Marking the Fifth Anniversary of His Death: Poet Muayyad al-Rawi’s “On Poetry and Childhood

FROM AL JADID ARCHIVES

Marking the Fifth Anniversary of His Death: Poet Muayyad al-Rawi’s “On Poetry and Childhood,” the Introduction to His Last Book, “The Singular Narrative,” (2015)

Muayyad al-Rawi, the poet and intellectual, pushed the free verse movement of Arabic poetry into a new dawn during the 1960s. In his own work, Muayyad constantly delved into themes of freedom. He considered “poetry and art…as the opposite of logic,” believing that “logic restricts the mind from rediscovering the world in its many variations.” In free verse poetry, he found freedom that allowed for creativity and imagination, a poet’s main tools.

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“Poetry often defies definition. On the one hand, poetry invariably exists in a self-referential crisis it is always trying to overcome, while on the other it holds up a mirror to humanity’s own crises across the ages. Perhaps this complexity is due in part to the fact that, in my view, poetry, and art generally, is opposed to logic. Our everyday world, however, mostly runs on the power of logic and reason, which form a system controlling modern life that distances us from poetry.

None of the ancient myths or arts bequeathed to us from our forebears were governed by the kind of logic that governs us today. This is why they can still inspire awe and introspection; they are, to a great extent, poetic, as we see best in the great epics of literature.

By logic I mean here the whole of human knowledge that is passed down from one generation to the next, the prerequisite conditions and laws that have accumulated over time to govern people, setting the course of their lives and the trajectory of their desires in a pragmatic direction.”

To read “On Poetry and Childhood,” the introduction to his last book “The Singular Narrative” (Al Jamal Press, 2015), please see below.

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