condition at large. It should not be surprising therefore that the same poets
of the second awakening, that is, the Nah,ah after the 1952 revolution in
Egypt, have combined their poetics with a politics of engagement that
accommodates contemporary national and international heroes, heroines,
renowned world poets, and issues of struggle in the three continents. The
poetic record is no longer restricted to a local or national specificity, as there
is a configurational site that brings together many locales and poetics,
ranging from Ezra Pound, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Jalml al-Dln Rnml, to
T. S. Eliot; and from Granada, Samarkand, London, Shiraz, and Rome to
New York. In modern Arabic poetry, discursive space claims and maps out its
registers, markers, and identifications through configurational trajectories.
Non-conformist poeticsPoetic production since the 1940s is of great pertinence to the cultural scene
now, not only because it sheds light on the tensions and concerns that plague
Arab life and culture, but also because it directs attention to the role of poets
and intellectuals in the Arab world. As the competition for the allegiance of
renowned names to this or that regime and platform intensifies among non-
democracies, poets navigate with caution, but find themselves allured at
times by promises of a good and pleasant life that would end the binding con-
tract with a reading public. This contract has a dynamic of its own, based on
attachments to public issues and devotion to the poetic art, but not to cere-
monials of allegiance as perpetuated by court politics. Thriving in difference,
disenchantment, and a search for justice, poetry grows in dissent, and it gains
more popularity and vogue for being so. In Arab modernism, conformity is
not a poetic track.
While tracing and inscribing sites of recollection, engagement, and
dialogue, modern Arabic poetry resurrects Arabic poetics from generaliza-
tions and platitudes. Each intersectional site brings anew a figure or a notion
through a reading that debates other interpretations. The revisionist poetics
appears as dynamically invigorating, for hegemonic poetics, including poet-
ics of allegiance, is not the only poetics worth reading or using as a measure-
ment and the dominating form cannot become the only representational
yardstick to assess a literary scene. The use of modified epistolary mono-
logues, free verse, polyphonic conversational pieces, folk poetry, fanciful and
imaginary sites, and Sufi revelations are among the many facets of modern
Arabic poetry that call for a further reading of the scene, its tradition, and
modernity. Poets in the modernist tradition follow a revisionist approach that
enable them to see through competing discourses, and to look for markers of
revolt, innovation, and change that defy any compartmentalization and cate-
gorical explanation.^93 In theory and practice, the emerging literary scene has
a broad cultural nuance, for poets are no longer concerned with the technical
side of poetry, the one which drew substantial attention in the late 1940s, and
POETIC TRAJECTORIES: CRITICAL INTRODUCTION