PREFACExviithresholds, dedications, exilic tropes, and their specific engagements with
articles of faith, language, ancient poetics, Islamic culture and rule, and pre-
Islamic times, rites, and customs. The book is not concerned therefore with the
history of movements and trends; nor does it focus on regional poetic scenes
and figures. If it makes any territorial claims it does so whenever there is a
crossroad, a threshold, or a meeting ground among texts and voices that
navigate between tradition and modernity. It cares for the poetic in its cultural
complexity as pertaining to issues of selfhood, individuality, community,
religion, ideology, nation, class, and gender. Studied in context, too, are issues
that have been cursorily noticed or neglected, like Shl‘lpoetics, Sufism,
women’s poetry, and expressions of exilic consciousness.
On the other hand, this book brings to this discussion of tradition and
modernity a comparative poetic that makes use of English, Spanish, and
French criticism and poetry as they overtly or covertly proliferate into mod-
ern Arabic poetry. Baudelaire, Lorca, and Eliot, for example, left their marks
on modern poetics in matters of theory and poetic practice. They permeated
texts along with Muslim and Arab Sufis and renowned Arab poets from pre-
Islamic and Islamic times. The religious and the secular find here a meeting
ground, and prophets and martyrs offer historical poignancy and buttress a
revolutionary register that brings poetry closer to popular culture after a
seeming disengagement in the early practices of the Free Verse Movement in
the 1950s. These modernist and postmodernist poetics are decidedly different
from the rhetoric of the “neoclassical” poets.
In sum, the book looks on these trajectories as textual itineraries that
gather enough momentum to enable us to see modern poetry at large in the
context of Arab life and culture. Poetry is no longer a genre that calls only for
formalist investigation, since the present reading looks upon the whole poetic
scene as central to Arabic culture, with its deep rootedness in the past, and
its complex engagement with issues of change, progress, nationhood, exile,
class, gender, race, and language. It is certainly a site where the meeting with
and the revolt against specific markers of other cultures take place. The dia-
logue with Western life and cultures becomes, here, one of the dynamics of
the modern poetic impulse and its subsequent manifestations and fluctua-
tions. Since the late 1940s, Arabic poetry has spoken for an Arab conscience,
as much as it has debated positions and ideologies, nationally and worldwide.