There’s a lot going on right now for Daniel Hales.
On the heels of the publication of his new chapbook, “Shake My Ashes,” just out from Beard of Bees Press of Chicago, the Greenfield poet, musician and collage artist (did I leave anything out?) heard that his book “Run Story,” a hybrid form that combines poetry, flash fiction, official reports, love notes, diary entries, and lists, among other forms, will be published in May of 2017 by Shape & Nature Press of Greenfield.
And, after 22 years working at a residential center for emotionally and behaviorally disturbed kids and adolescents that inspired “Run Story,” Hales will be taking a new teaching job at The Bement School in Deerfield in September.
“Shake My Ashes” is a collection of 16 poems, most of them written in a Persian form called a “ghazal.” Hales will be launching the collection as featured reader at the Déja Word reading on Tuesday, July 12, Déja Brew Café & Pub, 57 Lockes Village Road, Wendell. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Ten five-minute open mic slots begin at 7:00 p.m., to be followed by Hales.
In anticipation of his reading, Hales and I had some spirited email correspondence that spawned the following (lightly edited) exchange.
TC: So, I wondered about this form, the ghazal. How did you become intrigued with it? What does it offer you?
DH: My beloved teacher, Kashmiri poet, Agha Shahid Ali, taught me how to “do the ghazal” when I studied with him at UMass-Amherst.
The ghazal is a seventh-century (or possibly earlier) Persian form with a lot of regional variations. One of Shahid’s many charms is that he was one of the most alive, shameless, spontaneous people I’ve ever known, but seemingly paradoxically, he often wrote in very rigid forms — until he felt like bending the forms, which he’d allow if bending the form yielded a better, truer poem.
He also emphasized that when great Urdu ghazals were read in India, it was a festive occasion, not some stuffy uncomfortable aluminum-chair auditorium scared-to-cough type poetry-reading.
Ghazals are made up of couplets that end with a qafia (the rhyming word) right before the radif (the poem’s refrain). In India, if a poet throws down a qafia that is especially good, funny or clever, the audience cheers — or says it with the poet if the rhyming word is inevitable by the time they reach the end.
Everyone in Shahid’s writing workshop was assigned to write a ghazal, and I instantly fell in love and have continued ghazal-ing ever since. …Often I come up with lines while kayaking. It’s such a fun, singing form. And in many countries, ghazals are often sung.
A great starting point for anyone interested in learning more about the ghazal in English is Shahid’s anthology “Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English” (full disclosure: I have a poem in it).
Shahid’s introduction explains the form and history. As well as how to pronounce it: “ghuzzle” (with a guttural fricative on the gh). Shahid loved making fun of the various ways we ridiculous Anglo types would mangle it when we try to pronounce it.
TC: How about we talk about the poem “Epitaph” and run that one in the paper? How did you arrive at this subject? You’re a young man.
DH: First off, I enjoy the fact that “Shake My Ashes” is only a letter away from something you might not be able to print in the newspaper.
As for the subject, I may be young, relatively speaking, but we all came from ashes, and we’ll all be ashes again soon enough.
One thing that kind of rips me apart is that I have an insatiable wanderlust, but I also have these deep-rooted homebody tendencies. Part of me really wants to go everywhere in the world, and another big part of me just wants to chillax on the stoop with my cat, guitar, and a cold beer. So that poem plays with the idea that if everyone who loves me keeps some of my ashes after I die and spritzes a few each time they go somewhere new, my ashes will get to posthumously visit all the places around the globe that the flesh-and-blood Daniel never got to check out.
It’s a poem partly about coming to terms with your mortality — and laughing at the cruel joke of it, not letting yourself get too hung up on death. Life’s too short, too sweet, to waste your share of it worrying about your corpse.
TC: Anything I didn’t think of to ask that you’d like to say?
DH: I also had a chapbook of prose poems about road trip mix tapes called “Blind Drive” put out in April by White Knuckle Press. I’ll be reading some poems from that at Déja Brew, too. Like Shahid, I’m a fan of seeming contradictions, so it’s fun to write poems locked into forms like ghazals and sestinas and also prose poems, which some people will argue aren’t poems.
An ongoing music project of mine has been putting poems that I love to music. At Déja Brew, I’ll perform poems by Lewis Carroll, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, and Charles Baudelaire that I’ve put to music, accompanied by one or two of my Frost Heaves bandmates.
You can find a free download of Hales’ chapbook, “Shake My Ashes,” at: http://beardofbees.com/pubs/Shake_My_Ashes.pdf. Copies of the limited edition print run will be for sale at Déja Word on July 12.
Trish Crapo is a writer and photographer who lives in Leyden. Crapo is always seeking published poets and writers for her column. She can be reached at tcrapo@mac.com