Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Rhyme & Refrain

Rhyme & Refrain

Jalajel, David

Paperback

General Poetry

ISBN10: 0868087645
ISBN13: 9780868087641
Publisher: Univ Of The Western Cape
Published: Oct 18 2017
Pages: 60
Weight: 0.22
Height: 0.14 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The ghazal is a challenging poetic form whose metrical couplets end with a single rhyme followed by a refrain. Rhyme & Refrain explores this form's potential in English: including complex internal rhymes; a libretto for an oratorio that demands couplets are read simultaneously; tercet ghazals in a form invented by Robert Bly; and asemic poems that render the ghazal's form into unreadable alien scripts. Love poems to a ghoul maiden echo the ghazal's origins in the Arabian love poem, but subvert this idea by making their object an un-lovely Arabian folk figure: an undead creature that eats human corpses. The collection is framed by poems about cultural appropriation. It opens with a humorous complaint by an Arab poetaster offended by the Persian ghazal's repeated refrain. The final poem, Volcán de Fuego, depicts the Western adoption of the ghazal as an exotic locale, distorted and exploited by people for their own expressive ends, showing the creative potential and inherent dangers of cultural borrowings.

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