{"id":317,"date":"2007-09-13T14:28:03","date_gmt":"2007-09-13T14:28:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/nucleus-import\/?p=317"},"modified":"2007-09-13T14:28:03","modified_gmt":"2007-09-13T14:28:03","slug":"agha-shahid-ali","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/agha-shahid-ali\/","title":{"rendered":"Agha Shahid Ali"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"rightbox\"><img src='https:\/\/mahmag.org\/nucleus-import\/media\/2\/20070913-Agha Shahid Ali.jpg' width='94' height='108' alt='null' \/><\/div>\n<p>\nAgha Shahid Ali<br \/>\nAgha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi on February 4, 1949. He grew up Muslim in Kashmir, and was later educated at the University of &#8230;.<br \/>\n&#8230;..<br \/>\n<b>SNOWMEN<\/b> <br \/>\nMy ancestor, a man <br \/>\nof Himalayan snow, <br \/>\ncame to Kashmir from Samarkand, <br \/>\ncarrying a bag <!--more-->of whale bones: <br \/>\nheirlooms from sea funerals. <br \/>\nHis skeleton <br \/>\ncarved from glaciers, his breath <br \/>\narctic, <br \/>\nhe froze women in his embrace. <br \/>\nHis wife thawed into stony water, <br \/>\nher old age a clear <br \/>\nevaporation. <br \/>\nThis heirloom, <br \/>\nhis skeleton under my skin, passed <br \/>\nfrom son to grandson, <br \/>\ngenerations of snowmen on my back. <br \/>\nThey tap every year on my window, <br \/>\ntheir voices hushed to ice. <br \/>\nNo, they won&#8217;t let me out of winter, <br \/>\nand I&#8217;ve promised myself, <br \/>\neven if I&#8217;m the last snowman, <br \/>\nthat I&#8217;ll ride into spring <br \/>\non their melting shoulders. <br \/>\n<b>&#8211;Agha Shahid Ali, from The Half-Inch Himalayas <br \/>\n  <\/b> <br \/>\n________________________________________<br \/>\nAgha Shahid Ali<br \/>\nAgha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi on February 4, 1949. He grew up Muslim in Kashmir, and was later educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, and University of Delhi. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984, and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985. His volumes of poetry include Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (W.W. Norton &amp; Co., 2003), Rooms Are Never Finished (2001), The Country Without a Post Office (1997), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), A Nostalgist&#8217;s Map of America (1991), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979), and Bone Sculpture (1972). He is also the author of T. S. Eliot as Editor (1986), translator of The Rebel&#8217;s Silhouette: Selected Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1992), and editor of Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000).<br \/>\nAli received fellowships from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers&#8217; Conference, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and was awarded a Pushcart Prize. He held teaching positions at the University of Delhi, Penn State, SUNY Binghamton, Princeton University, Hamilton College, Baruch College, University of Utah, and Warren Wilson College. Agha Shahid Ali died on December 8, 2001.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Agha Shahid Ali Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi on February 4, 1949. He grew up Muslim in Kashmir, and was later educated at the University of &#8230;. &#8230;.. SNOWMEN My ancestor, a man of Himalayan snow, came to Kashmir from Samarkand, carrying a bag<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":546,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/546"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}