Both come from the Muslim West. Both have a daring experience, that Ibn
‘Arablpours out his life in the qaxidah, “daringly, and without remorse”
(Ibid.). The implications of this personal presence are of great significance to
the disciple, the belated poet, as the precursor sets the tone for a unique expe-
rience, free from servility to norms. This uniqueness as divergence and
freedom takes place, in Pratt’s words, whether the persona “breaks any of
the rules to which his utterance is subject.”^67 The personal in Ibn ‘Arabl’s
poetry, for instance, defied expectations and raised objections to his seeming
infatuations.
Like Adnnls before him, Mu.ammad Bennls finds AbnTammmm no less
effective than Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Malarmé, and Arthur Rimbaud,
in drawing his attention to the need to dig deep into the meaning of words.
That was during the formative years 1965–1968 (Ibid. 16). While specifying
affiliations, the poet is keen on establishing a poetic lineage whose markers
negate the historical to move towards constants that are spatial and poetical.
Although Bennls is not different in the emphasis on the personal from
other poets since the 1950s, his retention of this spirit is specifically couched
in terms of freedom from shackles and strictures, “... the personal which is
free from any conditionality” (Ibid. 10). The poets whom he read voluntarily
bridge time and space to include from the twentieth century the Tunisian
al-Shmbbl(d. 1934), Gibrmn Khalll Gibrmn and the modernists, and from the
classical al-Mutanabbl, and Abnal-cAlm’ al-Macarrl.
In these dlwmnsI found the blessing which I had missed. It was an
individual dialogue between these poets and me. What I read there
was the personal, whether real or imaginary, the personal which nobody
can see: a solitary world, one of pain, doubt and beauty, without
heaven or hell, with no certainty or obligation.
(Ibid. 11)The meeting ground subsumes time and historicity, for what the dialogue
imparts is the recognition of “... the language, the image, the suggestiveness,
the structure, the interaction, and the symmetry.” Through this engagement,
“... there runs in me the stunning ringing of a human language, to the extent
that the poetic manifests itself par excellence in the language” (Ibid.). While
the personal specifies the individuality of experience, the retention of the
perennial universalizes its poetic.
This perspective entails a vertical view of time, for it resists “any linear
historicity” (Ibid. 10), and it also entails a re-reading of history that may, in
the case of his poem “Mkhir Mudhakkirmt al-Mu‘tamid Ibn ‘Abbmd” (The Last
Memoirs of al-Mu‘tamid Ibn ‘Abbmd) challenge “the Moroccan national cultural
discourse that [for instance] sympathizes with [Almoravid] Ynsuf Ibn
Tmshfln while opposing and criticizing the poet al-Mu‘tamid Ibn ‘Abbmd.”^68
In this case, the contemporary poet establishes a poetic of affiliation that
POETIC TRAJECTORIES: CRITICAL INTRODUCTION