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What is the Poetry Archive?

The Poetry Archive is the only charity wholly dedicated to the production, acquisition and preservation of recordings of significant poets reading their work aloud.

We care for and preserve these uniquely valuable voices, which might otherwise be lost, so that future generations can continue to enjoy them. We make our own recordings of poets who write in the English language, and poets also donate copies of their own archives to us so we can look after them in the long term. Hearing how a poet speaks their own poems brings us a deeper level of understanding and enjoyment of the work and provides a rich resource for poetry lovers, explorers, teachers and students of all ages. We have a fundamental belief that poetry is for everyone so, as a charity, the funds we raise are used to record new poets and keep sharing these wonderful collections free-of-charge with you.

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Poet

13 poems available

Paul Groves is a poet, critic and Creative Writing Lecturer, a staple of British literary periodicals over a five-decade career. He has won many accolades, including an Eric Gregory Award (1976) and The Times Literary Supplement prize twice (1986, 2007), and has…

Latest Collection

Collection

Sit back and listen to our Listener’s Top Picks from 2024 and enjoy the poetry that resonated with you all this year.

From the glossary

G

Ghazal

Mimi Khalvati, whose poem 'Ghazal' is the only poem so far to use a ghazal form in the Archive, defines it at the start of her reading of it: "Ghazals are an old Persian form, and they're written in self-contained couplets with a monorhyme, sometimes one- (or two- or three-) word repeated phrase, like a refrain, and the last couplet is a signature couplet, in which the writer has to refer to themselves by name, or pseudonym, or by using some kind of wordplay on their name." In her ghazal, the repeated word is "me", the rhyme is on "through", "woo", "cue", "tattoo" and so on, and the 'signature' is in the reference to being "twice the me", or 'Mimi'.

Like the haiku, the age of the form - the ghazal can be traced back through a millennium - and its translation into the English language mean that the 'rules' have had significant variations over time. You may find some definitions insist that the subject of a ghazal should be love, and others that let the rhyme move to be earlier in the line than Khalvati's placement of it immediately before the refrain. Some insist that each couplet should be complete in itself, meaning that each stanza ends on a full stop, and can therefore have only a thematic connection to those either side. There are even some that do without the refrain, but these appear rare. The closed couplets, however, appear to be a necessity to the form.

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