Poetic tourism and deforming form.
by Andy Jackson If one writes in free verse – and one should – to subvert Western civilisation, surely one should write in forms to save oneself from Western civilisation? Agha Shahid Ali1 Agha Shahid Ali was born in Kashmir, and moved to the United States at the age of twenty-five. His poetry spanned this distance, and dwelt within both worlds equally comfortably. But he is most well-known as a contemporary master of the English-language ghazal. For many years, he had winced as other poets wrote what they called ghazals, with little apparent awareness of the rigour and complexity of…