When the modernist movement in Arabic poetry was launched in the 1940s, it threatened to blur the distinctions between poetry and everything else. The Arabic prose poem, qaṣīdat al-nathr, is probably the most subversive and extreme manifestation of this blurring. The term was first introduced in 1960, as a translation of the French phrase «poème en prose» and is the first example of non-metrical Arabic poetry. This book examines this “new genre” as a poetic practice and as a critical lens which gave rise to a profound, contentious and continuing debate about the definition of an Arabic poem, i ... More

When the modernist movement in Arabic poetry was launched in the 1940s, it threatened to blur the distinctions between poetry and everything else. The Arabic prose poem, qaṣīdat al-nathr, is probably the most subversive and extreme manifestation of this blurring. The term was first introduced in 1960, as a translation of the French phrase «poème en prose» and is the first example of non-metrical Arabic poetry. This book examines this “new genre” as a poetic practice and as a critical lens which gave rise to a profound, contentious and continuing debate about the definition of an Arabic poem, its limits, and its relation to its readers. It examines the history of the prose poem, its claims of autonomy and distance from its socio-political context, and the anxiety and scandal it generated. It takes as case-studies several understudied and unstudied poets, such as Salim Barakat (b. 1951), Unsi al-Hajj (1937-2014), and Muhammad al-Maghut (1934-2006), who are important in their own right and who exerted great influence on the poets who succeeded them. The book also sheds light on the works of more recent poets, such as the Egyptian poets of the nineties and younger poets whose careers launched in the twenty-first century and who have not hitherto been studied in English.