As an analogy for poetic art, weaving seems a universal figure, and in Arabic it is a venerable one. However, in northwest Arabia of the sixth and seventh centuries CE, weaving was neither a local trade nor an esteemed one, and in the earliest Arabic poetry it is not a dominant metaphor. This paper looks at two trades that are better represented in the poetry of the J?hil? and mukha?ram periods, namely bowyery and diving for pearls. Other crafts and trades are worthy of mention; what distinguishes the bow-maker's and the pearl diver's is the high level of detail with which poets of these periods described them. They are lowly trades, whose products are of high value, and also heroic trades, whose practitioners were subject to hazard and isolation in remote acacia forests and on the floor of the Persian Gulf. In neither art — the bowyer's nor the diver's — is there a robust metaphorical connection to poetic structure or form to be made. Poetic labor, on the other hand, is insistently (if ironically) modeled in the repetitive productive labors of bowyer and diver, and their quest for the perfect end-product. This will be shown in the "Poems of the Bow" of Aws b. ?ajar (fl. mid-6th c.), Muzarrid ibn ?ir?r and his brother al-Shamm?kh (fl. early 7th), and in descriptions of the pearl dive by their contemporaries.

Turning metapoetics on its head, the blind author and philologist Abu l-`Ala’ al-Ma`arri (d. 1057 CE) often makes poetry into something else, not the other way around. It is hard to read one of his double end-rhyming odes (luzumiyyat) — written later in life, decades after his first poetry collection, Saqt al-zand (The first tinder-spark) — without confronting technical remarks about meter, rhyme, grammar, and phonetics, at a level of detail that outpaces much verse in Arabic. No doubt this lets him show off his knowledge of prosody and challenge his readers, two motivations that lie just barely out of sight in all his writings. But more often, his jaunts through poetry’s mechanics are signposts toward something else, usually cosmic or metaphysical. In one place, the poet likens fortune’s bondage to fettered rhyme (muqayyada), that is, rhyme without a final short vowel; in another, he compares souls who desired too much in this world, thus forfeiting their good reward in the hereafter, with qasida poems whose originally correct meters are broken with the addition of an extra letter. Such lines of poetry about poetry, yet which in fact speak of something else, stretch our understanding of metapoetics even as they raise old questions. Which came first, the name for the thing, or the thing itself? Is it poetry that makes the world, or the world that gives birth to poetry? As for al-Ma`arri himself, are his regular scholasticisms a lapse in the poet’s art, or do they constitute its very core?

Arabic literary critical studies over the past thirty years have approached the subject of metapoetry, that is, poetry about poetry, in a number of ways. Several scholars have taken Western Modernist literary criticism as the point of departure for exploring metapoetry in Modern, and then Classical Arabic poetry. Others, particular in studying the Abbasid period, have interpreted the self-conscious and self-reflective bad?? (innovative) poetry of the Mu?dath?n (Abbasid Modernists) as a ‘metapoetry’ that serves to decode the J?hil? Bedouin tradition for their contemporary urban audience. For others, all poetry is essentially metapoetic, that is, the true ‘subject’ of the poem is always ultimately the poet, poetry and the poem. My approach to metapoetry in the poetic diwan Saq? al-Zand of the celebrated blind Syrian poet and litterateur Ab? al-?Al?? al-Ma?arr? (d. 1057 CE) reflects all of the above approaches. The essential topics of metapoesis have to do with the nature of poetry, poetic inspiration, the poet his/herself and his art, and the role and status of the poet and his poem vis-à-vis his rivals and tradition. These concerns are not, for the most part, expressed directly, but rather largely through metaphor. For Saq? al-Zand, a collection from al-Ma?arr?’s youth, the title itself (approx.‘the sparks of the flint’) is a metaphor for poetic inspiration, the first ‘sparks’ of his poetic ‘flint’. Within the poems themselves, images such as the night journey, the camel-caravan, the cooing of the dove and the cawing of the crow function as metaphors for poetic inspiration, composition, and form. Further, I argue, al-Ma?arr? insinuates himself and his poetry into the Arab mythic-folkloric tradition, as he draws upon it for imagery to express his poetic concerns. Thus, for example, he employs the mythical Had?l, a slain dove-chick for whom doves have mourned since the time of Noah, and hence the etion of the cooing of the doves and metaphor for elegy, to project al-Ma?arr?’s elegiac production back onto its mythic origins. Similarly, uses the motif of the ?Aghribat al-?Arab (‘crows’, i.e., black poets, of the J?hiliyyah) not merely as metaphor, but as a means to identify himself through his own ‘blackness’ (that is, his blindness) with the early practitioners of the Arabic poetic art. Thus, in al-Ma?arr?’s Saq? al-Zand, both metaphor and mythopoesis perform metapoetic functions.