The Zephyrs of Najd: The Poetics and Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasib Book

For readers trapped inside English, Stetkevych is your man for all things qasidah, and The Zephyrs of Najd (the title alone carries some of his oddly lyrical flair) collects a career's worth of reflections on Arabic poetry's venerable formal backbone. Aside from the enlightening cross-cultural comparisons'Najd to Arcadia, qasidah to sonata, nasib to pastoral'Stetkevych throws open a window on how much innovation hides within a seemingly conservative poetic landscape. The Arabic poets who replicated the diction, themes, and even place names of pre-Islamic Bedouin verse long after it had ceased to apply to their own space and time did so because the "sequence of moods" at the center of the qasidah offered a flexible and highly economical means to concentrate personal experience. It's Stetkevych's sensitive notion of form'less a matter of meter or strictures than a variable structure of feeling'that extends the value of his analysis beyond classical Arabic poetry to offer a way of reading any formally regular verse where the fun lies in the poet's cat-and-mouse game with the audience's well-defined expectations. When every mention of the abode or the idyllic uplands of Najd evokes in the listener all the other poems containing abodes and Najds s/he's sure to have heard, the poet becomes less an originator than a sophisticated manipulator of the subtle relations between text, context, and inter-textual allusion, which is where the real creative action of the qasidah takes place. In showing how these classical gestures operate, Stetkevych also opens a critical perspective on our own presumptions about modern poetry and what it should be or do. In the final footnote of the book, he writes:

"The theoretical relentlessness and immediacy of our modern understanding of all the formal and meaning-connotative aspects of artistic creation have undoubtedly contributed to our present aesthetic restlessness. The moment a form, subject, or symbol is used, it is also analytically understood in all its implications. Every repeated use of it then becomes a conscious imitation in depth. This we perceive as intolerable. At the most we cultivate it for a while only by attaching to it the suffix 'ism' and building around it a closed circle of aesthetically generic, broader tolerance. True originality, however, becomes possible only when the circle is broken. A new circle is then initiated, which hastens to close even faster, and so forth."