Poetry and Art in the Modern and Contemporary Moroccan Experience: Selected Models

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to study the dual relationship between poetry and visual arts, within the context of the aesthetic approach that will form the core of this research and the thread that connects its various elements. This is an attempt to elucidate the articulations and overlaps between these two creative fields, and the forms of artistic and cultural bridges that allow for this aesthetic creative dialogue.

In attempts to find an expressive and aesthetic counterpart for the poem, some contemporary and alternative poetic models in Morocco have made numerous efforts to transcend the techniques, advantages, and poetics of hearing towards the writing of sight. Consequently, they have established—with the same determination—a poetics of the eye, and specifically the poem of visual arts, considering that the Arab and Moroccan audience has significantly changed its mode of receiving poetry and is no longer content with the auditory aspect alone. Especially as modern media, with its visual density and fertility, has rearranged the characteristics of communication and reception in both the audible and visible, according to its languages, suggestive discourses, and astonishing semiotic explosion.

Talking about an aesthetic counterpart for the contemporary poem in general, including the Moroccan poetic experience, particularly in some of its forms that have bet from the beginning on the presence of aesthetic and visual discourse in its womb or body, may not be complete without discussing the other face of this proposed counterpart and its poetics as well. It is the aesthetic counterpart embodied in visual arts of all kinds and expressions, the parallel aesthetic discourse that has become—in many contemporary Moroccan poetic experiences—a fundamental organizer as well.