John Thompson, Phyllis Webb, and the roots of the free-verse ghazal in Canada

This thesis charts the emergence of the free-verse ghazal in Canada in the 1970s by exploring the form's important influence on contemporary Canadian poetics. While the form's imagistic accretion, disjuncture, lyric impulse, and allusiveness -- a complex I call "the ghazal sensibility" -- are anticipated in the pared down, lyric experiments of Phyllis Webb's Naked Poems (1965), the free-verse ghazal literally originates in the American co-translations of Urdu ghazals that comprise editor Aijaz Ahmad's Ghazals of Ghalib (1971). Original free-verse ghazals were first written in the United States by Adrienne Rich, who was inspired by the form's open structure while translating Ghalib for Ahmad's anthology. Following Rich's example, John Thompson -- the originator and most important practitioner of the form in Canada -- re-invents the Urdu ghazal's traditional conventions in his remarkably influential but critically undervalued Stilt Jack (published posthumously in 1978). To trace Stilt Jack's intertextual methodology -- which involves overcoming the influence of Yeats by balancing (post)modern structural experimentation with a neo-Romantic lyric language -- I posit Thompson's embrace of the ghazal sensibility as a re-invention of Keats' concept of negative capability, a term recuperated in the early postmodern era by Charles Olson. While Thompson's practice inspires many import ant Canadian poets, the most significant and successful is Webb. Her Water and Light: Ghazals and Anti Ghazals (1984) employs a "Zen" poetics that balances haiku and ghazal sensibilities to engage what I call her "Ethics of Location," an attempt to become accountable for Western privilege by transforming rather than merely rejecting the limitations of poetic predecessors such as Thompson and Ghalib. Supported by a critical dialogue with Peter Sanger, Margaret Atwood, Pauline Butling, Stephen Collis, Ken Norris, Susan Glickman, John Hulcoop, and others, my historical and critical overview of the free-verse ghazal form in Canada ultimately suggests that its current neglect in poetry criticism is a limitation that requires remedy, and that its primary practitioners in Canada -- Webb and Thompson -- correspondingly deserve lasting recognition.