Commentaries - March 2019

Poets of the twenty-first century: 'moving out' of Arabic

Golan Haji and Samir Abu Hawwash
Golan Haji and Samir Abu Hawwash
Because this is the last installment in this commentary series, I allowed myself to exceed the word limit to which I held myself in earlier posts. I have shed light on stations in the Arabic prose poem project. Although the imagined thread I’ve been tracing doesn’t end here, this is where I will stop tracing it for now. Poets of earlier phases were more aware of themselves as writing against the grain of Arabic poetry in general and the earlier Arabic modernists in particular. The poets of the later phases do not have to make the same effort to breaking away.

Language detained by saying

A note on Jordan Scott's 'Clearance Process' (2016)

In 2013, as part of the North of Invention conference (organized by Sarah Dowling and Charles Bernstein), poet Jordan Scott gave a presentation entitled “The State of Talk: Notes towards Speech Dysfluencies and State Interrogation Procedures and Techniques.” To much acclaim, Scott discusses the “lateral step” that he takes from his book Blert (2008) to consider “expanded

Poets of the nineties: poetry against poetry

From left to right: ʿImad Abu Salih, Iman Mirsal and Usama al-Danasuri
From left to right: ʿImad Abu Salih, Iman Mirsal, and Usama al-Danasuri
“Poets of the Nineties” is a phrase used to refer to a generation of Egyptian poets who came to prominence in the mid-1990s. A group of them called themselves al-Jarad (Locust). The nexus of the group was an underground magazine by the same name, founded in 1994 by a few members, most active among them are Ahmad Taha (b. 1950) and Muhammad Mitwalli (b. 1970). These writers intentionally disengaged from the motivations of their modernist predecessors.