wah-wah

The interesting thing about saying "don't do X" in a poem, is that it also contains the idea "do X." Jane Hirshfield wrote a beautiful essay exploring (or at least touching on) the ways that negation works in poetry / literature, citing a particular passage from Czesław Miłosz as example. I keep thinking of this essay (which I believe I read in The American Poetry Review in the 1990s or thereabouts), and at some point I should get organized & track it down. But paraphrasing, she pointed out: as soon as one says, in a poem: "I'm so small / I'm nothing at all" this opens the space for a sense of the statement's opposite. The soul experiences its own vastness (through a peculiar form of irony, one might say).

At any rate, enjoyed the plaintive ghazal & its colorful rhetoric. Keep on!