Forms of Hesitation: Tadhabdhub and Metrical Hybridity in Syrian tafʿīla poetry, 1962–1975

This essay claims that shiʿr al-tafʿīla, modern poetry which adheres to one or more of the traditional prosodic feet, witnessed a second ideological turn in the moment leading up to the 1967 defeat. Around 1967, the mixing of meters asserts itself in attempt to grapple with the epistemic rupture in Arabist ideology as keyed to the tafʿīla form. Hybrids emerge in Syria of the mid- to late-1960s, where modernistic nathr was cordoned off from poetic practice at the same time as social and political developments dictated a complex representation of interior struggles, paradoxes, and agonistic uncertainties. The readiness to experiment with metrical hybrids retrospectively highlights the silenced presence of metrical hybridity in Shiʿr magazine (1956–1964), the carrier of the Arabic modernist project. The poets of Shiʿr programmatically elided metrical thinking out of ideological considerations, and this paper wishes to rehabilitate prosody in the Arabic modernist legacy.