Turning metapoetics on its head, the blind author and philologist Abu l-`Ala’ al-Ma`arri (d. 1057 CE) often makes poetry into something else, not the other way around. It is hard to read one of his double end-rhyming odes (luzumiyyat) — written later in life, decades after his first poetry collection, Saqt al-zand (The first tinder-spark) — without confronting technical remarks about meter, rhyme, grammar, and phonetics, at a level of detail that outpaces much verse in Arabic. No doubt this lets him show off his knowledge of prosody and challenge his readers, two motivations that lie just barely out of sight in all his writings. But more often, his jaunts through poetry’s mechanics are signposts toward something else, usually cosmic or metaphysical. In one place, the poet likens fortune’s bondage to fettered rhyme (muqayyada), that is, rhyme without a final short vowel; in another, he compares souls who desired too much in this world, thus forfeiting their good reward in the hereafter, with qasida poems whose originally correct meters are broken with the addition of an extra letter. Such lines of poetry about poetry, yet which in fact speak of something else, stretch our understanding of metapoetics even as they raise old questions. Which came first, the name for the thing, or the thing itself? Is it poetry that makes the world, or the world that gives birth to poetry? As for al-Ma`arri himself, are his regular scholasticisms a lapse in the poet’s art, or do they constitute its very core?