xiiiPREFACE
This book concentrates on the moment of anxiety and tension in Arabic
poetry that occurs whenever poetic identity is in crisis, and whenever poets
feel the urgency and need to engage their strong precursors. In this moment,
both the spatial and the temporal coalesce, especially in a literary tradition as
rich as Arabic. This intersectional space manifests the personal in its cultural
richness. As the personal blends with other voices, it loses its individuality
and gets objectified, especially when poetic voices dramatize modern con-
sciousness. In other words, my argument follows up poets’ personal intima-
tions while tracing the reasons behind their emergence in relation to other
issues of regional, national, and global nature. The poetic and the spatial
often converge, and the selected text may well testify to the old saying of the
Prophet’s companion Ibn ‘Abbms (d. 687), made popular by Ibn Rashlq
(d. 456 h/1065), that “poetry is the register of the Arabs.”^1 Whereas modern
Arabic poetry may fall short of such claims, its range of exchange with other
texts, ancient and modern, Arabic, Asian, and European paradoxically impli-
cates it in both hybridism and specificity. Simply, it belongs to the present as
much as it is indebted to the past. This is the source of its strength and
strangeness, too, as it becomes a locus of a cultural dynamic. In Yuri Lotman’s
words, “the goal of poetry coincides with the goal of culture as a whole. But
poetry realizes this goal specifically, and an understanding of its specific
character is impossible if one ignores its mechanism, its internal structure.”^2
To enable readers to trace and discern poetic manifestations and revisionist
poetics, I have quoted poems and extracts as examples to elucidate the argu-
ment. The overall design of the book is thematic in the sense that its first few
chapters engage with issues and concepts of tradition in modern poetics, and
the responses of poets as participants in identity and cultural formation. Their
address to ancient rituals and classical forebears evolves into poetic strategies,
ranging between identifications and engagements, to dedications and dialogic
negotiations, not only with strong precursors, but also with the reader as
another participant in the making of meaning. The argument gathers momen-
tum as the nexus between modernity and tradition invites a resolution, which
has so much ambivalence that it resists clear-cut categorizations. The outcome