Saturday, July 12, 2008

Prompt: Ghazal

The ghazal is one my favorite forms: flexible enough to permit a wide variety of approaches, yet has a distinct flavor of its own. Loosely speaking, a ghazal is made up of couplets where each couplet ends with the same word or short phrase. Each couplet should stand on its own as a short poem in itself, though all are expected to be thematically linked.

For some excellent examples of contemporary ghazals, visit The Ghazal Page

For more technical (and disputatious) definitions, read this essay

and then try writing your hand at writing a ghazal. Or not. Remember, it's

Totally Optional


!

4 comments:

Crafty Green Poet said...

oh brilliant! I have recently discovered the ghazal and am loving it! Great prompt!!!

Lucy said...

Great! A pretext to post another ghazal, you have made me a happy woman!

Anonymous said...

Excellent! Nice to see the Ghazal getting some attention. I have a few up on my blog. Here's a link to one of them.

http://maekitso.wordpress.com/2008/06/21/dots/

Anonymous said...

tiel, thank you for the prompt this week... first introduced to ghazals on yr poetry site and fell in love with the form and history but have yet to try... stopped by makeitso as well... great stuff!!