Unlocking Your Poetry with the Ghazal: A Leap Beyond Western Poetics

Honoring One of the Greatest Poetic Forms

Many university courses and texts focus on classical Western poems, poetics, and meters. I enjoy reading and studying those poems, but they feel terrible to write. Writing a Sonnet shuts down my creativity faster than anything else.

However, there is a rich tradition in the West of poets tapping into Eastern forms (haiku) to unlock their creativity.

The Ghazal is a Persian and Indian poetic form that focuses on leaping, elevating, and honoring the cornerstones of our reality.

A Ghazal has three to fifteen stanzas with lines that are two or three lines. The Persians used two lines, but they fall more in the three-line zone when you convert their line lengths to English.

What makes the Ghazal unique is that all the stanzas are separate topics and should have no relation. This makes leaping from the conscious to the unconscious through the roads of association even easier. Ghazal means "love," so one stanza should be a love stanza. Some other common stanzas in the tradition include wisdom, complaints about your private life, celebrations or rebukes against artists, and anything else you can think of.

A Ghazal should have more elevated language to guarantee the separation between stanzas.

Also, and most important. The first stanza will introduce a word or phrase that you will repeat in every other stanza throughout the Ghazal.

Here is a Ghazal by Robert Bly (a Western poet who adopted the tradition and wrote two books of Ghazals!)

Robert Bly:

Some love to watch the sea bushes appearing at dawn,

To see night fall from the goose's wings, and to hear

The conversations the night sea has with the dawn.


If we can't find Heaven, there are always bluejays.

Now you know why I spent my twenties crying.

Cries are required from those who wake disturbed at dawn.


Adam was called in to name the Red-Winged

Blackbirds, the Diamond Rattlers, and the Ring-Tailed

Raccoons washing God in the streams at dawn.


Centuries later, the Mesopotamian gods,

All curls and ears, showed up; behind them the Generals

With their blue-coated sons who will die at dawn.


Those grasshopper-eating hermits were so good

To stay all day in the cave; but it is also sweet

To see the fenceposts gradually appear at dawn.


People in love with the setting stars are right

To adore the baby who smells of the stable, but we know

That even the setting stars will disappear at dawn.

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Note Bly's use of Dawn in all these unconnected stanzas. The psychic tie between them is beautiful and mysterious.

Below is a Ghazal I wrote!

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Desert Gurus


Instead of pushing apart
we come back to the Desert masters
drinking mezcal — writing poems of life.

Desert Crows over creosote
cross below crooked
stuttering stars shooting toward earth —

A whispering Desert wasn't enough
to make her feel special — and God's messages
moved right past her soul.

Desert chronicles shifting realities
conducting through electric towers
broadcasting bio-energetic algorithms.

Desert Heat erases images —
transmitting nothing into never
forged the hermit’s path.

Maybe if I was a Desert Rumi I could
fill her spirit — a poets eye and heart 
wanders between alieanted worlds. 

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Here is a Ghazal written by Ghalib!

My Spiritual State

When I look out, I see no hope for change.
I don’t see how anything in my life can end well.

Their funeral date is already decided, but still
People complain that they can’t sleep.

When I was young, my love disasters made me burst out laughing.
Now even funny things seem sober to me.

I know the answer—that’s what keeps me quiet.
Beyond that it’s clear I know how to speak.

Why shouldn’t I scream? I can stop. Perhaps
The Great One notices Ghalib only when he stops screaming.

This is the spiritual state I am in:
About myself, there isn’t any news.

I do die; the longing for death is so strong it’s killing me.
Such a death comes, but the other death doesn’t come.

What face will you wear when you visit the Kaaba?
Ghalib, you are shameless even to think of that.

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If you want to post a link to a Ghazal you’ve written, you may do so below!