The detractors of the prose poem in Arabic as well as its supporters have described it with a host of labels and adjectives that only prove the near impossibility of defining it. It is an ‘anti-genre,’ an ‘alternate genre,’ ‘a bastard form,’ a ‘hybrid,’ a ‘lack,’ a ‘gap,’ a ‘deformation,’ ‘a free form,’¹ among many other descriptions. The suspicion it raises is caused by the fact that in most cases, it is written, not with the intention of writing poetry, and surely not with the intention of writing prose, but rather with the intention of disrupting our expectations of both. Consider the following examples from Unsi al-Hajj’s al-Ra’s al-Maqtūʿ (The Severed Head):

for this reason,
the orchard-keeper said: stand and smell the rage.
The vine has died after that.

Surely, this poem is not representative of all Arabic prose poems. In fact, it is rather difficult to find qualities that all Arabic prose poems possess. Aside from the lack of meter and the assertion on the part of poets that their texts are poems, the texts produced under the banner of the Arabic prose poem have little in common. Unsi al-Hajj’s aesthetic is very distinct from that of other prose poets of his generation such as Adonis or Fu’ad Rifqa or Salim Barakat. The later generations of prose poets such as Bassam Hajjar, Abdu Wazin, Abbas Baydun, Nazim al-Sayyid, Iman Mirsal, Samir Abu Hawwash are just as varied and dissimilar. Their texts are heterogeneous; some are block texts, some are lineated, some are short and contained while others are long, sometimes divided into sections or sub-poems. Some are narrative, some are not. Hence, when critics write about the prose poem, they tend to reimagine or redraw the subject anew every time rather than engage with it. The prose poem thus turns into a posture or an attitude. It transforms in the writings about it into an approach to a thing and not a thing in itself. And for this reason, critical writings about the prose poem are often just as puzzling and diverse as it is.

It seems to me that writing, reading, and theorising the prose poem are interrelated; one cannot be done without the other. Not only does it put the practice of reading poetry to the test, but the prose poem also implicates the reader and places her in the position of writer and critic as she attempts to navigate the text and understand its claim as a poem.

More than any other poetic form, the prose poem imposes on its reader, as much as its writer, the need to define boundaries. And these boundaries are urgent, both the boundaries on the page, the blank margins that frame a prose poem, which connect it to other pieces in a collection or separate it from them, and the theoretical boundaries which set it apart from prose and poetry while involving them both in its proposition. In fact, the prose poem’s ceremonials of entrance and exit are crucial. Reading a prose poem often begins by deciding how and why it begins and ends the way it does. Otherwise the poem risks disintegrating into something else, precisely what it claims not to be, flowing formless prose as Unsi al-Hajj puts it.³ Just as urgent to the prose poem is context. Always an important consideration for defining genres, context acquires an added significance in the case of the prose poem and becomes a crucial stipulation for its very existence. Intended readership, the layout on the page, circumstances of publication become all the more important and may perhaps compensate for the lack of generic markers readers rely on to make sense of a text. In other words, the prose poem with its reliance on context and on contrasting itself against that context, thus highlighting the points of contact and diversion, is as M A Caws puts it, is a ‘frame of privileged space.’⁴

Thinking of boundaries and context together, one can say that the prose poem is a text that can only exist on the edges of genres, at that front line or interface where boundary and context meet. It is that space or moment in which we begin to recognise something that stands out in an otherwise consistent background: a still shot in a streaming video, a person standing still amid a moving crowd, a cloud in a clear sky.⁵

Moreover, the majority of Arabic prose poems can be described as thought-poems⁶, in that they rely primarily on manipulation of themes, an opening up or shaking down of themes in a transformative way. And often this exploration of theme ends with heightened tension and a lack of resolution; a quality Caws describes as the prose poem’s ‘strangely reticent irresolution.’⁷ The prose poem thus often directs itself at our comprehension to challenge it or disrupt it in some way. The effect of this can be revelatory, even if that which is revealed is all too familiar, as is the case in this piece by Nazim al-Sayyid:

I have used up all my promises
and here I am
sitting with my present
clinging to it, shivering
like a swimmer, regretful between two riverbanks
measuring what lies ahead with what lies behind.

Al-Sayyid’s poem contemplates the present moment. As it progresses the speaker is stripped of all before him and ahead of him. The poem gathers itself inward, ‘clinging’ to a point mid-way between two banks, between past and future. The state of suspension is achieved through the build-up towards the image of the swimmer. The line breaks here further intensify it by emphasising ‘my present,’ ‘shivering,’ and the two ‘riverbanks.’ The piece fulfills itself with the word ‘regretful.’ Not hesitant or undecided, the swimmer is regretful as he contemplates the two opposite riverbanks and measures the possibilities that could be against each other. The poem ends with this closing off or collapsing of directions, in a moment suspended in mid-stream.