enforces the unity of the poem to some extent, while its resonance plays at
times on the verbal expectations of the learned audiences. Meters usually suit
the purpose and the intended musical pace of each theme. Hence the names
given to those meters indicate movement, length, time, and, also, intention.
Like any long-time practice, the qaxldahhas grown into a binding form, not
only in its meters, but also in its dominant structural patterns of the erotic
prelude, the journey, and the panegyric in its varieties.^4 The structure gave way
to many innovations between the eighth and eleventh centuries that betrayed
dissatisfaction not only with the erotic prelude and its obsolete recollections of
desert life, but mainly with ongoing tendencies to imitate the ancients and
to apply worn out imagery to a different life and culture. Bashshmr Ibn Burd
(d. 783), AbnNuwms (d. 815), Muslim Ibn al-Walld (d. 823), AbnTammmm
(d. 845), al-Mutanabbl(d. 965), and Abnal-cAlm’ al-Macarrl(d. 1057) were,
respectively, among the pioneers in this innovative enterprise, whereas
pre-Islamic poets like Imru’ al-Qays have become the strong precursors and
forebears in terms of eloquence, spontaneity of experience, and daring involve-
ment in life. Their names recur among the modernists as household words, and
their poetry and life are drawn upon in assemblies and speeches. With such
names in the back of their minds, modernists can hardly forfeit a sense of
cultural or even genealogical succession.
Duly posited as such even in the latest debates on the role of poetry in
Arabic culture, the qaxldahremains central to discussions for reasons that
relate to its historicity and place in Arabic culture. The growing critical
corpus that focuses on its history and cultural role assumes great significance
in view of the changing consciousness, for ancient poetics still operates on
this consciousness and formation of temperaments. No matter how hard the
modernist and postmodernist critique attempts to sunder its bonds from
early criticism and poetry, its inner search for a unified vision against banal-
ity, disintegration, and fragmentation implicates it in the interwoven work-
ings of historicity whereby memory operates in a very intricate manner.
In Walter Benjamin’s articulate deviations from Marxism, “Memory forges
the chain of tradition that passes events on from generation to generation.”^5
The workings of poetic consciousness reclaim images and details from the
past to endow life with mystery, argues Hugo Friedrich. This amounts to no
less than the “... attempt of the modern soul, trapped in a technologized,
imperialistic, commercial era, to preserve its own freedom.”^6 This contention
applies with equal force to Arabic poetics. To operate on the past entails
redefining the present as well, for the modernist poet has to create a new
poetic selfhood beyond traditional categorizations of periods and people.
We may cite, as an example, the Moroccan poet Mu.ammad Bennls’
(b. 1948) self-styled “lineage to the pre-Islamic poet Imru’ al-Qays.”
He is the ‘Arabiyyah, Arabic language, in a canticle state, face to face
with absence-death, as he halts to weep over a deserted campsite,POETIC TRAJECTORIES: CRITICAL INTRODUCTION