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Those songs were our psalms, the daily orisons we heard every day:
Once you warned me that if you scorned me
I’d say a lonely prayer again
And wish that you were there again
To get into my hair again
It never entered my mind
Lorenz Hart, “It Never Entered My Mind,” 1940
Interestingly, those rhymes follow the pattern of Hebrew prayers such as the Schehecheyanu, with the rhyming sound appearing before a repeated end word.
The romantic ballads of the American songbook also had a sophistication and wit that sparked my love of words and poetry:
Imagine all the lonely years I’ve wasted
Fishing for salmon
Losing at backgammon
What joys untasted!
My nights were sour
Spent with Schopenhauer
Ira Gershwin, “Isn’t It a Pity?” 1930
The lyrics often featured naked emotion and double entendres, at a time when that was very risqué. The verses crossed boundaries of gender and sexuality before those issues were openly discussed:
I’ve got you under my skin
I’ve got you deep in the heart of me
So deep in my heart, you're really a part of me
Cole Porter, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” 1936
Interestingly, this song was written by a man, and often covered by male singers such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Frankie Valli.
Often the lyrics of the American Songbook have a bittersweet flavor that tasted like the world of my upbringing. Our family had Jewish immigrant roots, like so many of the lyricists and composers of the American Songbook. We had found prosperity and acceptance in North America, but with the ghosts of persecution and trauma lingering from the past.
When I started studying at Yale University in 1970 and began majoring in English, that poetry I had known from the lyrics of Lorenz Hart and Cole Porter had no place in our literature classrooms. That was ironic, because Cole Porter was not only a Yale alum, he had written several of Yale’s football fight songs, still sung then:
Bulldog! Bulldog!
Bow, wow, wow—
Eli Yale.
Bulldog! Bulldog!
Bow, wow, wow—
Our team can never fail.
But my elbow-patched professors preferred the stark poetry of the Lost Generation, the era of early modernism, when writers like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound took a skeptical view of popular culture and the milieu of the masses and urban life.
Another aspect of the American Songbook that modernism scorned was rhyme. Even “sonnets” now are not rhymed. It’s true, rhyme gave poetry a jingle-jangle quality that only detracted from the seriousness and elegance of the diction, when used in a facile way. But rhyme in the best of the American Songbook lyrics is a source of delight and an intellectual exercise. The rhyme often required an incredibly ingenious bending of words:
Just declaim a few lines from Othella
And they'll think you're a hell of a fella
If your blonde won't respond when you flatter ’er
Tell her what Tony told Cleopatterer
Cole Porter, “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” 1948
The verses of the American Songbook were great, but I don’t think anyone would argue that current literary journals should be publishing rhymed lyrics of that sort. What I do think is that the best characteristics of the American Songbook can still help create great poems—wit, frank emotion, sensuality, great stories, and yes, maybe even rhymed verse—you could intersperse it!
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.
