PREFACExivmaterializes, however, into textual homelands and exilic evocations that
constitute a large portion of modern poetry, and deserve, therefore, to be stud-
ied closely in this reading of tradition and modernity trajectories. Stepping
outside immediacy in time and place, the poet as exile re-inscribes into the
present, a store of remembrance from the ancient past and the classical period,
but not necessarily with the ideological and mythical superimpositions of
the 1950s in the Arab world, as a period of great awareness of the mythical
principle as made popular by T. S. Eliot.
Each chapter argues its case in relation to the whole. Chapter 1 is a criti-
cal introduction to familiarize readers with issues and controversies that
receive further study and attention in the rest of the book. It introduces con-
cepts and movements as they pertain to Arabic poetry and poetics. Theory
and poetry work together toward a deconstructive stance. The hegemonic cir-
culation of dry language, stagnant referentiality, and application of the dor-
mant and the backward to enforce and sustain power relations becomes the
target of a revisionist poetics. Poetic lineage and succession become an issue,
and the new poets trace their intellectual and textual lineage to classical or
ancient texts and figures to debate and bypass neoclassical imitativeness.
Chapter 2, “The tradition–modernity nexus in Arabic poetics,” targets the
encounter with modernity and tradition among the literati since the Nah,ah
or the first Arab renaissance in the last part of the nineteenth century. This
encounter was not an easy one, and poetry reveals a great deal about the nature
of the challenge, and the creative response and participation in its making.
Concentrating on specific landmarks, texts and occasions, this chapter revisits
the scene to focus on the 1950s as the second renaissance in the history of Arab
thought and the formation of the post-independence state. Putting the
Romantic yearnings of the earlier generation aside, the emerging poetics was
after a new vision that made use of the mythical, the legendary, the folk epic,
and the street song to accommodate the new temper of the times.
In Chapter 3, I advance a number of modern poetic strategies that relate to
forebears and that have been common among poets since the 1950s. In this and
the following three chapters, such strategies are pursued in sequence. In this
chapter, there is a discussion of “Poetic strategies: thresholds for conformity and
dissent”: The facts behind innovation are variegated, and the effort in this chap-
ter is toward looking at these closely in their interconnectedness. The change
in form no longer deserves discussion as a pure formalist matter, for organic
manifestations are indivisible, and the assumption behind a unitary poetics no
longer holds. In this chapter, there is a mention of the resilience of traditional
forms, and the recurrence of influence from the past, but tradition becomes
more usable and approachable, not as a sacred entity,but as an amalgam of the
credited and the discredited.
Chapter 4, “Poetic dialogization: ancestors in the text,” carries further the
thematic pattern of discussion as set in the preceding chapter. It discusses the
meaning of the dialogic principle in poetry. Drawing attention to the use of