Tag: Poetry

Sejaal, An Online Community For Arab Poets And Poetry Competitions

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SejaalSejaal is a new online community portal for Arab poets and poetry competitions that was recently officially launched by Jeeran, a leading Arabic user generated content portal, in its efforts to enrich the Arabic internet with a new type of genuine content and a new crowd of users.

Sejaal’s vision is to be the place for poets from around the world, and to provide poets with tools that help them express their talent and share their creativity with other poets and people online.

A “Sejaal” is a traditional activity that Arabic poets used to enjoy throughout ancient times. This form of poetry has faded in the last century due to the invasion of modern lifestyles, as well as cultural dilution. The web site was specifically designed to replicate the real life experience of a traditional “Sejaal” and therefore revive this form by riding on the most popular medium today –the Internet- making it available to anyone, anywhere in the world.

Sejaal

With the beta version launched earlier in January of this year and even though sejaal is an invitation only site where only the good poets are allowed to join, to maintain the level of quality of the poetry at this very early stage, over 300 competitions were created, the topics of which reflected the general mood of events taking place in real life. For example, a competition on the sad events that took place in Gaza was started by Sejaal users through which the poets wrote 50 verses criticizing the attacks against Palestinians and encouraging the resistance of the Palestinian people.

Abu Dhabi Authority For Culture And Heritage To Launch Online Poetry Encyclopaedia

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Poetry EncyclopaediaThe Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH) has announced that it will soon launch a website that serves as the latest issue of the poetry encyclopaedia, to coincide with the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, held on March 2009. 

The fourth edition of the encyclopaedia, whose publishing rights are owned by ADACH, will include: 2,693 poetry collections (which mount to 2,890,301 verses or 138,641 poems). In addition, it will have 1,081 books on scientific, literary and historical heritage.

Many of the original poetry collections have been provided with huge additional content. For example, the third edition Ahmed Shawqi’s collection had 376 poems (11,724 verses), while the fourth edition includes 776 poems (16,517 verses). 

Work on the poetry encyclopaedia began in 1997 and the National Library launched the first edition in 1998, which included nearly 180,000 verses of 88 poets, in addition to the Arabic dictionary ‘Lisan Al Arab’ (the Arab tongue) of Ibn Mandhour. 

Jumaa Al Qubaisi, Director of the National Library, said ADACH was keen that the poetry encyclopaedia, in its new look, remains committed to the high refined taste of its Arab readers, in its collections of selected Arab poets – old and new. The poetry encyclopaedia did not set as a pre-condition of only including previously published poetry collections as its editors believe that many glorious poets, whose poems can be found in different places, did not have their poetry collections published, while not every poet whose work has been fully published means that his/her work is of a valuable significance. 

There are books that deal with the poetry of some of the Arab tribes, the poetry of a certain country or region, the poems of people belonging to certain religion or sect, as well as ones focused on female poets only.

The encyclopaedia also provides a search engine to help researchers. 

The fourth edition of the poetry encyclopaedia will be available online for all visitors of the ADACH website.