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POETIC STRATEGIES
Thresholds for conformity and dissent
Who will buy the history of my forefathers for a day of freedom?
(Ma.mud Darwlsh, Splinters of Bone, 1974, p. 9)One way of addressing the modernity–tradition nexus is to assess representative
poetics against the poetic practice itself, its reliance on or fusion into textual
terrain, including the narrative and the dramatic, and its exchange with
precursors. In addition, writers have shown a tendency since the 1950s to
dedicate poems to predecessors and contemporaries. The latter tendency was
strong, too, among the post-revivalists, during 1930–1990. Especially among
the qaxldahpoets, dedications tend to commend, embed, or improve upon the
dedicatee. Many reasons may stand behind the phenomenon, as texts fuse into
each other, and each poet asserts a lineage, while fighting for a space of his or
her own. Among prominent figures, the Iraqi Mu.ammad Mahdlal-Jawmhirl
(d. 1997) offers a good example of intertextual engagements. He addressed the
Iraqi poets al-Ruxmfl(d. 1945), al-Zahmwl(d. 1936), and others in more than
one poem each. In distinguishing himself from his immediate forebears, the
poet is conscious of the effort to present a unique figure, textually advanced to
the readers as a presence that overshadows or surpasses the rest. In Bloom’s
terms, “poets differentiate themselves into strength by troping or turning
from the presence of other poets,” but the attempt to subsume or ignore a
precursor is a sign of anxiety, nevertheless.^1 On the other hand, poets from
the young generation may prove more subversive, as they battle an estab-
lished form, whose “love of language was heady, ecstatic,” for “the poets carried
on with the task of reviving words, phrases, and ideas that had remained
dormant during five or six centuries of intellectual stagnation,” writes the
Palestinian-Iraqi novelist, poet, and critic JabrmIbrmhlm Jabrm(d. 1994).^2
The neoclassical qaxldah:Al-Jawmhirl
The case may stand out more emphatically when set against the established
neoclassical qaxldah practice as represented throughout by Mu.ammad