View Single Post
  #3  
Unread 05-14-2022, 08:28 AM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Mar 2017
Location: TX
Posts: 6,630
Default

Thank you, Susan! I think your key metaphor is both resonant and apt. A single key will not unlock four different houses, you need different keys for that, and that's one good reason they exist. There I see thesis B: forms as new avenues for looking at the world.
But you also make a fundamental point, I think, about thesis A: these "houses" are the different civilizations of the world, to which these forms are organic. And just as the sonnet tells us something fundamental, both about late medieval Italy, and about renaissance and Romantic Europe, so the haiku does for (late medieval I think) Japan, and the ghazal does for centuries of Islamic art.
Which brings up the appropriation question - it seems ever-present these days. And it seems to me, Susan, that you argue further, in an answer to appropriation, that there are few better ways to understand the nuts and bolts of a form than by trying it out ourselves: ghazal, haiku, villanelle, sonnet, triolet, sestina. To do so is not imperialism, it is respect. It matters that we recognize the world's different civilizations in their otherness, just as we recognize different people in their otherness (as I hope I am doing in this comment). If we want to do so, we can do far worse than engage willingly with the challenge that a poetic form imposes.
A sidebar: you've both convinced me, for my part, to be less hasty to dismiss Western ghazals. I'm sorry to say I dislike bandwagons, on principle, but this is not a kimono Wednesday event, and if it were, would that be reason to condemn the Boston Museum of Fine Art? Or did people actually learn the tiniest bit about how kimonos are worn in the process? Which I think would be a good thing.

OK, enough from me. Sarah-Jane's original comment was in her ghazal thread on Metrical, also worth a look IMO. But the topic may well be endless.

Cheers,
John
Reply With Quote