Status Updates From مقدمة للشعر العربي

Authenticity is not a fixed point in the past to which we must return in order to establish our identity. It is rather a constant cacpacity for moevement and for going beyond esisting limits towards a world which, while assimilating the past and its knowledge looks ahead to a better future.

This book is a profound analysis of creative expression itself; one which gripped me so unexpectedly and fervently. It’s holistic nature is breathtaking and I consider the author herself to be of great genius.

The messages articulated re-established my faith in the practice of creativity as a spiritual pursuit. That creative practices synchronise our humanity identities and distil the wanderings of our mind.

"the questions ‘What is knowledge?’, ‘What is truth?’, ‘What is poetry?’ remain open, that knowledge is never complete and that truth is a continuing search.
The essence of this is that modernity should be a creative vision, or it will be no more than a fashion. Fashion grows old from the moment it is born, while creativity is ageless. Therefore not all modernity is creativity but creativity is eternally modern."

"Perhaps the best way to end, and to express the range of the new poetics, is to quote...Abū Nuwās, which are a poetic statement in themselves:
But I say what comes to me
From my inner thoughts
Denying my eyes.
I begin to compose something
In a single phrase
With many meanings,
Standing in illusion,
So that when I go towards it
I go blindly,
As if I am pursuing the beauty of something
Before me but unclear."

"...The Quranic text was a radical and complete departure: it formed the basis of the switch from an oral to a written culture — from a culture of intuition and improvisation to one of study and contemplation, and from a point of view which made contact with the pagan surface of existence to one which reached into its metaphysical depths."

"The Qur’ān was not only a new way of seeing things and a new reading of mankind and the world, but also a new way of writing. As well as representing a break with the Jāhiliyya on an epistemological level, it represented a break on the level of forms of expression. .."

"...These questions all imply that behind this permanent, uniform, prescriptive discourse there exists a silence, an absence, a blank. Today we are called upon to embark on a reading of our critical heritage which will reveal these absences and make the silence speak."

"The poetry was therefore judged according to how far it could arouse ṭarab, a state of musical delight or ecstasy, and the poetics was founded on what could be called an aesthetics of listening and delight. This was then transformed by political exploitation and the general ideology into a sort of aesthetics of information, so that poetry became a variety of declamatory speech able to affect people..."

"...and finally, to investigate the characteristics of this orality in poetry and assess the extent of its influence on written Arabic poetry in succeeding periods, in particular on its aesthetics."

Wow.

"Poetics and Orality in the JāhiliyyaI
I use the term orality here in three senses: first, to mean that Arabic poetry at the time of the Jāhiliyya (the pre-Islamic era in Arabia) was rooted in the oral and developed within an audio-vocal culture; second, to indicate that this poetry did not come down to us in written form but was ‘anthologized’ in the memory and preserved through oral transmission;..."