Just How New is “New” Arab Poetry
A few months back, I was discussing my idea of launching a literary magazine in Arabic in Gaza. When I outlined the genres the magazine would present, I naturally included free verse on the list. All of a sudden, Tamer, one of my four consultants, burst out laughing. He then mocked free verse and those who wrote in it. Generalizing, Tamer said that those who use free verse are ignorant of the Arabic language, its rules and vocabulary. He said, “They write nonsense.” He added that if there really were such a thing as “free verse”, then there also had to be “slave verse.”
I argued that form matters less than content — at least for the purpose of my proposed magazine. I told him about Mahmoud Darwish, one of the most important free verse poets in any language, and how he had served the cause through his poetry. Surprisingly, Tamer launched an ad hominem attack on Darwish, criticizing not only his poetry but also the man himself. I cut the conversation short.
My younger brother, Hamza, a prominent scholar of Arabic grammar, and also participant in that virtual meeting, told me later why the other person hated free verse and its users. It was partly envy, as free verse poets have dominated the literary world at the expense of more traditional prosodists like Tamer.
It is an old argument. In the late 1950s the renowned Egyptian polymath Abbas al-Aqqad (1889-1964) was heading the poetry contest committee at the Damascus Poetry Festival where the young Ahmed Abd al-Mu‘ti Hijazi (1935- ) and Salah Abdel-Sabour (1931-1981) were set to represent Egypt. On learning that the two poets were about to ascend the stage to read their poems, al-Aqqad threatened to resign from the committee, saying their “poems” should be referred to the prose committee. The two young poets were forced to withdraw.
The poems by the two poets were written in the style of the “new poetry” which, at the time, was called shi’r al-taf’ila. A variation on classical Arabic metrics, it has three major characteristic features: it does not use consistent rhyme, the number of feet in every line can vary, and more than one meter can be deployed in the same poem.
Arabic Poetry has long been defined as a “metrical, rhymed utterance pointing to a meaning,” something that was not challenged for a long, long time. In Arabic, there are 16 metrical forms. While scansion in English poetry is based on stressed/unstressed syllables, in Arabic poetry scansion is based on syllables classified as either "long" or "short." A line in a typical, classical Arabic poem shows two halves (hemistiches) in which the end rhyme of the second half rhymes through the whole poem. The poem also relies on one single metrics throughout.
A poem that observes a strict meter but does away with rhyme is called shi’r morsal and is the equivalent of blank verse in English. A piece that retains the rhyme without the meter is called saj’, or rhymed prose, and is also common in the Arabic literary tradition. This form appears frequently in most chapters in the Holy Quran and in some prophetic utterances.
In classical Arabic poetry every meter is called bahr, or “sea,” suggesting that, like the ocean itself, it contains other formal possibilities with in it. The sixteen bahrs are divided into two types: mixed/compound and unmixed (or clear/simple.) A line in a mixed bahr has more than one foot-form in a line. This variation of feet is strictly and consistently repeated throughout the whole poem. However, a line in an unmixed bahr is made up of one single foot that is repeated equally in both hemistiches and throughout the poem. There are 9 mixed bahrs and 7 clear ones.
Taf’ila, the no-longer-so- “New Poetry,” deploys unmixed bahrs. The pioneer of taf’ila may well have been the Iraqi poet Nazik al-Malaika (1923-2007). Her poem “Cholera” broke new ground when it appeared in a Lebanese magazine called al-Oruba in December 1947 although a few weeks after “Cholera” was published, another noted Iraqi poet, Bader Shakir al-Sayyab (1926-1964), published his poem “Was It about Love?” Al-Sayyab claimed that his poem was written a long time before its publication.
For a decade beginning in 1957, the Lebanese literary journal Shi’r promoted the modernist movement in the Arab world. One celebrated poet and critic, Adonis (1930- ), theorized about the new poetry, both al-taf’ila and prose poetry, in some of his books and many lectures and essays. “[Shi’r’s] editors sought to generate a profound change in the role and form of Arabic poetry as a tool to support a significant leap forward in the Arab thinking and writing… [It played an important role] in enabling a new kind of secular and personal poetics, including that of prose-poetry and vision poems,” literary critic Basilius Bawardi emphasizes.
The magazine also promoted such distinguished writers as Ounsi el-Hajj (1937-2014), who was the first to publish a book of prose poetry in the Arab world, and Saadi Yousef (1934- ) who continues writing today and has also composed more than 30 books of taf’ila poetry.
Poetry that observes neither meter nor rhyme is called prose poetry. And this is where the conflict gets particularly heated. Prose poetry is an obvious oxymoron, after all. Most Arab critics and poets reject the classification, preferring to label such works “artistic texts” or “prose texts” or “artistic prose.” Most literary critics remain unable to conceive of poetry without meter and rhyme. However, for modernist poets, both al-taf’ila and prose poetry remain viable alternatives.
It is noteworthy that while al-Aqqad suppressed the two young advocates of the new poetry back in the fifties, he himself earlier launched a fierce attack against the famous neoclassicist poet Ahmad Shawqi (1870-1932) for articulating conservative themes in his verse. Along with two other poets, al-Aqqad established Al-Diwan School of poetry, which called for reforms focusing not on prosody but on subject matter. Al-Aqqad called for a poetry written in everyday language and describing ordinary life. In some ways his aesthetic echoed Wordsworth’s call in The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads a century earlier for a poetry of the quotidian, choosing “incidents and situations from common life” conveyed in language “really used by men.”
Both al-Malaika and Hijazi also rejected poetry that dispenses with meter entirely. Prose poets meanwhile accused al-Malaika and Hijazi of hypocrisy. After all, they themselves had advocated a certain radical reorientation for Arabic verse.
While dispensing with regular meter, a “prose poem” instead offers the reader inventive imagery based on the poet’s personal experience: the length of a line is determined by the poem’s internal logic, by feelings and thoughts of the poet, not by a set of prosodical rules.
I was once asked why I write poetry in English. One reason is that most of my poet friends who write in Arabic refuse to call what I write in Arabic “poetry.” And so I go my own way.
Writing more than a thousand years ago, Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (923–1023 A.D.) had this to say on the matter: “The best of speech is prose that feels like poetry, and poetry that feels like prose.” Here he proved himself the legitimate precursor to modernist poetics in Arabic. The rest of us are still catching up.
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, fiction writer, and essayist from Gaza. He is the founder of the Edward Said Public Library, and in 2019-2020 was a visiting poet and scholar at Harvard University. He gave talks and poetry readings at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, the University of Arizona (w/ Noam Chomsky), and the American Library Association conference. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Nation, Solstice, Arrowsmith, Progressive Librarian Guild, among others. Mosab is the author of Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, forthcoming from City Lights Books in April 2022.