The sea is coming to wash the cities
To sweep the masks that are numbered
According to the rites of the marketplace
(The bowing, the creeping, and the fear.)The sea evolves as a trope for a new poetics of rejuvenation and change.
The sea is coming with the verses of the
pregnant stones:
Action is the word and Refusal of the old.
The sea is coming.^91Imagery derives its indices from fertile myths, with the sea as the encom-
passing image of enforced change. The Biblical deluge can sweep away
corruption, negligence, and commercialism. In its juxtapositions and recre-
ations of images of the boundless, the poem invites the scenic devices of
traditional poetry to represent a sense of the vast and the boundless that is
also correlative of freedom. In other words, the poem manipulates a poetics
of subversion that gains steadily in impetus within a context of cultural
negotiation, as attested to by publications and conferences in the 1950s
and 1960s.
Which tradition in the Rome conference (1961)?
As poems of identification, counter-identification, and disidentification
multiply, we may need to read through their background, for consciousness
operates on needs and outcomes, as much as it derives from them. Socio-
political concerns as well as visionary impositions constitute a cultural aware-
ness in which poets participate with a sense of commitment and passion.
Although agenda and faiths have varied since the 1950s, references to them
early on in that period took the modernity–tradition nexus as a starting point
in relation to issues of background ethics and morality. The effort to justify
poetic recreations of present concerns and expectations drove major voices to
develop a theoretical framework, whereby they could navigate between the
past and the present, especially in matters of innovation, change, and their
bearing on present life and literature. The Rome Conference of 1961 was
an important historical moment as far as these issues relate to the modernity/
tradition dialectic. Citing AbnTammmm’s (804–845) innovatory stance as
both an exemplary appropriation of ancient poetics and a challenge to servile
imitation, poets like cAllA.mad Sacld (Adnnls) came up with a modernist
poetics of some complexity and richness. To justify a position, to criticize
social and political evils, or to vie for poetic freedom, many poets, like him,
made use of dedications or recollections of ancestors. Poetic strategies, including
masks and personae, multiplied along with paratextual reference and historical
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS