Rhyme & Refrain

The ghazal is a challenging poetic form whose metrical couplets end with a single rhyme followed by a refrain. "Rhyme & Refrain" explores this form's potential in English: including complex internal rhymes; a libretto for an oratorio that demands couplets are read simultaneously; tercet ghazals in a form invented by Robert Bly; and asemic poems that render the ghazal's form into unreadable alien scripts. Love poems to a ghoul maiden echo the ghazal's origins in the Arabian love poem, but subvert this idea by making their object an un-lovely Arabian folk figure: an undead creature that eats human corpses. The collection is framed by poems about cultural appropriation. It opens with a humorous complaint by an Arab poetaster offended by the Persian ghazal's repeated refrain. The final poem, "Volcn de Fuego", depicts the Western adoption of the ghazal as an "exotic" locale, distorted and exploited by people for their own expressive ends, showing the creative potential and inherent dangers of cultural borrowings.