Poetry cannot be history, or words spoken by poets we often bring from the past, or awaken from their slumber, to compare them with the contemporary poetry we hear and read, considering Al-Baghdadi's saying, 'Contemporaneity is a veil.' This is only to say to the reader:

- If you wish to read or know poetry, and to know what it is, look behind you. Poetry is history itself, what has come to be said in the past tense.

These are the worst arguments and proofs by which we wrong the present, because it has not yet become past, and the living, because they have not yet died.

In this context, I will suffice by pointing out the situation of the contemporary Arab poet. Being with us, a contemporary, we harbor ill will for him, not poetry, because we have not read him in his entirety, nor understood his conception of poetry or his poetic theory, of which we have only taken snippets and patches. We do not examine the poet's works, nor scrutinize them, nor read them objectively within their poetic, intellectual, or artistic-aesthetic contexts. We overlook the concepts and visions he adopts, what is new in them, what is traditional, or what has not escaped the authority and presence of the past. This is so we can be inside poetry, not outside it, and so that poetry is our focus, not the poet himself—the person rather than the text.

• Author: Salah Bousrif
• Publishing House: Dar Fadaat
• Year of Publication: 2025
• Number of Pages: 122