pattern, this critique falls into a formalist trap that alienates the craft from
its formative burgeoning.
Normative patterning is a fossilized practice unless it is deliberately parodied
or transposed into a new context for further experimentation. While it carries
the imprint of its own culture, it may share common features with others. The
use of the deserted encampment can be a common legacy of ancient cultures,
and a property shared with the Hellenic tradition, as Suzanne Stetkevych
argues. This argument, based on Gian Biagio Conte’s reading of the Greco-
Latin traditions, broadens the scope of the discussion, and makes it possible to
speak of the Arabic tradition in terms of world culture. Conte explains how
important it was for these ancient traditions to come up with an opening
which was no less empowered than a heading or even a title, a “signature” with
a full “literary identity” that transferred itself to audiences with a full
“emblematic value” (quoted Ibid. 25). The opening acts as perpetuator and
mediator, for the audience’s expectations are both aroused and established as
long as “the opening signals...the relation between a specific composition
and its literary genre” (Ibid.). The quote from the classical scholar has no insin-
uations of influence, for the argument tends to draw attention to this Islamic
poetic outside Eurocentric strictures. The case is more so as these pre-Islamic
poetic openings have an identified stamp, repeatedly drawn with enough
markers to establish a tradition that has been difficult to dislodge without a
counter poetic of equal power. As the examples from the modernity outcome
explain, the prelude establishes a threshold of shared expectations, but its
internal transformations may restore it to the modernity movement as a site of
accommodation between the old and the new.
The elegiac prelude
On the formal level, the elegiac prelude, naslb, motivates the poem through a
recollection of loss, as imaged in the campsite. The opening is therefore a jus-
tification and perpetuation that leads into other parts, which, in Jaroslav
Stetkevych’s monumental reading of this mode, operates in a fashion that
invites comparison with the oration, and, for that matter, with Greek poetics of
oratory, that is, exordium, narration, argumentation, and conclusion.^8 The
comparison is worth pursuing, for the opening catered to a mode, a temper and
a tradition whereby the poet accepted the role of the oracle, fitting hence into
the “oracular” as signified by the abandoned campsite. Suzanne P. Stetkevych
carries this further by drawing on the classical scholar Gregory Nagy in his
assessment of the mythicized poet in the Panhellenistic tradition whereby
the ancient poet’s identity was appropriated by “myth-making structure.”^9 This
application is valid as long as it eludes the question of authenticity and makes
allowance for issues of orality. The case is more complicated, however, whenever
the ancient concordance creates its genealogies and modes of succession. The
aylmlor ruined abodes assume not only the stamp of customary practice in
CONCLUSION: DEVIATIONAL AND REVERSAL POETICS