Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition

an entity that challenges coercion but tries to penetrate deep inside, as this is
its space of influence and challenge. As the audience is the speaker’s target,
the poem has to reach its addressee:

You who fabricate reasons, you who hear me

Don’t leave its letters at the door

Standing and waiting cursed by the doorkeeper.

(Ibid. 1: 448–49)

Long familiarity with polemical discourse keeps al-Baymtl’s intentions
glaringly visible. However, to forestall any confusion of his virgin language
with Tammnzlarticulations, as advanced by his contemporaries, he reiterates
that spontaneity is there in the unpremeditated feelings, joys, cries, and
enunciations of people who are the very material and stuff of his text. If there
is a moment that stands between spontaneity and poetic flow, he finds solace
in Lorca, for he also asks the woodcutter to take him back to the womb. In
“Song of the Barren Tree,” Lorca asks: “Woodcutter/ Cut my shadow
from me. / Free me from the torment/ of seeing myself without fruit.”^105 In
“al-Mawt wa-al-qindll” (Death and the Lamp), from the collection Qamar
Shlrmz(Shiraz’s Moon 1975), the Iraqi poet repeats:

Your cries were the axe of the woodcutter penetrating deep into the

virgin forests of language: a legendary king ruling a subconscious

Kingdom and pagan regions where there exist music, black magic

sex, revolution and death...^106

To bring “death” and “lamp” together in a title is not innocent. Al-Baymtl
insists on reminding his readers of the subtext of his early poetry, especially that
intersection of past and present, memory and release, as argued in “Al-Jur.”
(The Wound). Facing up to the challenge of banishment and its aftermath, he
implicitly justifies his early displacement of memory as a step toward new
transfigurations. Achieving this means freedom from possessions, a position
that Hikmet has already taken. As if taking after al-Mutanabblwho says in one
poem that he has neither steeds nor money to present to the patron, invoking
poetry to help him out in situations where a gift is the fashion, both specify
steeds at the top of their list of lack. Hikmet says in “About my poetry”:

I have no silver-saddled horse to ride,

no inheritance to live on,

neither riches nor real estate

a pot of honey is all I own.^107

The whole idea is that there is a creative mind, well recognized even by oppo-
nents. To the latter’s chagrin, poets have nothing to lose, as long as they are

ENVISIONING EXILE