The last five years have seen exciting advancements in scholarship on medieval Arabic anthologies. A significant handful of studies have provided productive techniques for both appreciating the coherence and logic of individual works and accessing the concerns and agendas of their author-compilers. This paper points to the insights to be gained by recognizing the narrative art in certain anthologies, especially on the level of individual chapters. In particular, attending to narrative features within anthologies allows us to account for coherence and agendas in a way that goes beyond straightforward correspondences. This paper looks at the narrative features in the Kitab al-Aghani chapter dedicated to Kuthayyir ʿAzza in order to appreciate the complexity of its internal logic and its complier’s concerns and agendas. In the Kuthayyir ʿAzza chapter of the Aghani, the author-complier Abu ‘l-Faraj al-Isfahani entertains his audience with a selection of akhbar (reports) that presents the poet as disingenuous and transgressive of social norms. The akhbar also target his appearance and intellect—he is mocked for his ugliness, short stature, foolishness and stupidity. After encountering seemingly incessant derision of Kuthayyir, however, we learn from the akhbar Isfahani presents at the very end of the chapter that nearly the entire city of Medina attended his funeral despite the fact that it coincided with the funeral of the famed Quran and legal scholar Ikrima. The people of the city flocked to mourn Kuthayyir’s death and celebrate his poetic legacy. This transition from criticism to veneration in Isfahani’s arrangement of akhbar is categorical and, on the surface, may also seem jarring. However, attending to the narrative art of this chapter and comparing it to the other Aghani chapter dedicated to Kuthayyir provides a picture of a specific kind of logic and set of concerns on the part of Isfahani.