Intertextuality as Expression: A Deep Dive into Amr Hasan's Egyptian ‎Performance Poetry

Studies have been made celebrating and analyzing western performance poetry as an effective tool in expressing poets' identity. They have indicated how addressing audience lively is an experience completely different from that of reading. The eastern experience in this context is significant to be studied and focused on, too, especially with regards to Egyptian performance poets. So, this study attempts to provide a thorough analysis of performance poetry aspects in the works of the Egyptian poet Amr Hasan, a contemporary Egyptian performance poet. Performance poetry is a modern common cultural phenomenon in Egypt which competes with and parallels the western one. This phenomenon of poetic evenings directed to live audience and accompanied by music, is an artistic tapestry that has its especial literary flavor. Created by young Egyptian poets and viewed or attended by thousands make it an experience that deserves to be studied.  It combines distinctive elements; the spoken words and theatrical performance often accompanied by music and multimedia. The study reveals how elements of global performance poetry are present and significant in the Egyptian one. It also indicates that in addition to performance elements, there are intertextual aspects that make the Egyptian category very distinctive and help enrich the poems' themes that varied into social, political, and mostly personal emotional ones. Hasan’s poems are rich in its intertextual displacement. The intertexts are evident in poems such as ''Gobran'', ''Asking you about the spirit'', ''El Maestro'', etc. These elements are traced to indicate how they are employed to achieve distinctive Egyptian poetic experience and to highlight the identity and ideology of the poet.