The Space of Poetry: Inhabiting Form in the Ghazal

It is easy to use metaphors of structure (scaffolding, skeletons, architecture) when discussing poetic form. This essay takes that impulse seriously in an attempt to understand how prosodic form affects not poetry in general or poems in specific but the imagination of the reader or writer who engages with it. Cross-pollinating Bachelard's The Poetics of Space with Agha Shahid Ali's ghazals, this essay studies the ways in which rhyme, refrain, couplets, and the inclusion of the author in the poem itself might affect an inhabiting imagination. Just as Bachelard complicates the idea of houses as mere containers, so too this essay finds a dynamic relationship between external poetic structures and the internal inhabitant.