1) After reading Patricia Smith’s “Hip Hop Ghazal,” p.55 Creative Writing Textbook, you will be attempting to write your own ghazal. Here is what is needed for a ghazal…

(Refer to “Hip Hop Ghazal” as I go through this with you).

1) A ghazal is made up of a series of couplets (two-line stanzas).

2) The lines of these couplets, ideally, have the same number of syllables and has the same meter. (With Smith’s poem each line has 14 syllables and each syllable pair is an iamb -an unstressed and stressed syllable). If you can do that, great, if not—it’s a draft!

3) In the first couplet, both lines end with the same word. (In Smith’s poem she uses “hips”).

4) In every couplet after that, the second line of the couplet will end with the same word. (Note again, in Smith’s poem, that word is “hips”).

5) In a ghazal, when you lead into your repeating word, there is a rhyming word or rhyming phrase that leads into that word. (Note in Smith’s poem, every time before she gets to the word “hips,” she uses an -ing word leading into the word. (swinging blue hips, bringing them woo hips, singing thru hips, clinging like glue hips, etc.)

6) In the final couplet of a ghazal, in the first line of the last couplet, you say your own name. In Smith’s poem she says: “Crying 'bout getting old—Patricia, you need to get up off”

In the Persian tradition, a Ghazal’s subject matter included both erotic longing and religious belief or mysticism. Importantly, in a ghazal, you are having a conversation with yourself, or, a better or “worse-er” side of yourself—thus, the saying of your own name in the first line of the final couplet.

Like Patricia Smith, it would be easiest to use -ing rhymes to lead into your repeated word.

Repeated words that may work well for your ghazal: lips, love, magic, crazy, time, day, speak, there, here, heart, open, true, etc.