PREFACExviscenes of modernity. While I have been putting a lot of emphasis on Adnnls as
a theorist for the poetic scene, on the Iraqi Badr Shmkir al-Sayymb (d. 1964) as
the unrivaled lyricist, and on Darwlsh as a subtle farer between tradition and
modernity, and exile as identity, I have devoted more analysis to ‘Abd
al-Wahhmb al-Baymtl’s poetry for a number of reasons. His use of Arab tradi-
tion and his raids on other cultures are wide ranging and very stimulating.
His experimentation with form has no limits, enabling us therefore to see the
rest of the scene succinctly.
Chapter 7, “The edge of recognition and rejection: why T. S. Eliot?,” looks
at the other side of textual relocation in modern Arabic poetry among poets
of great presence, such as Eliot. Their appeal to a poet like al-Baymtlis ana-
lyzed in terms of exile, dislocation, disenchantment, and commitment, too.
This Iraqi poet is selected to balance the premise that the Iraqi al-Sayymb is
the modern Arab poet most affected by Eliot’s far-reaching impact. My analy-
sis works in textual and contextual terms to demonstrate the dynamics of this
impact. The Iraqi poet is not imitative, nor is he complacent. There is a poet-
ics of selection and rejection that draws attention to the use and misuse of the
poetry and career of the European–American precursor within the dialectic of
modernity and tradition to which Eliot made recognizable contributions.
These lead to a culminating review of the outcome of this encounter
between ancients and moderns, Arabs, Europeans, Latin Americans, and
Asians. The concluding Chapter 8, “Deviational and reversal poetics,”
attempts to read these in terms of the rise and fall of poetics, modes, and gen-
res. In Arab tradition, a “poetics of allegiance” was the most conspicuous in
classical poetry, as Suzanne Stetkevych argues in a number of books and arti-
cles. Presently, we witness not only a questioning of this poetics, but also an
ironic reading of its means and methods. There is also a mediatory poetics
that lives side by side with a consistent effort to revoke the poetics of alle-
giance. The effort is in pace with dissent and innovation and deserves to be
seen in context, too.
Hence, the rationale behind this book is many-sided. Primarily it plans to
meet the demands of the field for a comprehensive reading of modern Arabic
poetry in its cultural context, and its configurational sites and trajectories of
modernity and tradition, whereby convergence, friction, and difference gener-
ate acute tensions. These sites are of great significance to any study of Arabic
culture, as poets revisit tradition and the past in a manner that recalls and
debates the classical alternative use of such spatial images as maqxad, maslak,
and sabll, or destination, track, and path, along with verbs and nouns of
achievement like yajtam‘ and majma‘, which are also indicative of intentions,
emulations, assemblies, methods, and ways of argumentation and writing, and
geographic routes.^5 No wonder the focus of trajectories in this book is the
qaxldah, the traditional Arabic Ode, which signifies destination and intention,
too, as its triliteralroot, and dominant tripartite division indicate. This study
follows up these images, their traces in the modernist spatial poetics, with its