from a distance, camouflaging its movement behind tree branches, the poet
still thinks in terms of vocational commitment and role enhanced by excep-
tional prophetic powers. While calling on her to speak up and break silence,
the poet understands his position as a brigand who is marginalized for a pur-
pose. “I, who never ate mutton, / Never had power, / was of no consequence,”
he says, “Banished from the councils of the elders, / Now invited to die/
though not to parley with the men!”^11 Years later, some major poets still
speak of an active role to be played, an engagement even larger than poetry
writing and recitation, to critique a whole life and culture. The Palestinian
poet Ma.mnd Darwlsh (b. 1942), for one, argues after the siege of Beirut,
August 1982, “... if it becomes necessary for intellectuals to turn into
snipers, then let them snipe at their old concepts, their old questions, and
their old ethics.”^12 The call to involve intellectual life in active discussion and
change addresses poetry, too, and criticizes positions and ways of writing.
Ma.mnd Darwlsh’s underlying critique targets an essentialist and absolutist
rhetoric that is usually invoked or debated in the discussions of modernity
and tradition.
Continuities and discontinuitiesIt is pertinent to explain my use of tradition and modernity in terms coherent
to readers at large. Also, it is worthwhile to look at this issue in terms of
modernist theories worldwide, as Arab poets at the present time are no less
open to other cultures than their predecessors between the ninth and twelfth
centuries. In Arabic, the past still holds significance, not only because it
survives as language, and in accounts, symbols and values, but also because it
acts through these on the present. Its registers may be recalled, invested,
manipulated, and validated according to the rising occasion or need.
“Tradition,” argues Anthony Giddens, “is not wholly static, because it has
to be reinvested by each new generation as it takes over its cultural inheri-
tance from those preceding it.”^13 In matters of survival, he adds, “Tradition
does not so much resist change as pertain to a context in which there are a
few separated temporal and spatial markers of which change can have any
meaningful form.”^14
The configurational nature of the new, and its confluence of trends, tends
to supplant petrified forms. Yet, this modernist tendency to manipulate
stylistic potentialities in hybrid genres including letters, memoirs, songs,
reportage, and their like, can elude both progressive and regressive demarca-
tions. Art forms meet needs and demands, but they are not strictly in keep-
ing with material or social growth. R. Jakobson argues, “Nothing is more
erroneous than the widely held opinion that the relation between modern
poetry and medieval poetry is the same as between the machine-gun and the
bow.”^15 By debating such assumptions, Jakobson does not negate the aging
POETIC TRAJECTORIES: CRITICAL INTRODUCTION