It’s so beautiful when artists speak to each other in the kaleidoscopic theatre of poetry. I saw relentless rain in a video. It reminded me of cumming’s ‘somewhere i have never travelled’ , and Shahid riffing on ‘not even the rain’. When Agha begins to play, I love to watch. He references Dickinson’s poetry too.
“Ali’s world certainly became more complicated, more intricate, intertwining a multiplicity of ideas and frames of references. And in this complexity, the nostalgia for a place where to belong wholly and completely intensified. Perhaps Agha Shahid Ali didn’t find this place, but in the ghazal he certainly found a space in which to question and seek freely.”