Images of pain and deformation are central in two works from the 1960s that emerged from the Beirut-based journal Shi‘r, and are utilized as metaphors signaling an alternative mode of creation. The first is Lan, Unsī al-Hājj’s first collection of prose-poems, published in 1960 by Dār Majallat Shi‘r. The second is Sittat rusūm, a series of black-and-white illustrations by Kamāl Bullāṭa, published in Shi‘r’s 35th issue (Summer 1967). This paper attempts a visual reading of Lan using themes evoked by Sittat rusūm as guideposts. Bullāṭa’s depictions of the human body in mental and physical agony subvert iconic scenes from Christian iconography and are repurposed into a visual metanarrative of the Palestinian plight post-1967. Tension between roundness and linearity, anxiety over sterility and unknown progeny, violence and fear are visual iterations in Bullāṭa that echo Lan’s parataxis, erraticism, and formlessness, themselves symptoms of de-formation begetting innovation. My argument builds on al-basariyya al-shi‘riyya (poetic visuality) borrowed from Muṣliḥ al-Najjār (2020), a useful comparative concept that enables a more comprehensive reading of modern Arabic poetry by thinking visually with images evoked by words. I argue that poetic visuality is at work in late modernist Arabic poetry in its interplay with structural elements of visual arts and in cross-pollinations of visual consciousness among poets and artists, which grew horizontally across forms and media exemplified in Shi‘r’s experiments. More generally, I argue that experimental poetry relies predominantly on the image; the logic of composing images can unlock a poem once it dispenses with conventions of rhyme, meter, and musicality. Working with theories of physiological and psychological pain and their representations in art and poetry as elucidated by Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain (1985) and Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), I read instances from both works that speak to each other in their urge to destroy inherited forms of representation that can no longer adequately capture subjective experience. Lan’s reception is thus incomplete without visual perception. My work expands upon Laurie Edson’s method of relational reading across cultural mediums by making a case for poetic visuality across modern Arabic cultural production. Reading modern Arabic poetry intersectionally, in relation to adjacent works of visual art, unpacks valences despite attempts to alienate the reader. In both works, we're presented with a vocabulary of pain and production supplied in picture form, highlighting the notion that experiences of pain and deformity inevitably trigger alterity.