Ann Kjellberg, founding editor of Little Star, an annual journal of poetry and prose, and Little Star Weekly, its mobile app version, will be offering a poem every Sunday this spring. This is her third post.
A couple of years ago the young Chicago poet Anthony Madrid published a book, I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say, apparently consisting of sixty-four ghazals; we published one of them, “Beneath Your Parents’ Mattress,” in our app, Little Star Weekly.
The ghazal is an ancient classical Eastern form that pervades the literature of multiple languages and traditions. It had its origins in a sixth-century Arabic panagyric but found its full expression in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Persian of Rumi and Hafiz. It spread, partly through the energies of Sufi mysticism and Islamic court traditions, throughout the Middle East to Turkey, North Africa, and Northern India (whence Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali brought the ghazal to modern American literature with an anthology of new ghazals by dozens of English and American poets in 2000).
The classical ghazal is an exacting form: ten to thirty lines of rhyming couplets and identical length, with the second line repeating a refrain and the last couplet playing off the poet’s name, either literally or figuratively. (Read more ghazals in Little Star.) But Madrid’s book is anything but an academic exercise. His completely original take illuminates a paradox lurking in the ghazal’s biography: that a form so highly structured became the foundation of an ecstatic religion that embraced music as a vehicle for revelation and eroticism as its germinal metaphor. Madrid’s ghazals, like Rumi’s and Hafiz’s, often find the speaker in the clutch of love, and driven from there to further reaches of apprehension. The poems of the ghazal masters were set to music and became the vehicle of an ecstatic religious practice. In both love and verse, a constraint becomes a provocation. Madrid’s poems are divided into chapters and even identified, somewhat jokingly, in a way that looks scriptural: “1.1,” “1.2,” etc. And constraint has its own place in them, as we’ll see. (That he likes a constraint can be seen too in his sixteen limericks recently published in Little Star #5.)
True to form, “Beneath Your Parents Mattress” offers a hilarious, sexy cosmology inside a profane poem of love. Generally, Madrid keeps the ghazal’s couplets but not their metrical constraints; in this one however he starts off with a bravura metrical stroke: two dactylic lines with pyrrhic caesura. That we are speaking of one’s parents’ marital bed in such a form throws a strobe light on the ghazal’s invitation to ontological sex play. The first couplet sets up a kind of joke Divina Commedia in which the cosmic architecture springs up and down from the terra firma of one’s own conception. The joke is redoubled by the appearance of moles in the second couplet as some kind of genealogical–temporal astronauts.
In the third stanza we meet our heroine, who surfaces throughout the book as a kind of archangel of sexual promise. Her bondage toys stand in for infernal props, and the challenge of her has the magnitude of potential damnation. (Here another ancient Eastern poetic form that shadows Madrid’s book, the hija, or invective poem, makes an appearance: “let herds of city buses packed with foreigners drive over my hollow corpse.”)
As we pass over the poet’s hollow corpse, the poem eyes a potential transition from the infernal to the celestial. Angels are found to be girls, and the blood pounding in one’s own ears is the element that surrounds them; the cosmological is within; the moment of passion offers transit to the furthest reaches of space or thought.
Madrid’s poem doesn’t quite get us there; the door is unopenable. The poem leaves him—invoked by name as the ghazal requires—rubbing away his “charm-bangle.” It is this, to me, that makes the poem modern—not just its jokey sexual references and casual self-denigrations. The poet glimpses something, even yearns for it, within his language and his longings, but leaves us entangled in the low-magical promise of the totem that is his own body. He is “angry.” That is mysterious, and interesting.
Beneath Your Parents’ Mattress
Beneath your parents’ mattress is a stairwell leading downward.
That bed is like a door on which your parents knocked to summon you.
Moles are a kind of meteor. Their careers are knots in the earth.
Because the earth is a ball, the way out of the maze is straight up.
Punishing young woman, fueled by a river of burning stones,
Put up your black snake whip, set aside your thorny iron ball on a stick.
For, if I do not solve, within the next few hours, the eternal tormenting mystery of love,
Then let herds of city buses packed with foreigners drive over my hollow corpse.
Angels in the bath! But they’re not really angels; they’re merely girls.
And that water is hardly water. It is the blood in your own ears.
And everything from passion’s aphelion to integral calculus is telling you to go.
But always you find the hinge of the door on everwhich side you pull ...
madrid has a black charm-bangle. When he’s angry, he rubs the black charm-bangle.
Right now his fingers are white from how hard he’s rubbing the black charm-bangle.
—Anthony Madrid
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