The essay investigates the rise and development of the prose poem form in Iraqi poetry in the period during and after the 1980s Iraq–Iran war. The essay follows the legacy of Western experiments with form following the First World War and their impact on the development of form in Iraqi poetry culminating in the prose poem. The dominance of this form on poetic development in this period has a close relationship with the experience of warfare and the ensuing of the cultural changes in Iraq after 1980. Poets of the 1980s war used poetic form as a means of dissent. The prose poem became for them an inherently subversive form that reflected their disaffection with the political, cultural, and literary conflicts of the time. The prose poem in the Arabic world varies from Western models and has more significant political implications. Its use by combatant poets created an alternative battlefield for the discussion of conventional prose and verse among the Iraqi intelligentsia, as well as providing a blueprint for intellectual and ideological manifestos. The beginnings of the development of the prose poem in Arabic and Iraqi poetry can be linked to the first seeds of rebellion which took root with the Free Verse movement in the 1940s. However, it has a close relationship with the translations of the French and English prose poetry and writing in the 1970s, which resulted in what is called “the third product.” This was a poetry produced under the direct or indirect influence of translated Western poetry, which shaped huge contradictions in the Arabic prosody traditions and prose conventions, and replaced the marginal status of prose poetry by directly connecting it with frontline culture.
