a declaration of poetic excellence that enables the poet to identify with the
precursor, with no anxiety of influence.
This stand may well apply, with qualifications, to Adnnls and his
Mutanabbl. We should remember that Al-Kitmbstands for Adnnls’ final say
on tradition.^67 The choice of the precursor is not random. Had Adnnls still
been concerned with issues of innovation, he would have gone to Abn
Tammmm, who, for a long time, had ranked first among Adnnls’ preferences
in matters of poetics. Nevertheless, al-Mutanabblis deployed for a purpose in
a book that makes use of his personal and poetic record within a historical and
cultural context. The poet’s career and reputation, his controversial lineage,
glory, majestic presence, and mastery of language make him a central figure
in a text that aspires to gather history and culture in a nexus. The use of a
major text that voices the precursor’s poetic pronouncements within
marginal, but contextualizing, interventions and comments, of opposite
claims and positions, is a mechanism to operate on history with power, and
even retribution. It is time to see through the misery and the failure.
Apprenticeship to the strong precursor is there; it culminates a career of
innovation and acculturation, very much in line with that of the precursor.
Now the poet outgrows association and strives for lineage. The so-called
manuscript is not merely a textual exercise to prioritize writing. It is not a
postmodernist pastiche. It is a text that its present writer, Adnnls, chooses to
put under his newly claimed name, al-Mutanabbl. This culmination of a
career sums up affiliations, concerns, inhibitions, aspirations, and frustrations.
These have been gathering momentum in Adnnls’ other writings to be
encapsulated in Al-Kitmb.
Conclusion
Recollection, with its many claims on memory, reading, grounding, affiliation,
and disenchantment, operates powerfully on poetry. Its intersectional space is
a site of rich poetics. Modern poetry, with its postmodernist or postcolonial
manifestations, offers many examples of engagements between modernity and
tradition. These are also rife with tension whenever contemporary concerns
demand a position. But to cover the use and appropriation of classical poetics
and poets is beyond the scope of this chapter, for almost all modern poets have
made attempts to reconcile positions or to lean on “the traditional symbol...
to enlighten” current practices.^68 We may take the preceding perspectives on
tradition and modernity as a sort of summing up of directions in modern
Arabic poetics, a point that subsequent chapters aspire to address. We need
to remember this early search for innovation to understand the significance of
the whole effort in its prominent posts. Nmzik al-Malm’ikah believed in a
limited metric innovation to cope with new situations and predilections. Her
own poetic career manifests a feminist concern with expression to resist an
overpowering masculine language, which she accused of limiting women’s
POETIC STRATEGIES