushairas,
something like the Indian or Pakistani equivalent of a poetry slam, that were held in
the San Francisco Bay Area where I live. When I heard these ghazals performed, I
realized that poetry lovers from the Indian subcontinent don’t usually recite ghazals, they sing
them. And when they recite or sing
poems, they don’t read them the way English poems are read, where the audience members quietly sit on their hands and listen to each line in order: line one, line two, line three, etc. The
audience participates in a mushaira, calling out during the reading, singing or
reciting favorite lines along with the reader, demanding that a performer
repeat a particularly good couplet over and over till they get their fill of
it, repeating the radif along with the poet. And the performer does not
necessarily recite a line just once. A performer will repeat lines, parts of
lines, or whole couplets, sometimes out of order, often spontaneously. A good
performer of ghazals will make up his or her own melody for a text that he or
she likes. It’s a very creative and active process for the reciters of poetry as
well. I think English-language writers and readers have a lot to learn from it.
To make
the ghazal accessible to an English-speaking audience, it’s going to take a
fusion of the ghazals that have been written in English so far, and the musical
ghazals that are popular in Urdu. Something like a mix of the great Indian
singer Ghulam Ali and Bob Dylan. There’s a potential there that hasn’t
been tapped. I think we need to go back to the musical roots of the ghazal and
the connection of the ghazal rhyme to American show tunes, to make the ghazal
all it can be in English. For an example of my own very personal take on this, please see this YouTube video. The ghazal starts at 6:05.
If you’re interested in the ghazal form, you might enjoy reading a series of ten ghazals that I included in my book Talking with the Radio, available from Kattywompus Press.
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