Known simply as the “Poets of the South”, the members of Shu‘arā’ al-Janūb, including ‘Abbās Bayḍūn, Shawqī Bizīʿ, Muḥammad ʻAlī Shams al-Dīn, Jawdat Fakhr al-Dīn and Ḥasan Abdallāh, are credited with giving voice to the underrepresented southern borderland of Lebanon that had been shrouded by Israeli occupation for over two decades until its liberation in May 2000. In an attempt to find a language of memory distinct from dominant urban-centered narratives, this counterhegemonic school of poets proposed alternative memories of war and occupation in South Lebanon reminiscent of Iraqi poetics of resistance. While the poetry of Shu‘arā’ al-Janbūb culled its commemorative language purposefully from the lexicon of the nasīb with a rhetoric that initially appears conservative, it latently transforms the classical Arabic tradition of contemplating ruins into a contemporary struggle against forced migration, war, and oppression. As ‘counterhegemonic emergent forms’, this school of poetry can arguably be viewed as Gramsci’s transformative agents by reinvigorating the discourse on the south. Part of the larger project of this subaltern movement of poetry was an attempt to carve a space of memory with the south inhabiting a central as opposed to liminal position within the nation’s memorial landscape. My intent in this paper is to trace the engagement of these South Lebanese writers with their Iraqi literary counterparts by examining the influence of Iraqi Marxist sensibility on Shu‘arā’ al-Janūb, who although engaged in albeit different cadre of struggle, nevertheless with recourse to tropes, rituals, mythological and otherwise, stemming from Iraq’s Najaf region. In doing so, this paper attempts to account for a largely understudied genealogy of resistance literature that crosses literary and poetic borderlines and simultaneously highlights the comparative poetics of this rural periphery—South Lebanon—which arguably comprises a significant yet understudied narrative strand in contemporary Arabic poetics.