In his 1986 memoir of the Lebanese Civil War, "Memory for Forgetfulness," Mahmoud Darwish remembers a news conference in which a journalist asks him, "What are you writing in this war, Poet," To which Darwish responds, in playfully paradoxical fashion, "I'm writing my silence." He then goes on, more seriously, to defend the importance of silence--and of what calls "patience"--against the popular demand for "poems that match air raids or at least upset the balance of forces." In such demands, Darwish argues, "The political conception of poetry has become confused with the notion of event." Darwish's defense of a poetic of silence and cunning over one of voluble immediacy can be read as a form of self-criticism, one that he would insist on and deepen over the last two decades of his career. For Darwish's own early poems are indeed rather clamorous texts (they are full of double and triple exclamation marks) in which the poet often argues, with an almost apocalyptic intensity, for the primacy of the present, the urgency of the now. My paper will focus on several of these early poems, in an attempt to understand their strategies for asserting poetry's immediacy and "eventfulness," its nature as, in Wallace Stevens words, "the cry of its occasion, / part of the res itself and not about it." Looking at such canonical texts as "Bitaaqat Huwiyya," " 'An al-Shi'r," and "al-Ward wa-l-Qaamuus," I examine the role of self-dramatization, the appeal to radical contemporaneity, and figures of innocence and beginning. All these tropes and themes, I argue, show a poet attempting to break out of the realm of signification and into the world of action, or what we might call praxis. I will end by suggesting how Darwish's later rejection of these strategies--in whole or in part--gives way to a very different conception of the relations between the poetic and the political.