Beauty in the apertures of pain

is there any poems you haven't been able to stop thinking about recently? I'm always fascinated by the poems stay with a person because it struck a chord so deep it's almost become a part of them

oh well I’ve actually been fascinated by ghazals lately! the craft of it just amazes me. it originated in 7th century arabic poetry & then flourished in 13th and 14th urdu & persian poetry. it’s a poetic form with a very restrictive structure but it brings out wonders. basically: ghazals are composed of autonomous couplets which are unrelated to one another but brought together by the structure of the whole poem. there is a rhyme-refrain (qafia-radif) pattern to each couplet: one or several words are repeated at the end of the second line (radif), and immediately before this refrain there is an internal rhyme (qafia). this rhyme-refrain is introduced in the very first couplet by being used in both lines in order to set up the pattern to be expected in the second line of following couplets. then in the very last couplet, the poet is supposed to add a signature (makhta) either their name or a nickname or a reference to their name. the form was sort of introduced to the american poetic scene in the late 1960s but most (white) poets only kept the couplet structure and dismissed the qafia-radif pattern which is in my opinion the most interesting aspect (if you want to read more about this, i recommend agha shahid ali’s breaking down of the form & criticism of white poets not respecting the entire structure in his introduction to the anthology ravishing disunities: real ghazals in english)

now this might seem very theoretical but the best way to understand the form is to read ghazals so here are some that have stayed in my mind (unfortunately it seems impossible to faithfully translate a ghazal so these are all ghazals written in english + rather contemporary too)

why so many female writers

Well, many, many reasons including..

Virginia WoolfSylvia PlathAnne SextonMary OliverMuriel RukeyserErica JongAnna AkhmatovaAnna KamienskaCarol Ann DuffyAnais NinSimone de BeauvoirMargaret AtwoodLouise GlückKatherine MansfieldJoyce Carol Oates Edna St. Vincent Millay 

Should I continue??   

Poetry recs? Like your absolute absolute favourites

Okay these are the ones that made me die a little