sword, the paper and the pen.”^51 Descendants are attracted to such engage-
ments with articles of traditional thought, and valorizations of reason and the
role of poetry, its changing vocation, and its innovative becoming. They find
in these two precursors a line of thought that deviates from the circumscribed
and the fixed, but also opens up the whole poetic domain for further reviewing.
From them revisionism emanates as a legitimized strategy.
There are traces of transgression and revolt in the forebears’ poetry, and the
successors have noticed these. To them, the poem is no longer a container,
a periodic conventional form, or a concord of harmonious applications, with
a superimposed order. It engages personal experience, and is free therefore
from imitative rhetoric. The very image of change that takes so many forms
and manifestations in the poetry of both fascinates their descendants. Al-Baymtl,
for example, compares himself as a rover and exile to al-Mutanabblwho is
“restless as if riding the wind.”^52 To M a.mnd Darwlsh, the recollection of
al-Mutanabbl’s flight from the court of Sayf al-Dawlah to his new patron
Kmfnr, from Aleppo to Egypt, speaks to a personal poetic desire for the good,
free, and independent life that allows a lyrical and energized flow of emotion.
In “Ri.lat al-MutanabblilmMixr” (1984, Al-Mutanabbl’s journey to Egypt),
there is a celebration of poetry and the poet, for “my homeland is my new
poem” repeats the speaker. The exchange between the two is not easy, and he
asks if it is true that his homeland is his new poem. There is nowhere to go,
and Syria became his exile.^53 The poet identifies with the precursor through
as process of recognition. “I gaze upon al-Mutanabbi / journeying from
Tiberias to Egypt / on a horse of song.”^54 Images act as in a “radiant vortex,”
in Pound’s terms, ceaselessly involved in the act of becoming, and in dynamic
acceleration of discord and difference.^55 The ramifications assume great com-
plexity as modern Arab poets get more involved in their readings of heritage.
Both precursors were very well-versed in tradition, in its many manifesta-
tions. Both were known to have used allusions, borrowings, and quotations,
but there is no implication that they were after these strategies to attain the
completeness or the closure of the periodic form. No matter how many books
were written on al-Mutanabbl’s plagiarisms, for instance, other books argued
otherwise. His poetry defies allegations of subordination to precursors. Time
itself is no longer the actor or the agent of change, for it is relegated to the
role of the subservient, as it is “a rhapsody of my necklaces—whenever I com-
pose a poem, time becomes a reciter.”^56 In another translation, “Time itself is
a reciter of my odes; / I compose a poem, then time recites it.”^57 The speaker
decenters tradition, and magnifies the role of poetry as acting on time, a
position that the self-secluded al-Macarrlnever claims. “If the youth blames
life in his days, what has he to say if that youth passes?” However, he takes
issue with people who blame him for other things. “My inequities are
deemed many for some people, but I have no inequity other than grandeur
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS