Event

“Can there be an Arabic prose poem?” is a specific instantiation of the more universal question “Can there be a prose poem?” In Arabic, however, the question takes on added urgency because it threatens to transform the long-standing definition of Arabic poetry in a way that no other poetic form has previously.The Arabic poem prose has been described as an oxymoron, a non-genre, an anti-genre, a miracle, and denigrated as a bastard form, a lack, a gap, a deformation, and even a conspiracy. Professor Fakhreddine will discuss her new book The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice, which examines this “new genre” as a poetic practice and as a critical lens which gave rise to a profound and contentious investigation into the definition of poetry, its limits, and its relation to its readers. 

Huda J. Fakhreddine is associate professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition(Brill, 2015), The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and the co-translator of Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA editions, 2017), The Sky That Denied Me (University of Texas Press, 2020), and Come, Take a Gentle Stab (Seagull Books, 2021). Her translations of Arabic poems have appeared in Banipal, World Literature Today, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly, Asymptote, and Middle Eastern Literatures. Her book of creative non-fiction titled زمن صغير تحت شمس ثانية (A Small Time under a Different Sun) was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut in 2019. She is one of the editors of the Library of Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern Literatures

Co-Sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations