Tag: ghazal

Ghazal workshop with Ellen Rowland

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Ghazal workshop with Ellen Rowland
Date: Tuesday, April 7
Time: 1-3pm Eastern
Duration: 2-hours
Cost: $25

Limited to 15 participants.

>> Register Here <<

Readings are recorded and shared with all who sign up.

~ About The Workshop ~

In this instructive and generative workshop, we’ll delve into the Arabic Ghazal, exploring its historical origins and cultural significance, as well the specific stanza structure and musical devices, including refrain, rhyme, and use of repetition. Through illustrative examples, we’ll learn the particular patterns and music of this ancient form to express cultural differences, celebrate love and beauty, or insist on an idea or theme.

The first hour of workshop will cover the history of the Ghazal and its influence on modern poetry with examples and detailed writing guidelines, followed by discussion.

The second hour will be dedicated to writing time to practice the form and optional sharing of our work.

In order to create an intimate environment that encourages discussion, sharing of ideas and writing, this workshop is limited to 15 participants.

All poetry levels welcome.

~ About The Workshop Leader ~

Ellen Rowland is a writer and editor who leads small, generative poetry workshops on craft and form. She is the author of two collections of haiku: Light, Come Gather Me and Blue Seasons, and most recently The Echo of Silence/L’écho du Silence, a bi-lingual book of haiku and tanka. Her full-length poetry collection, No Small Thing, was published by Fernwood Press in 2023. You can find her writing in One Art Poetry, Sheila-Na-Gig, Braided Way, Humana Obscura, and several anthologies, including “The Path to Kindness” and “The Wonder of Small Things” edited by James Crews. Her chapbook of after poems, In Search of Lost Birds is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. She lives off the grid with her family on a small farm in Greece. Connect with her on Instagram , Facebook and Substack.

Three Poems by Rachel Custer

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You: a Ghazal

Here’s the truth: you’re sick to the bone of you.
The whole world is selling you on the throne of you.

Better a shack in heaven than a mansion in this world;
The same ending awaits the most well-known of you.

A tsunami of sameness drenches all you meet
Even the stranger seems just a clone of you.

So much falseness demands your worship these days.
You grow weary of God sometimes, let alone of you.

Realize, Rachel, how little it all matters in the end,
How much of what’s true is overthrown – of you.

*

Repentance

Here is Mercy, Indiana,
a town you thought you knew.

Here is the room
behind the boarded door.

(To return is to repent
though you didn’t sin by leaving,

though you left
carrying nothing but regret.)

Some places kill with silence.
Some places kill with words.

Like cornstalks, gossips
crackle stories into the wind.

(to repent is to return)

Junkies inject the lies
they see in others’ eyes, the truth

nobody thinks they hear.
Mercy is a hard place to stay clean.

A child’s teeth rot for simple lack.

A mother trips along
toward the liquor store.

The fields hum a gathering song.

*

Malediction for the Madness in Me

Hard child, home
in my marrow, wildness

orbiting the eye of me,
may you live forever.

May you live forever cold,
wandering joint to joint

in search of burning,
purpling your bare arms

with desperate slaps (see, fever,
how the spell we need is never

the spell we cast? The reassuring
purr of pain?) and may

the fires you find be dying.
Despair, be a desert in me: entire

in your lifelessness, endless
in the pursuit of yourself.

May you never be loved
for what you are not: poet, lover,

woman, dancing alone
in your calloused feet. Be exile

in your own hallucinated homeland,
thumbing rides from men who promise

to feed you plums, so long as you lick
the stains from their thick thumbs.

Beg them to love you.
Beg them to love you again.

*

Rachel Custer is the author of Flatback Sally Country (Terrapin Books, 2003) and The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She was a 2019 NEA fellow. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, OSU: The Journal, B O D Y, One Art, and The American Journal of Poetry, among others. She currently resides online at rachelcuster.wordpress.com and songsonthewaytogod.substack.com.

Ghazal for Summer Squash by Hayden Saunier

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Ghazal for Summer Squash

At the end of every farm lane, driveway, garden gate
is a basket, bag, or pilfered milk crate labeled “free,” filled with zucchini.

Loanwords are words adopted from one language and incorporated,
sans translation, into another: such as ghazal, stanza, sans, and yes, zucchini.

More potassium than a banana and packing only 25 calories makes
this charmer a nutritional powerhouse, says the PR lady for zucchini.

Julia Child served a dish called Tian de Courgettes au Riz,
composed of cheese, rice, too much work: it’s almost all zucchini.

The female flower forms a yellow trumpet; the male’s a thinner,
slightly duller bloom. Add a bee and presto! More zucchini.

One is a zucchina. But there’s never only one. A synonym
for surplus, surfeit, excess, glut, or way-too-much should be zucchini.

When possible, choose baby, small or barely medium, because
size matters when discussing gourds (and that goes double for zucchini.)

Shaved, dressed with garlic, panko, reindeer hearts or baco-bits,
then blackened, sauteed, pureed, whipped to foam: it’s still zucchini.

Praise song for gardens, blossom, vines, and plenty, I offer thanks
for frost and final stanzas, for an end to this zucchini of zucchini.

*

Hayden Saunier is the author of five books of poetry; her most recent is A Cartography of Home (Terrapin: 2021). Her work has been published in 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bracken, Pedestal, Thrush, and Virginia Quarterly Review, featured on The Writers Almanac, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and has been awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize and the Rattle Poetry Prize, among others. She is the founder/director of the interactive poetry reading, No River Twice. www.haydensaunier.com @Hayden_Saunier