Agha
Shahid Ali, the famous Kashmiri-American poet and self-described 'multiple
exile', was undoubtedly the most accomplished english-language poet of the
modern era.
Agha Shahid Ali was born on February 4, 1949 and passed away on December 8, 2001.
He grew up in Kashmir, and was later educated at the University of Kashmir,
Srinagar, and the University of Delhi. He earned a Ph.D. in English from
Pennsylvania State University in 1984, and an M.F.A. from the University of
Arizona in 1985. He authored several collections of poetry, including
Rooms Are Never Finished (W.W. Norton & Co., 2001), The Country Without a Post
Office (1997), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), A Nostalgist's Map of
America (1991), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), The Half-Inch Himalayas
(1987), In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979), and Bone Sculpture
(1972). He was also the author of T. S. Eliot as Editor (1986), translator of
The Rebel's Silhouette: Selected Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1992), and editor of
Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000).
Shahid received fellowships from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bread
Loaf Writers' Conference, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the New York Foundation
for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and was awarded a Pushcart Prize. He
held teaching positions at the University of Delhi, Penn State, SUNY Binghamton,
Princeton University, Hamilton College, Baruch College, University of Utah, and
Warren Wilson College.
Shahid's poetry is best described by an American contemporary - Shahid drew on the lyric poetry tradition of the ghazal while joining it with
Western poetic influences, including the sounds and rhythms of the English
language. His range of conventions, covering two very different poetic
traditions, were truly multicultural - the result being English language ghazals
in which the rich musical pattern, often lost in translation, stood fully
revealed:
Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight
before you agonize him in farewell tonight?
I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates-
A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.
("Ghazal", The Country without a post office, 1997)
SNOWMEN
My ancestor, a man
of Himalayan snow,
came to Kashmir from Samarkand,
carrying a bag
of whale bones:
heirlooms from sea funerals.
His skeleton
carved from glaciers, his breath arctic,
he froze women in his embrace.
His wife thawed into stony water,
her old age a clear
evaporation.
This heirloom,
his skeleton under my skin, passed
from son to grandson,
generations of snowmen on my back.
They tap every year on my window,
their voices hushed to ice.
No, they won't let me out of winter,
and I've promised myself,
even if I'm the last snowman,
that I'll ride into spring
on their melting shoulders.
STATIONERY
The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert
in great sheets, reams
of silver handmade by you.
The night is your cottage industry now,
the day is your brisk emporium.
The world is full of paper.
Write to me.
(The Half-Inch Himalayas, 1987)
A History of Paisley:
You who will find the dark fossils of paisleys
one afternoon on the peaks of Zabarvan -
Trader from an ancient market of the future,
alibi of chronology, that vain
collaborator of time - won't know that these
are her footprints from the day the world began.
(Oh see, it is still the day the world begins:
and the city rises, holding its remains,
its wooden beams already their own fire's prophets.)
And you, now touching sky, deaf to her anklets
still echoing in the valley, deaf to men
fleeing from soldiers into dead-end lanes
(Look! Their feet bleed; they leave footprints on the street
which will give up its fabric, at dusk, a carpet) -
you have found-you'll think- the first teardrop, gem
that was enticed for a mogul diadem
into design...
...three men are discussing, between
sips of tea, undiscovered routes on emerald
seas, ships with almonds, with shawls for Egypt.
It is dusk. The gauze is torn. A weaver kneels,
gathers falling threads. Soon he will stitch the air.
