Gorgeous morning, to be followed doubtless by gorgeous afternoon, and I find myself in one of those rare states of empty mind: no agenda, no guff, nothing to get off my chest. I fear I will devolve into a simple laundry list of what happened, so let me wrack my brain a minute...
I'm messing around with ghazals lately. They're a Persian form with fairly strict rules. It's the first time I've messed with form in a while. Form helps rein me in and, at the same time, helps me find the exact wording I need. Since my downfalls are a tendency to overstatement and a tendency to jokiness, form helps reduce these. Ghazals are challenging because I've got to have a "refrain" in every stanza that can bear being viewed through different lenses. And the refrain must be preceded by a rhyming sound that gets repeated in every stanza. So a rhyming dictionary is a must.
The toughest rule to follow is that each line is supposed to have the same number of syllables. Not necessarily the same stresses, but the same number of syllables. It's usually at this point where I say, "Well, you have to relax the rules sometimes."
Still new to the form, I think of a ghazal right now as a meditation upon a refrain, whatever that repeated phrase or word ends up being. My first one is "on that bridge," the second one just "money." Sometimes you need a phrase, sometimes a single word. I have in mind other refrains: "Atlanta," "son of a bitch," "underwater."
Using forms, it occurs to me, invites more serious play, more testing and discarding than perhaps an open form does.
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