poetry is like bread
The “Poetry Is Like Bread” Ghazal #5 is a collaborative poem created by a world of poets to nourish us through the pandemic and to envision the world that will come after. The Ghazal is at https://www.bowerypoetry.com/bread, and you can see the group poetry video on YouTube (see below). A ghazal couplet I wrote was featured in this compilation (2:39).
Bread and ghazals, perhaps two of my most disparate loves, were never things I’d consider saying in the same sentence. But the folks at Bowery read my mind - and launched this incr”edible” (pun intended) initiative during the #COVID19 lockdowns worldwide.
The couplet I wrote reads as follows:
“If there is meaning in life and in death, there is no better metaphor than naturally leavened bread.”
From The Bowery Poetry Club:
"The ghazal (pronounced like “guzzle,” with the first sound like the “ch” in “chtuzpah”), an Arabic poetic form dating from around 700 CE, migrated into Persian in the 10th century, spread to South Asia, and now can be found all over the world. American poets like Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky and Natasha Tretheway have written them, and the form was popularized in English by Agha Shahid Ali, who edited an important anthology, Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English. The elegiac ghazal chain written for Shahid as he lay dying in 2001 was the inspiration for this current poem.
The consistency that all English ghazals share with Arabic, Persian, and Urdu ghazals is that they are written in couplets (each verse is two lines), and there is no direct connection between the couplets. That’s a hard one to digest – how does a poem hang together if the verses are autonomous? Because of course the lines do, somehow, all “connect,” just not in the direct way that English poems usually proceed, word to word. It’s as if each ghazal couplet has a completely different angle on whatever it is we’re talking about. In this ghazal, all lines refract human resilience in a time of great dread. Which is why the radif is bread, as in these words of Pablo Neruda -- “On our earth, before writing was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars, and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.”
The radif is another part of ghazals often written in English – the last word of each couplet is repeated in every verse. That’s the radif, and in the first couplet this word often ends both lines. It’s this repetition, its surprising surprise and consistency, that anchors the ghazal. Some poets will rhyme the word(s) just before the radif, which mimics the qaifa (rhyme) that is a feature of ghazals in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Turkish, and other languages.
That the ghazal has moved and changed from culture to culture may inspire new ways to think of humanity uniting to form a global resilience, a global resistance. Here are words to heal, in a form we hope will push and pull you to define, from different angles, what this Plague is. From the invisible virus, the clarity of words, of poetry. Like bread.