PREFACExvthe conversational poem, the epistolary form, the song, and the embedded
text, the argument in this chapter draws attention to the transgeneric
dimension in the modernist movement, and shows the power of the text in
enlisting the reader’s response. It invites a better understanding of poetry in
its intersectional stance between ancient and modern poetics.
Chapter 5, “Dedications as poetic intersections,” focuses on another poetic
strategy, dedicatory and prefatory matter, which is unduly neglected in
criticism of poetry. It looks upon paratextual devices, dedicatory pre-texts,
prologues and the like as functional poetics with great density and power.
They are rich with exchange, and their recurrence in modern poetics demon-
strates how the new poet looks upon ancestors and contemporaries in terms
of a textual lineage that invigorates the new poem and makes it an active
space that gathers into focus the old and the new. The emergent textual space
is one of synthetic engagement and dialogue.
Chapter 6, “Envisioning exile,” draws attention to an accumulating exilic
poetics as embodying the exile, the outcast, the vagrant, and the rover, or “the
sufferer of modernity,” to use Hugo Friedrich.^3 This theorization carries great
weight in this discussion of modernity and tradition not only because of the
underlying Islamic or ancient subtext, but also because this is the usual
invigorating poetics of modernity and its reliance on remembrance to dispel
the encroaching sense of loss. “Exile is places and times which transform their
victims,” writes Ma.mnd Darwlsh in his Dhmkirah lil-nisymn,^4 and the mod-
ernist spirit draws on remembrance to resist oblivion and annihilation. The
chapter consists of two parts: the first, “Exilic evocations,” surveys and stud-
ies poetic negotiations with strangers, exiles, and aliens from the past, along
with modern exiles like Nazim Hikmet, Lorca, and Alberti. It provides more
ground work to study exile in Arabic and other traditions. The emerging
text, argues this chapter, is one of anxiety that gathers poetic momentum
whenever the poet draws on an ancient legacy to fathom a present moment of
rupture. It should not be surprising that this concordance of remembrance
turns into an inventory of traces to counterbalance the material loss of home-
lands. Many examples manifest this tension, and poems by Ma.mnd Darwlsh
and the Iraqi Muzaffar al-Nawwmb (b. 1934), the Iraqi Sa‘dlYnsuf (b. 1934),
and many others demonstrate as much. This part proposes an exilic poetics in
preparation for other examples.
The second part of Chapter 6, “Exilic trajectories: textual homelands,”
cites for discussion on selected poems from among a large number of poets,
covering most of the Arab scene. There is more on the idea of textual home-
lands, the evolution of the poem as a displacing topos. The poem as home is
a willful construct that exerts remembrance to build an imaginary relocation.
Although many poets fall within this category, I find the Iraqi poet ‘Abd
al-Wahhmb al-Baymtl(d. 1999) the most representative, not only in providing
an intricate, well-developed poetics of exile, but also in investing ancient rit-
uals, classical figures, and symbols with new meanings that alleviate the stark