The poet Alloush Assaf: The poem without music and weight is not poetry

Damascus-Sana

Alloush Assaf is one of the important poetic voices on the Syrian literary scene, with his creative sense, broad imagination and poetic music that subordinates it to meaning in poems that simulate the homeland, love and man.

The poet Assaf explained in an interview with the cultural Sanaa that his belonging to a rural environment in which the horizon extended with the elements of pristine nature and beautiful environmental components nourished his imagination and gave him more room to write to begin his journey with poetry in high school and then interrupted the period of university studies before returning to the world of the poem through his first group “Bells Silence".

Regarding the presence of women in his poetry, Assaf explains that the female has gained a special place among Arabs in general and among the countryside in particular. That is why he considers her his second home and connects her with the land, pointing out that he issued a group entitled “My National Oyounak” in which he talks about the eastern Arab female who lived with him all the details of his life In addition to writing a lot about women from research and articles.

When Assaf writes about women, he sets out from reality to navigate with his imagination to wider and wider horizons, indicating that he may be the mouthpiece of others, so he writes on behalf of a friend who has gone through a failed or successful emotional experience and is unable to compose poetry, so he composes poems bearing longing, eagerness and nostalgia.

Regarding the necessity of poetic music, Assaf believes that if poetry is stripped of music, it has become prose, and what distinguishes the poem is the weight that he considers necessary for any vertical poem and even the metaphor, interspersed with musical phrases called verbs that may be repeated for one or two times or more, and they combine in length and shortness, forming an aesthetic musical state in harmony with the meaning .

Regarding his opinion of the prose poem, Assaf denies its affiliation with Doha poetry despite its aesthetics, as it remains in prose, and the internal music in it is present in metered poetry and is present in all kinds of literature, but it does not give it the right to be poetry.

Assaf, who was fond of rhythm, weight, and the Khalili poem, as was evident in his first collection, “Bells of Silence,” had a remarkable development with his last group “The Sun Said to Me” in terms of structure, proposition, content, language and images. His presence in Damascus, the capital of civilization, culture and thought, affected what he shaped A major difference from his poetic experience is that he does not give up on any poetry he wrote in the past.

And about his newness, Assaf said that he is preparing a group entitled Black Poems, referring to the impact of the stage in which the Syrian and Arab citizens live, and the consequences of terrorism, which makes the situation tend to be pessimistic, but despite all this blackness there is a white space that suggests hope and radiance.

Assaf pointed out that he accompanied the terrorist war on our homeland with his poetry, as in his poem, “My Western T-shirts,” which carried all the pain and destruction that the Syrians suffered, in which he spoke with the language of the expatriate who left his homeland in addition to a poem I grew in your blood and spoke about the heroics and sacrifices of the Syrian Arab Army, considering that literature is in keeping with it The stage is in labor, in addition to the fetal literature present in the memory of the creators, which will produce many results from what was observed and stored in this era in its creative memory.

Bilal Ahmad