Poems upon Poems: Literary Relations in the Arabic Poetic Tradition
Panel 120, sponsored byNOT AFFILIATED WITH MESA: Journal of Arabic Literature, 2010 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, November 20 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
Poems upon Poems seeks to explore the several manners in which poets and poems relate to each other in the Arabic poetic tradition, how these can be theorized and how this applies to our reading and interpretation of individual poetic works. Paper 1 investigates the ways in which contemporary literary critical work on metapoesis (poetry about poetry) applies to the poetic production of the classical Arabic poetry of the Abbasid Age. Paper 2 moves from the more general theoretical considerations of Paper 1 to examine a particular pair of poems, the Abbasid Abu Tammam's famous victory ode "The Sword is Truer than Books" and its explicit imitation (contrafaction) by the Andalusian poet, al-Sharif al-Taliq, using speech act theory as a basis for interpreting the structural and thematic differences between the two works. The author of Paper 3 chooses to explore the complex relation between the formal classical qasida genre and the innovative informal Andalusian zajal through examining the interplay of the conventional and unconventional in the animal motifs of Ibn Quzman's zajals. The final contribution, Paper 4, rounds out the discussion by turning to a contemporary Arab poet's reprise of a traditional Arabic genre, the tardiyyah or hunt poem. While explicitly engaging the classical genre, through the title, the Egyptian poet Muhammad `Afifi Matar deviates radically from it to create a poem that is not a lyric description of the courtly hunt, but an allegorical description of the poet's "hunt" for the poem itself--hence an eminently metapoetic poem. It is hoped that the discussion will serve to contextualize these studies in a way that will point toward future possibilities for the study of Arabic poetry.
Several modern critics have described the poetry of the Abbasid age as "secondary", "mannerist", and "exegetical" in recognition of its detachment from and its critical concern with the model it sprang from. In this paper I suggest using the adjective meta-poetic to describe the overall attitude of the Abbasid qasida towards its archetypal pre-Islamic model. Meta-poetic in this context indicates a detachment and consciousness that are determining characteristics of this later qasida particularly in the way in which the archetypal motifs and devices are featured in it. The cultural milieu of the period and the debates and issues that surrounded Abbasid poetry necessarily influenced poets and their creative processes. Abbasid poets wrote for an ideal reader/critic not only qualified to appreciate their innovations but also capable of placing their contributions in the continuum of the tradition they were writing against. This was bound to bring the relationship with the literary past to the forefront of the poet's concerns. Thus, poets were always aware of writing against or in perpetuation of an already established form. The consciousness which is necessarily involved in every creative act and especially poetry is therefore sharply heightened. This paper explores the definition of the term meta-poetic in its application to the poetry of the Abbasid age focusing on sample qita' (short poetic compositions) in which poets explicitly voice their critical opinions on poetry.
One of widespread phenomena that scholars of Andalusian Arabic poetry have noted is that of Andalusian poets composing mu'aradat (contrafactions or imitations using the same rhyme and meter) of the works of the master poets of the Abbasid era. Arabic literary scholarship to date has not explored the nature of the poetics of such imitations, that is, the way the later poet draws on the base poem while at the same time trying to produce an original literary work. My study aims to investigate this issue through a close examination of one pair of poems: the Abbasid master-poet Abu Tammam's (d.231/846) famous victory and panegyric ode "Swords [Turn out] to be more Correct than Letters are" and a victory and panegyric imitation of it, "for Enemy is no Protection but Flight," by the Andalusian poet, Marwan ibn 'Abd al-Rahm?n (known as al-Sharif al-Taliq) (d. 400/1010).
Employing speech act theory, the paper shows that the later poet intentionally distinguishes his imitation and differentiates it from the model poem in order to respond to his own political context. He must make his poem a successful performative statement by taking the circumstances and convention into account and being appropriate with them. The paper will argue that, in light of speech act theory, that the structural and thematic differences between the two poems can be understood as each poet's response to his particular political and poetic circumstance and, further, that if each poet had not made the choices he did, the poems would not have been successful performative statements.
Animals of various sorts are mentioned throughout the zajal poetry of the Andalusi Arabic writer Ibn Quzman (d. 555/1160). My proposed paper will focus on two poems of particular interest: (1) ) In "Zajal 21" the poet highlights the figure of a domestic guard dog; an animal not normally found in Classical Arabic poetry, but which is, in this instance, treated conventionally (the animal is loyal to his master) in an unconventional context (the poet, who is disloyal to his wife, has divorced her). (2) In "Zajal 92" the poet brings into play the figure of a pet cat (again, an animal not normally mentioned in the Classical tradition), only to affirm that the cat has abandoned the poet because of the latter's failure to feed it, given his extreme poverty. Once again, the animal is behaving conventionally according to feline instinct (dogs are loyal; cats are not) in a poem in which its appearance is unconventional. From the above, it may be concluded that, in the topsy-turvy poetic world created by Ibn Quzman, animals that are unconventional to Classical Arabic poetry are portrayed conventionally. The proposed paper will base its conclusions on a detailed contextual analysis of both poems, along with contrasting references to a third ("Zajal 147"). previously studied, and in which the unconventional function of birds (the raven and the ringdove) normally conventional to Classical Arabic poetry was highlighted.
