Lisa: I'm having fun with ghazals!

Hi everyone!  I've been studying ghazals -- I'm so fascinated with them but still haven't found the subject to write one yet.   However, I read a wonderful website about ghazals about the poet Agha Shahid Ali, called "A Gift of Ghazals".

Here's the link:
http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200104/a.gift.of.ghazals.htm
 
This is just a beautiful preview of some of the things they say....
 
The strictness of these conventions, he says, make him feel "gratefully shackled." Poet John Hollander, in a ghazal about ghazals, has called the form "inaccessible, vibrant, sublime at the end" and its couplets "two frail arms of delicate form." Ali has referred to ghazals as "Kashmiri paisleys tied into the golden hair of Arabic."
Because the expression of genius within tight boundaries can become a theatrical enterprise, ghazal poets were historically a social lot. They gathered often to recite before their fellows in competitive symposia called musha'arahs, which reached their peak in the Mughal court, although they are still held today wherever Urdu poets are active. In these sophisticated and ceremonial occasions, the poets in attendance were given a misra'-i tara, a half-line in the meter and rhyme in which each then had to compose his ghazal. In order, from the lesser poets to the masters, each participant recited his work for the appreciation of his peers and the audience. A lighted candle was placed before the poet whose turn it was to recite.
"The Last Candle of Delhi," by Farhatullah Beg, is a semi-historical account of a royal musha'arah attended by 59 poets, including the masters Ustad Zauq, Mirza Ghalib and Momin Khan, and their student followers. Zauq was court poet of the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah II, who himself wrote fine ghazals and under whose auspices the musha`arah convened. Farhatullah’s account was based on an actual 1845 musha'arah recorded by Karim-ud-Din Maghfoor, who collected the ghazals recited that night in a volume called a guldastah ("bouquet")
 
Wow!   Imagine... a bouquet of ghazals!!!!!  The Spetses 7 could do that! What do you all think about Alicia (or one of us)  giving us a "misra'-i tara, a half-line in the meter and rhyme"  and then we each compose our own ghazal?!!   Then we'll need a candle for our blog!

Lisa