Agha Shahid Ali

Ali was born in February of 1949 in New Delhi, India to a well-off Muslim family ("Agha Shahid Ali"). He received a great deal of education; over the span of fifteen years, he graduated from the University of Kashmir, Srinagar with a Bachelor of Arts, received his Master's degree from the Unversity of Delhi, received a Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University, and obtained an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona (Ellmann, O'Clair, and Ramazani 888). Ali's emphases were literature and English, and after he graduated for the final time he worked as a professor of creative writing at several different universities, including Hamilton College, the University of Arizona, the University of Utah, Princeton College, Warren Wilson College, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Ali began to publish his poetry in the early 1970's, but little attention was given to him until the publication of his anthology A Walk Through the Yellow Pages in 1987 ("Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001)"). After his breakthrough, however, Ali became a highly acclaimed poet both for his unique themes and for his common usage of the ghazal form. Ali died of brain cancer in 2001, only a short time after his mother died of the same disease (Ellmann, O'Clair, and Ramazani 888).

Ali's poem "Postcard from Kashmir" is written in free verse, split into stanzas of two, two, six, and four lines. This poem was written in 1987, after Ali had been living in the United States for over a decade, and explores his feelings of displacement and of being an outsider. America "is home" now to Ali (line 5), but India is his home as well; consequently, the picture on the postcard is "the closest [he'll] ever be to home" (line 6). Because Ali has been away from India so long, he remembers it as being more perfect than it really was. He acknowledges with sadness that even if he were to go back to India, it would not be home any longer for him.

Bibliography

Poem:

Ali, Agha Shahid. "Postcard from Kashmir." The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Volume 2. Eds. Ellmann, Richard, Robert O'Clair, and Jahan Ramazani. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2003. 889. Print.

Biography:

Ellmann, Richard, Robert O'Clair, and Jahan Ramazani. The Norton Antholody of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Volume 2. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2003. Print.

"Agha Shahid Ali." Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. Apr 04 2011. http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/127.

"Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001)." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2010. Web. Mar 04 2011. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/agha-shahid-ali.