universe and the obsession of people,” Adnnls uses him as the locus for self
and tradition, a threshold and material for revisionist poetics. In this poetics,
he retains the concept of poetry as the archive of Arab life and culture, as
suggested by Ibn ‘Abbms (d. 687), endorsed by Ibn Qutaybah (d. 889) and
made popular by Ibn Rashlq (d. 1064), and reiterated by many thereafter, but
it is an archive that undergoes revision through the technique of bookkeeping,
the “loose-leaf system” of Ezra Pound. The text and the margins take on the
argumentation of prose while sustaining the tropes of poetry. The questions
of continuity and discontinuity are no longer pertinent, as the effort goes
beyond simplifications of sequentiality and origination. Identification is out
of the question, since the text and its margins exercise a reapplication of the
emerging consciousness to history and literature as controversial narratives.
The author pursues interrogation, and his schema resists submission and
conformity to pre-constituted models. Dichotomous positions signify plurality
and multivoicing. In the process, poetry is no longer the same, nor is prose,
for the entanglement enforces loss, gain, and exchange. Nevertheless, it
remains to be said that poetry in this far-reaching experimentation may need
a spirited effort to regain the beauties of language while aspiring to retrieve
a past tradition for new generations of readers whose familiarity with the
internet may overwhelm their meager grounding in tradition. The resolve to
apply multiple discursive and poetic strategies requires recognition of present
complexity and challenge, since the poet has to counteract competing forms
of discourse in order to sustain a presence.
POETIC STRATEGIES