In 1954, Palestinian poet, Tawfiq Sayigh, published his first collection of prose-poetry under the title: Thalathuna Qasdah. Ibn Manzur defines the qasidah as that form of poetry, which is “celebrated by its author and revised with fine articulation and carefully-chosen wording.” This definition of the qasidah did not elude Sayigh, for he sought to unsettle classical notions of Arabic poetry, influenced by his training in American poetic modernism in Harvard under the tutelage of Archibald MacLeish and alongside another Palestinian he met there in 1952: poet and novelist, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. Sayigh’s goal reached a high-point with the publication of his last prose-poetry collection in 1963, Mu’alaqat Tawfiq Sayigh, where he took aim at the most honored form of Arabic poetry, that of the ‘suspended ode.' Yet, in spite of such creative vigor, Sayigh has yet to receive the attention he deserves intellectual historians studying the development of modern Arab poetry in the postwar period. Ironically, what Sayigh penned on the flyleaf of the copy of Thalathuna Qa?idah he gifted to Jabra: “I fear that you are my only audience,” was no hyperbole. Alongside a focus on Sayigh and on his efforts to transform Arab poetics, my historical investigation will survey other Palestinian contributions in the field of prose-poetry from figures such as Jabra and Thuraya Melhes – whose 1949 collection, an-Nashid at-Taeh, stands as one of the earliest volumes of prose-poetry in Arabic literature. The question is raised, however, what links prose-poetry as a modern Arabic literary form and the fact of exile shared by Palestinian intellectuals who lost their territorial/political/emotional anchor after the 1947-9 Nakba? Edward Said offers a tentative answer. For him, to be an exile – a poet in exile no less – is to be in a “jealous state,” seeing estrangement in all matters and “clutching difference like a weapon to be used with stiffened will.” Indeed, it is this exilic stubbornness and “refusal to belong” that could explain why Palestinian poets chose innovation over imitation, savoring a fleeting emancipatory moment from the straitjacket of the classical poetry meter. In effect, this presentation seeks to bring Sayigh and other Palestinian poets from the margins of Arabic intellectual history to its center. In studying such Palestinian contributions, I will interrogate the ‘origins story’ of the Arab prose poem, often associated with the Beiruti Shi’r collective of poets, in particular Muhammad al-Maghout and Unsi al-Hajj.