The pre-modern Arabic literary canon as it was developed during the Abbasid caliphate (c. 750-1258 CE) comprises limited examples of naqāʾiḍ (invective flytings) poetry. Furthermore, the canonical naqāʾiḍ were composed by a small number of poets during a relatively brief period, namely, the Umayyad era (c. 661-750 CE). Why might this be? My hypothesis is that the two most canonical naqāʾiḍ poets, Jarīr and al-Farazdaq, achieved special fame for their corpus of naqāʾiḍ for two main reasons: first, because of the way in which they weave together the multiple temporalities that flow through them to create a lasting and resonant experience of time; and second, because they served the political projects and literary tastes of the Abbasid scholars who incorporated them into the literary canon they constructed over the course of the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries. Jarīr (d. 111/729) and al-Farazdaq's (d. 110/728) naqāʾiḍ are a seminal work of pre-modern Arabic literary canon; how their naqāʾiḍ achieved the status of Arabic literary classic, however, raises many interesting questions about Arabic literary history, how literary canons take shape, and what it means to become a canonical literary work. In this paper, I will discuss the role of temporality in canonical literature using a two-poem invective exchange between Jarīr and al-Farazdaq as a case study. Based on this analysis, I argue that each poem weaves threads in the direction of a multitude of temporalities and creates its own temporal world; I term this temporal textile “poem-time,” and beyond being a quality of these two specific late seventh-century Arabic poems, it is possible that the creation of a particular type of poem-time is an important factor that can and often does contribute to the consideration of a literary work as a classic.