My talk will discuss attempts at collaborative poetic writing in Arabic literature. It will introduce a set of practical and theoretical concerns regarding the styles, forms, languages, and performative affect of collaborative poetics among Arab poets. First, I will analyze how collective composition works in the Arabic tradition and what historical circumstances give rise to it. I will frame this discussion within the framework of “poetry and the commons”, which refines our conception of how poetic language helps shape commonality and community. The commons created by poetry can be conceptualized as an imaginary ḥayyiz mussayaj (an enclosed space) or cooperative taḍāfur (tight interweaving, mutual assistance) that comes into existence to counteract the disintegration of al-ḥayyiz al-ʿām (public space) in Arab countries. It rejects the hostility between social groups by nurturing values of solidarity, affection, and shared initiative. To generate this alternative space, the construct of the solitary romantic artist is dismantled, and modes of writing that aspire for community-building effect take its place. In Arabic poetry, the turn towards collaboration has critical ramifications for the poem’s language and for reimagining the gaps between stylized expression and common life. The corpus I study starts from the 1947 surrealist poetry collection Siryāl and reaches the 2011 collage of Syrian poets titled Mundhir Maṣrī wa-Shurakāh (Mundhir Masri and Co.). Analyzing this body of works will give a fresh perspective on central notions in the intellectual history of the Arab 20th century such as iltizām and the “unmaking of the Arab intellectual” (Halabi), cultural authenticity (aṣāla) and modernity (ḥadātha), exile and postcolonial subjectivity. What can we learn about the literary and intellectual history of the Arab world from looking at the ways in which Arab artists collaborate and present the products of their shared probing of the collective psyche?