KHAL AND HAWI 241which the present Oxford Professor of Poetry has recently complained in his
Inaugural lecture, 'Alternative Poetry' (printed in Encounter, June 1974).
Khal and Hawi
Of the major figures connected at some time or other with Shi'r magazine only
three will be briefly discussed here: the Lebanese Yusuf al-Khal, KhalilHawi
and the Iraqi Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, none of whom is as extreme in his
approach to the language of poetry as Adunis has become, although ironically
enough at the start of the Shi'r venture Yusuf al-Khal was considered by the
most enthusiastic and sympathetic critic of New Poetry to be 'the most
extremist of the innovators because he is the one whose aims were clearest'.^55
Yusuf al-Khal (b.1917), a graduate of the American University of Beirut,
where he studied philosophy and English, left Beirut for America in 1948 to
work first in New York for UNO, then in his own export business, while at the
same time editing the Arabic Mahjari paper al-Huda, which because of Khal's
Protestant religion was, according to him, opposed by the Maronites and
strongly criticized by Abu Madi in al-Samir. After a spell in Libya on a
United Nations mission Khal returned to Beirut, where he worked for a very
brief period in journalism, then as a research assistant at the American
University. It was then that the project of Shi'r was conceived. He gathered a
number of young people around him and was joined by Adunis when the lat-
ter heard about the project. The magazine was set up in 1957 and continued
to appear until 1964, and was resuscitated (for a relatively short time) in
- It was the rallying ground for most of the avant-garde poets in the
Arab world (for instance, the first volume published Khalil Hawi's well-
known poem 'River of Ashes'), and played a role in the development of
Arabic poetry similar to that of Abu Shadi's Apollo during the 1930s, a role
shared by the other great Beirut magazine, Suhail Idris's al-Adab. In 1961 he
set up another literary magazine, Adah, which had to close down two years
later. Concurrently with editing Shi'r, Khal ran a publishing firm which
brought out a large number of volumes of verse by the most experimental of
Arab poets and which, not surprisingly perhaps, eventually went bankrupt.
He also owned a modern art gallery (Gallery One) in which for many years he
and other avant-garde poets and writers had their lively weekly meetings.
The poets included Unsi al-Hajj, Shauqi Abi-Shaqra, Fu'ad Rifqa, 'Isam
Mahfuz and Taufiq Sayigh, men of widely varying talents, but their sessions
contributed towards the lively literary atmosphere of Beirut during the 1950s
and 1960s.
Khal began as a follower of Sa'id' Aql who was known to be the leading
symbolist poet in Lebanon. His first two volumes. Liberty (1945) and Herodia