May is Asian Heritage Month and is a time to celebrate the arts and cultures of Asia. Poetic forms arise out of a cultural group’s language and can sometimes work well in another language like English with some modification and changes. Poetic forms can also be used as a means of expression of one’s cultural identity or sensibility. Over the weekend at a conference I attended, I had a chance to listen to poet Sheniz Janmohamed talk about the ghazal, a poetic form originating in Arabic, and later made famous by Persian poets Rumi and Hafiz. For Janmohamed, learning about the ghazal form and its traditions lead eventually to her own ghazal writing in English. The ghazal was a way to connect her with her South Asian heritage and to deepen her knowledge and awareness of the rich potentials of the form as it could be explored in English. The result of her work is her book Bleeding Light, TSAR publications, 2010. Of course, you don’t have to be South Asian to write a ghazal; it is a form like any other and artists are always interested in experimenting with forms! However, because I am myself a poet of Asian background, I appreciate those artists who plumb the depths of their cultural traditions and find new hybrid
ized ways of expressing themselves through traditional forms, particularly non-western ones.
An example of a poet playing with traditional Japanese forms — haiku and senryu — is Richard Stevenson, who has compiled a book of poems called Casting Out Nines: Haiku and Senryu for Teens (Ekstasis Editions, 2011.) This is a collection of flip, irreverent high-school haiku — which reminded me of a long ago incident in my high school days when an English teacher allowed students to submit creative writing for their papers and was stymied by my friend who submitted a haiku (or maybe it was two!) for his paper. Leave it to a teenager to exploit a literary form to his own ends!
Anyway, that aside, Poetry Friday this week is hosted by Katja at Write. Sketch. Repeat.