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Chandrani Chatterjee192 Milind Malshethe poem to. More and more I want to involve that ‘you’ in thepoem, say, “You’re here. Don’t go away”…I control the use of thisother presence to make a more social environment for the poem, sothat it is not just a statement of an isolated person, but assumes anaudience, assumes an involved presence whom one desperatelyhopes is there somewhere when the work is done.’ 8 Adrienne Rich inthe essay ‘Blood, Bread and Poetry’, admits that she was, ‘easilyentranced by pure sound and still am, no matter what it is saying;and any poet who mixes poetry of the actual world with the poetryof sound interests and excites me more than I am able to say.’ 9 Theghazal readily afforded these American writers with a form that hadits roots in a different culture but was capable of fulfilling theirrequirements. The flexibility and novelty of the ghazal appealed toAdrienne Rich, who was in quest of a new form. In ‘What is FoundThere: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics’ (1993), Rich comments onher quest thus:What poetry is made of is so old, so familiar, that it’seasy to forget that it’s not just the words, butpolyrhythmic sounds, speech in its endeavours (everypoem breaks a silence that had to be overcome), prismaticmeanings lit by each other’s light, stained by each other’sshadows. In the wash of poetry the old, beaten, wornstones of language take on colours that disappear whenyou sieve them up out of the streambed and try to sortthem out. 10In this quest for a form, which could give proper shape toher ideas, a form that was flexible enough to accommodate herviews on life and woman emancipation, Adrienne Rich was inspiredby the writings of Ghalib and chose to write ghazals using thecouplet form in the collection called Leaflets (1969). Richacknowledged her debt to Ghalib when she wrote: ‘My ghazals arepersonal and public, American and twentieth century; but they owemuch to the presence of Ghalib in my mind: a poet, self-educated