songs are available, however, to rescue poetry from self-elegizing. Ma.mnd
Darwlsh sees in Lorca his vocation as a poet, not for the nature of the precur-
sor’s experience, but rather for the notion of poetry as song. Ma.mnd Darwlsh
is not sanguine about the trend to intellectualize poetry, nor is he pleased
with the tendency to treat the poem as a written form, for Lorca “was chant-
ing. He said poetry needs a transmitter, a living human soul, whether a singer
or reciter/chanter. Lorca used to test both the appeal to the taste and the poem
itself in recitation. He was in search for the direct connection between the sound
and the heart, for poetry is not a visual art. There must be an ear, a rhythm.”^46
Ma.mnd Darwlsh’s note is not a passing one, for he looks upon music as the
ultimate poetic, free to sail into the unbounded and the unrestrained.^47
The case is not the same with dedications to other poets, whether precursors
or contemporaries. Although the self is occasionally rebuked for negligence,
releasing the dedicatee, in the manner of al->aklm’s Mu.sin, from accountabil-
ity and responsibility for current mishaps, it is usual to come across a variety of
dedicatory patterns. Foremost among these is the poetry of repression. In this
poetry, the dead poet, the precursor, is held at bay, maneuvered and challenged
in the very terrains of his or her poems. Especially when the dead were once con-
temporaries, dedications to them are offered as gifts while fighting back their
heavy textual engagement with their dedicatee. They take from the dedicatee
first before embarking on restitution. Oscillating between recognition and
denial, these dedications evolve as sites of tension. In Jacques Derrida’s words:
Repression does not destroy or annul anything; it keeps by displacing.
Its operation is systematic or topological; it always consists of keep-
ing by exchanging places. And, by keeping the meaning of the gift,
repression annuls it in symbolic recognition. However unconscious
this recognition may be, it is effective and can be verified in no
better fashion than by its effects or by the symptoms it yields
up...fordecoding.^48With this recognition of presence in the act of erasure or repression, the poem
becomes a potential space of rift and collision.
Elegy, dedication, and repression
Especially in al-Baymtl’s elegies, there is great repression that takes a number
of directions. More than any other contemporary poet, al-Baymtlwas on the
lookout for the new, fighting back in himself many ghosts of competing
energy and caliber. Outlasting “most of his blocking agents,”^49 al-Baymtl
felt free to develop an enormous corpus of dedications, apostrophes, and
contrafactions that set him in the main growing trends, from modernism to
postmodernism, in Arabic poetry. Justifying poetic absorption as natural, he
looks upon poetic interaction as central to the very mission of poetry. In his
DEDICATIONS AS POETIC INTERSECTIONS