Postcard from Kashmir

Agha Shahid Ali’s poems draw from many literary traditions, including contemporary American poetry, the sonnet, the Persian Ghazal, and Indian and Urdu poetic forms. Educated in Kashmir, New Delhi, and the United States, Ali brought a unique, syncretic perspective to his work. Ali considered himself fortunate for how he could move seamlessly between literary traditions and cultures. In an interview with poet Stacey Chase, Ali says:

I have these three major cultures [Hindu, Western, Muslim] available to me. They’re part of my mental makeup, my emotional makeup. And I do not have to strive for exotica to use them; they’re just there, they’re part of me […] And I think that is the lucky part (Chase, Stacey. “Agha Shahid Ali: The Lost Interview.” The Café Review, 1990).

In “Postcard from Kashmir,” Ali uses the 14-line structure as well as the theme of piercing, lost love as an homage to the sonnet. Though the poem is thoroughly American in its deployment of specific, personal details in the confessional style, it is also a meditation on love and longing in the manner of a ghazal. The melding of influences is clear in Ali’s juxtaposition of concrete details, such as the postcard, with abstract ideas of memory and loss. Using couplets as the first two stanzas also recalls the ghazal, which is traditionally composed as five to 15 stanzas of two lines each. However, Ali breaks from both the sonnet and the ghazal to create his own signature; the poem’s stanzaic structure is wholly its own. The break from couplets to longer stanzas makes the poem unpredictable, giving it an edge beyond its restrained tone.

Ali’s literary influences were indeed wide, ranging from the 20th-century Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who wrote in Urdu, to the 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson ("If I should die," "'Hope' Is the Thing With Feathers," "The Only News I Know"). Ali admired Dickinson for her meditative tone and elliptical language that revealed its truth in stages. One can see a similar unfolding in “Postcard from Kashmir.” From Faiz, whose ghazals Ali expertly translated in English, Ali learnt the conventions of the Urdu form and the tenet that all poems are an ode to a lost love. In “Postcard from Kashmir,” Ali uses repetitions in the manner of Urdu and Persian poetry, such as the repeated “so” in Lines 6-10:

When I return,

the colors won’t be so brilliant,

the Jhelum’s waters so clean,

so ultramarine. My love

so overexposed

This repetition creates a crescendo-like effect—but, unlike in a ghazal or a sonnet, the poem offers no resolution or twist at the end, pausing on a contemporary, open-ended note.