Agha Shahid Ali(19492001) Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi, India in 1949. He grew up in Kashmir, the son of a distinguished and highly educated family in Srinagar. He attended the University of Kashmir, the University of Delhi and, upon arriving in the United States in 1975, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Arizona. Though a Kashmiri Muslim, Ali is best known in the U.S. and identified himself as an American poet writing in English. The recipient of numerous fellowships and awards and a finalist for the National Book Award, he taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Princeton College and in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. At the time of his death in 2001, Ali was noted as a poet uniquely able to blend multiple ethnic influences and ideas in both traditional forms and elegant free-verse. His poetry reflects his Hindu, Muslim, and Western heritages. In Contemporary Poets, critic Bruce King remarked that Alis poetry swirls around insecurity and obsessions [with]memory, death, history, family ancestors, nostalgia for a past he never knew, dreams, Hindu ceremonies, friendships, and self-consciousness about being a poet.

Known particularly for his dexterous allusions to European, Urdu, Arabic and Persian literary traditions, Alis poetry collections revolve around both thematic and cultural poles. The scholar Amardeep Singh has described Alis style as ghazalesque, referring to Alis frequent use of the form as well as his blending of the rhythms and forms of the Indo-Islamic tradition with a distinctly American approach to storytelling. Most of his poems are not abstract considerations of love and longing, Singh noted, but rather concrete accounts of events of personal importance (and sometimes political importance). Though Ali began publishing in the early 1970s, it was not until A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987) that he received widespread recognition. King characterized that book as a surreal world of nightmare, fantasy, incongruity, wild humor, and the grotesque. Although the existential anxieties have their source in problems of growing up, leaving home, being a migrant, and the meeting of cultures, the idiom is American and contemporary. Alis next book, A Nostalgists Map of America (1991), relates a series of travels through landscapes often blurred between his current American home and memories of his boyhood in Kashmir. King contended that such imagination links past and present, America and India, Islamic and American deserts, American cities and former American Indian tribes, modern deserts and prehistoric oceans, adding there is a highly profiled language of color, paradoxes, oxymora, and other means to lift the poems into the lyrical and fanciful.

Alis next books were widely praised. The poem originally called Kashmir Without a Post Office was published as the title poem in The Country Without a Post Office (1997). Taking its impetus from the 1990 Kashmiri uprising against India, which led to political violence and closed all the countrys post offices for seven months, Alis long poem is considered one of his masterpieces. Built on association and repetition rather than straightforward narrative logic, the poem is filled with recurring phrases and images. Ali dedicated it to his life-long friend James Merrill. Joseph Donahue, reviewing Alis posthumous collected volume The Veiled Suite (2009) for Bookforum described The Country Without a Post Office as the first of the two volumes that form the peak of his achievement. In the book, Donahue explained, the poet envisions the devastation of his homeland, moving from the realm of the personal to an expansive poetry that maintains an integrity of feeling in the midst of political violence and tragedy. Kashmir is vividly evoked, all the more so for retaining an element of the fantastic.

Rooms Are Never Finished (2001) similarly yokes political and personal tragedy, again with a long poem as its focal point. Ali used a line from Emily Dickinson as the title for Amherst to Kashmir, a poem that explores his grief at his mothers death and his own continued sense of exile from his home and culture. Noting how Ali continually stitches his work from cultural, political and personal events, Donahue described the poem as a cultural inquiry as well as a personal lament. Ali threads the story of the martyrdom of the Shia hero Hussain throughout his elegy, keeping the history and hope of transcendental violence always before us, drawing strength from the strain of esoteric Islam that runs through his work.

Ali was a noted writer of ghazals, a Persian form that utilizes repetition, rhyme and couplets. As editor of Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000), he described the long history of fascination of Western writers with ghazals, as well as offering a succinct theoretical reading of the form itself. In his introduction he wrote, The ghazal is made up of couplets, each autonomous, thematically and emotionally complete in itself once a poet establishes the schemewith total freedom, I might addshe or he becomes its slave. What results in the rest of the poem is the alluring tension of a slave trying to master the master. Alis own book of ghazals, Call Me Ishmael Tonight (2001), frequently references American poets and other poems, creating a further layer of allusive tension. The poet Michael Palmer alleged that Alis ghazals offer a path toward a level of lyric expansiveness few poets would dare to aspire to. The volume was published posthumously, following Alis untimely death.

Ali translated the work of Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz in The Rebels Silhouette (1992), and frequently alluded to the poets influence on his own poetry. Joseph Donahue, reviewing The Veiled Suite, commented that through those translations, Ali first challenged the poetry of our moment, and they resonate profoundly with the personal and cultural devastations he documents in his own life. Some of the finest lines in The Veiled Suite can be read as a response toFaizs. Reviewing the book for Publishers Weekly, poet Mark Doty, however, saw Merrills influence on Alis poems not only in terms of their formal elegance but in the way that a resonant, emotional ambiguity allows the poet to simultaneously celebrate love and lament a landscape of personal and public losses. Noting that Alis poems fill with letters, addresses, envelopes, lost messages and maps, and with images of home recalled and revisited in dreams, Doty concluded that Ali so thoroughly inhabits his exile, in this haunting lifes work, that he makes of itboth for his own spirit and for his readersa dwelling place.Postcard from Kashmir"

1

Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,my home a near four by six inches.

I always loved neatness. Now I holdthe half-inch Himalayas in my hand.

This is home. And this is the closestIll ever be to home. When I return,the colors wont be so brilliant.

The Jhelums waters so clean,so ultramarine. My loveso overexposed.

And my memory will be a littleout of focus, in ita giant negative, blackand white, still undeveloped.

Final Literary Thread:Agha Shahid Ali's poetic career reflects his personal attempt to cope with exile1.FORMThe Poem has three stanzas, the first and third stanzas has four lines while the second has sixPoetic FormFree-verseRhymeAli rhymes clean with ultramarine in the fifth and sixth lines of the second stanza. He also has an internal rhyme in the first line of the third stanza, rhyming memory with will be.MeterThe last line of the second stanza is iambic trimeter.In stanza two, the first syllable of lines 1-2 is stressed, the first syllable of lines 3-4 is unstressed, and the first syllable in lines 5-6 are stressed.2.FUNCTION (consult Elements of Poetry handout)MEANING This poem is about how memories and pictures cannot compensate for actually being in your homeland. The reference to a postcard shows that his understanding of his homeland has become shallow and incomplete. Memories of one's homeland are clouded by nostalgia, Ali remembers only the good, when the reality of Kashmir was more accurately violent. METHODAli says that his home is now four by six inches, implying that he is nowhere near capable of reproducing it in his mind.The "half-inch Himalyas" show how something majestic can lose its sense of grandeur, like Kashmir.Ali describes his memories as undeveloped, showing that he is losing clarity of culture/home.Ali calls his memories undeveloped pictures (metaphor).Kashmir physically becomes the postcard in his mailbox (metaphor).Ali reminds the reader to be careful what they wish for, saying "I always loved neatness" when he is clearly upset about the loss of everything else about his home (irony).THEMEConfronting loss of one's homeland, or even memories of it, is extremely painful.3.LITERARY THREADAli experiences a kind of peaceful, but painful recognition that Kashmir is no longer his home. He attempt to deal with the fact that he doesn't remember on it, something he seems to believe is akin to cheating on a lover.It gives him an independant sense of loss because he knows that it is no longer like his memories, it has been through violent revolt.

Agha Shahid Ali "Postcard from KashmirAgha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi, India in 1949. He grew up in Kashmir, the son of a distinguished and highly educated family in Srinagar. He attended the University of Kashmir, the University of Delhi and, upon arriving in the United States in 1975, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Arizona. Though a Kashmiri Muslim, Ali is best known in the U.S. and identified himself as an American poet writing in English. The recipient of numerous fellowships and awards and a finalist for the National Book Award, he taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Princeton College and in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. At the time of his death in 2001, Ali was noted as a poet uniquely able to blend multiple ethnic influences and ideas in both traditional forms and elegant free-verse. His poetry reflects his Hindu, Muslim, and Western heritages. In Contemporary Poets, critic Bruce King remarked that Alis poetry swirls around insecurity and obsessions [with]memory, death, history, family ancestors, nostalgia for a past he never knew, dreams, Hindu ceremonies, friendships, and self-consciousness about being a poet.SUMMARY OF THE POEMIn Agha Shahid Alis poem titled Postcard from Kashmir, the speaker describes receiving a postcard from his native land, Kashmir, a region of the Indian subcontinent. Parts of Kashmir are controlled by India, Pakistan, and China, and in fact disputes between India and Pakistan about the territory are long-standing and have often led to armed conflict.In the opening two lines of the poem, the speaker indicates that the postcard contains a photograph of (part of) Kashmir, a place the speaker still considers his home (2). Apparently he is very geographically distant from Kashmir, a fact that makes his use of the word home ironic. He may have been born in Kashmir and may have lived there for much of his life, but now he is apparently living somewhere else, perhaps even in some Western country such as the United Kingdom or the United States.In any case, the speaker next mentions that he always loved neatness a trait that emphasizes the irony that he can now hold the half-inch Himalayas in my hand (4). The massive mountain range has been reduced to a small, tidy picture, which is surely not the kind of neatness the speaker truly desires. One of the most impressive aspects of his homeland has thus been shrunken and made to seem far less impressive and significant. Although the speaker holds the postcard, he has in more literal ways lost touch with the land he loves.Perhaps the most intriguing and puzzling lines of the poem are these:This is home. And this the closest I'll ever be to home. . . . (5-6)Does the speaker mean that Kashmir is home? If so, why does he say that this is the closest he will ever be to home? One might assume that he means that he is unable to return to Kashmir, and so the postcard must suffice as a poor substitute for an actual visit. In the very next phrase, however, the speaker seems to contemplate an inevitable return (6). Therefore, when he says This is home, does he mean the unnamed place where he currently resides, which seems a poor substitute for his actual home of Kashmir? The phrasing of lines 5-6 is not entirely clear and contributes an interesting ambiguity to the poem.The speaker assumes that when he does actually return to Kashmir (in real life and not simply in his imagination), the real sights of the place will not live up neither to the picture of them presented in the postcard nor to the idealized memory of them in the speakers mind. In the poems closing lines, the speaker suggests that his memory of Kashmir is unreliable and that Kashmir itself may be like. . . a giant negative, blackand white, still undeveloped. (13-14)These lines and especially the last word are suggestive. They may imply that Kashmir is still in the process of development as a place, that it is at present still too polarized to live up either to the speakers idealized memory of it or to the postcards idealized presentation of its beauty.Critical Commentary:Kashmir is the most inflammable part between the India and Pakistan. Due to the dispute many native people of the region migrated from there, Kashmir is the heaven of the earth still there are away from their homeland. Through this poem poet tries to focus on the sentiment of the people of the Kashmir. Nostalgia for the motherland is the central theme of the poem. Poet is seeking the quest for identity.The Dacca Gauzes. . . for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite Dacca gauzes.-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Those transparent Dacca gauzesknown as woven air, runningwater, evening dew:a dead art now, dead overa hundred years. "No onenow knows," my grandmother says,"what it was to wearor touch that cloth." She woreit once, an heirloom sari fromher mother's dowry, provedgenuine when it was pulled, allsix yards, through a ring.Years later when it tore,many handkerchiefs embroideredwith gold-thread paisleyswere distributed amongthe nieces and daughters-in-law.Those too now lost.In history we learned: the handsof weavers were amputated,the looms of Bengal silenced,and the cotton shipped rawby the British to England.History of little use to her,my grandmother just sayshow the muslins of todayseem so coarse and that onlyin autumn, should one wake upat dawn to pray, can onefeel that same texture again.One morning, she says, the airwas dew-starched: she pulledit absently through her ring.

Agha Shahid Ali wrote Dacca Gauzes, a very beautiful poem full of lament and woe. Something that is rather infectious. His poem on the "Dacca Gauzes" exemplifies Shahid's nostalgia, his sense of history, his grace, a sensibility as fine as the gauze fabrics he describes here. Grandmothers and their stories , the amazing woven air, the texture of morning air in autumn and of course the tragic end of these muslins and their weavers. It is near impossible to grow up in India, without having heard about them the fabled weave from Dacca.Throughout the poem Agha Shahid Ali uses some images typical to the sub-continental context. Moreover, the poem reminds us the cruel colonial policy that the British colonizers exercised on the peasants of the BengalThe reference to the exquisite fabric, the refined Bengali muslin, in Agha Shahid Ali's poem, "The Dacca Gauzes," serves as a metaphor of loss of history and memory. Describing his grandmothers nostalgia for this beautiful muslin and its splendor in the lines no one now knows, my grandmother says, what it was like to wear that cloth, the speaker addresses the glory of this art. The juxtaposition of the grandmothers nostalgic memory, in the following imagery, the air/ was dew-starched: she pulled/ it absently through her ring, reflecting the ephemerality of the cloth, now lost to history, with the speakers historical knowledge of the intricate Dhaka muslins in the following lines, In history we learned: the hands/ of weavers were amputated,/ the looms of Bengal silenced, shows how the phrases and imagery in the poem reflect its themes of nostalgia and loss.In Memory of Begum Akhtar

(d. 30 October 1974)1Your death in every paper, boxed in the black and white of photographs, obituaries,

the sky warm, blue, ordinary, no hint of calamity,

no room for sobs, even between the lines.

I wish to talk of the end of the world.

2

Do your fingers still scale the hungry Bhairavi, or simply the muddy shroud?

Ghazal, that death-sustaining widow, sobs in dingy archives, hooked to you. She wears her grief, a moon-soaked white, corners the sky into disbelief.

Ghazal, that death-sustaining widow,You've finally polished catastrophe, the note you seasoned with decades of Ghalib, Mir, Faiz:

I innovate on a note-less raga.3Exiling you to cold mud, your coffin, stupid and white, astounds by its ignorance.

It wears its blank pride, defleshing the nomad's echo. I follow you to the earth's claw,

shouldering time's shadow. This is history's bitter arrogance, this moment of the bone's freedom.

4One cannot cross-examine the dead,

but I've taken the circumstantial evidence, your records, pictures, tapes, and offered a careless testimony.

I wish to summon you in defence, but the grave's damp and cold, now when Malhar longs to stitch the rain,

wrap you in its notes: you elude completely. The rain doesn't speak, and life, once again, closes in, reasserting this earth where the air meets in a season of grief.

(for Saleem Kidwai)Leaving your city: AnalysisThe Poem that I chose to analyze is Agha Shahid Ali's titled Leaving Your City. This is a very appropriate choice of title because it clarifies and helps you to understand the movement of the poem. We have the writer and another character meeting and spending time together and then they are not together and the title helps us to understand that the writer has left the city of the newly met companion. Also the title is not stated with in the poem and is not a real clich title so I believe that that makes it work even better. The way Ali has broken up this poem is very interesting. He makes use of full sentences and only uses capitalization at the beginning of each sentence. However the way that each stanza is broken up puts a great deal of emphasis on specific lines throughout the poem. There is also enjambment throughout the entire poem and it makes you keep reading a sentence and at the same time has you look at the line the reader just read more carefully. There is also a great deal of end-stopped lines and line breaks which introduce an unexpected emphasis. There is one line that is just one word, the word meticulous, and that word alone really paints the picture of the nameless character that is involved in someway with the speaker. The way you are forced to read allows for a great reading experience. Ali pulls together very unlike images and makes them work very well together. The images however seem to be somewhat abstract. The stanza that really stands out to me is you sharpened the knife on the moons surface, polished it with lunatic silver. (Ali) This is just very uncertain and it makes the reader have to think about what the speaker is saying. There are just so many different ways in which you can deduce that set of lines, which is definitely a good thing because then the reader definitely has their own interpretation and experience of the writing. The speaker never uses a simile flat out but everything that the speaker says is very important because there are so many events and movements that take place in this piece, yet it is all withered down to a few precise words that encapsulate everything the speaker is trying to convey. The tone that the speaker sets is also very important to the reader empathizing. From the beginning the reader seems to be looking into the past on an event that has already taken place and is written in the past tense. Everything is in the first person which helps us to know that the speaker is actually involved in the events and has feelings. Then the piece takes a very evident turn where the tense changes from past to present and the speaker talks about what they have left. The mood also changes when the tense changes. It starts out that the speaker is jovially reminiscent of the events with this unknown person and then turns into a sort of depressed longing to be near that other person which many people can identify with. The interesting thing about this piece is that I am not able to see any type of meter or established rhythm at all. Yet everything flows very well, and I believe that is due to the simplicity of every event that the speaker expresses. There is no time wasted setting anything up or really describing the events. The speaker simply states what happened with a few funky adjectives. The way this piece ends is very appropriate and it definitely resonates with the reader. It ends in a sort of way that makes you feel like everything is just fading away while you get farther and farther away from the events that had taken place earlier in the piece. It seems to be the best way to end such a depressed piece and I really liked the way it put everything into perspective. Seeing as how this class is my first experience with poetry I feel that I still have a great deal to learn about how to analyze a piece. This is just about everything that I could extract and analyze from Leaving You City'Beyond the Ash Rains,' Agha Shahid Ali

What have you known of lossThat makes you different from other men?- Gilgamesh.

When the desert refused my history,Refused to acknowledge that I had livedthere, with you, among a vanished tribe,

two, three thousand years ago, you partedthe dawn rain, its thickest monsoon curtains,

and beckoned me to the northern canyons.There, among the red rocks, you lived alone.I had still not learned the style of nomads:

to walk between the rain drops to keep dry.Wet and cold, I spoke like a poor man,

without irony. You showed me the relicsof our former life, proof that wed at lastfound each other, but in your arms I felt

singled out for loss. When you lit the fireand poured the wine, I am going, I murmured,repeatedly, going where no one has beenand no one will be Will you come with me?You took my hand, and we walked through the streets

of an emptied world, vulnerableto our suddenly bare history in which I was,

but you said wont again be, singledout for loss in your arms, wont ever againbe exiled, never again, from your arms.

A Rehearsal of Loss

The night rose from the rocks of the canyon.

I drove away from your door. And the night,

it left the earth the way a broken man,

his lovers door closing behind him, leaves

that street in silence for the rest of his life.

Ghazal

Feel the patients heart Poundingoh please, this once JAMES MERRILL

Ill do what I must if Im bold in real time. A refugee, Ill be paroled in real time.

Cool evidence clawed off like shirts of hell-fire? A former existence untold in real time ...

The one you would choose: Were you led then by him? What longing, O Yaar, is controlled in real time?

Each syllable sucked under waves of our earthThe funeral love comes to hold in real time!

They left him alive so that he could be lonelyThe god of small things is not consoled in real time.

Please afterwards empty my pockets of keysIts hell in the city of gold in real time.

Gods angels again arefor Satan!forlorn. Salvation was bought but sin sold in real time.

And who is the terrorist, who the victim?Well know if the country is polled in real time.

Behind a door marked DANGER are being unwoundthe prayers my friend had enscrolled in real time.

The throat of the rearview and sliding down it the Street of Farewells now unrolled in real time.

I heard the incessant dissolving of silkI felt my heart growing so old in real time.

Her heart must be ash where her body lies burned. What hope lets your hands rake the cold in real time?

Now Friend, the Belovd has stolen your wordsRead slowly: The plot will unfold in real time(for Daniel Hall)Ghazal

Definition:All good things come in pairs, and the ghazal is no exception. This poetic form consists of anywhere from five to fifteen couplets, each of which has nothing to do with the other couplets.So why are they all in the same poem, you ask? Good question. The couplets are all united formally in that they follow a strict pattern of rhyme and rhythm. The first line of the first couplet sets up an internal rhyme, followed by a refrain. In the second line of the subsequent couplets, that rhyme and refrain are picked up again. (The first line of the subsequent couplets can do whatever it pleases.)As with all poetic forms, it's easier to understand the ghazal in practice than in theory, so take a look at the first three couplets of Agha Shahid Ali's "Ghazal":

I'll do what I must if I'm bold in real time.A refugee, I'll be paroled in real time.

Cool evidence clawed off like shirts of hell-fore?A former existence untold in real time

The one you would choose: Were you led then by him?What longing, O Yaar, is controlled in real time?

See what we mean? The internal rhyme that gets repeated is set up with the word bold (and its rhyming partner paroled). And the refrain, "in real time," gets repeated at the end of the second line of all the couplets, including the first. Ali was kind of an expert at the ghazal, since he introduced this form to the good ol' US of A. So when in doubt, read one of his and you'll catch the gist.There's also a tradition in ghazals of having the poet give a sort of sign-off in the last couplet, where he's supposed to include his name in some way, as Agha Shahid Ali does in another ghazal of his, "Tonight." Take a look at his final three couplets:

The hunt is over, and I hear the Call to Prayerfade into that of the wounded gazelle tonight.

My rivals for your loveyou've invited them all?This is mere insult, this is no farewell tonight.

And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell theeGod sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.

And there it is, folks, Shahid's little shout out to himself.

Ghazals, by the way, are old. They come from ancient Arabia, and were popular with famous Persian poets like Rumi and Hafiz. Often, ghazals are about unrequited or forbidden love, longing, and Big Questions like, what on earth am I doing here all alone?