January, 2024

January, and — only this week — winter has arrived here in St. Petersburg, Florida, which is to say, cold-ish (50s) and damp – though one wouldn’t know it along the beaches, of course: the usual pallid, wind-bright fugitives from SAD toting boogie boards and red cup margaritas, and trailing their squalling cohorts. (That’s a bit rude, isn’t it? Sorry.) Still, for the most part, matters proceed as, I suppose, everywhere in our neighborhoods and malls – inflatable Chipmunk Elves and (okay, barefoot) Santas; frantic shoppers and almost-comical parking lot square-ups.

But, you know all this. Perhaps have experienced such, even yourself have found solace – or joy! – in our subtropical holiday trappings. If so, I wish you well.

And…oh, never mind. Let’s get on with it, I hear you thinking. Yes, yes – but, before we turn to Joseph Campana’s bracing essay, and a bit of news, allow me to thank you, readers and writers alike, for your many and steadfast kindnesses this difficult year. It’s a great privilege, you know, to offer you these poems and essays and reviews each month; honestly, I can’t imagine much that I would do better, given my own meager talents.

Anyway.

Before Mr. Campana arrives, what more enticing way to begin than with a short – and aptly titled — poem from recent Plume contributor Richard Hoffman?

December 31st

All my undone actions wander
naked across the calendar,

a band of skinny hunter-gatherers,
blown snow scattered here and there,

stumbling toward a future
folded in the New Year I secure

with a pushpin: January’s picture
a painting from the 17th century,

a still life: Skull and mirror,
spilled coin purse and a flower.

How beautiful, that turn, no?

January’s picture
a painting from the 17th century,

a still life: Skull and mirror,
spilled coin purse and a flower.

But let’s scurry, happily, now, to the main attraction: Joseph Campana’s fascinating – generous, perhaps topical, even hopeful –piece on Omar Sakr’s “On Finding the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in Dante’s ‘Inferno,’”

Holidays are no longer “holy days” for most. That’s not to say religious observance is unimportant or even uncommon. But it is less prominent than once it was in a broad cultural sense. A hope for rest, perhaps, is all the consensus left. Consensus, otherwise, feels fleeting as 2023 lurches to a close and some rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born as 2024. The world gets stranger, harder. And what goes by the name of politics includes open war, seems organized around creating a consensus around violence, as we could and should answer questions like “Who would you rather hurt? Who would rather see hurt to find peace?”

I’d like to say poems offer me solace in such times. They don’t, although I enjoyed a quieter holiday than perhaps I deserve. All quiet on the medical front for those I love, which is as close as I get to peace in any season. If I find no solace in poems it’s because the ones I return to ask the mind not to rest but to be restless. There are too many hard questions and time is short.

I’ve been thinking, for a few months now, about a poem one of my students sent me. Omar Sakr’s “On Finding the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in Dante’s ‘Inferno,’” which was published this summer in Poetry and which is one of a sequence in Sakr’s latest collection Non-Essential Work. Sakr delves into the great and terrible Inferno, a system of justice and punishment, an exquisite cosmic proposition and a torture chamber all in one. Gifts come in many forms–the poem itself, yes, and a little correspondence with Omar Sakr to tell him how moved my students were by his poem. Since his newest book wasn’t yet out, he sent the other Inferno poems. In fact, I owe him a letter. But back to the poem I can’t stop thinking about.

It begins simply, at least at first: “I lift him out, whole and perfect.” But the title already announces something far more complex is afoot. How to lift a figure like the Prophet Muhammad from a medieval poem, a Christian spiritual epic (with an only sometimes- enlightened attitude towards Islam) one in which the journey through hell offers horror upon horror? Who emerges whole and perfect from hell? Not even Dante does. What hope is there for Muhammad, who appears in the circle of the schismatics: those who have split and fractured the religious world are themselves gruesomely bisected, physically rent in two in punishment.

There’s a certain shock in the Inferno, which Sakr’s poem registers just as it registers the long strange reception of the poem, whether because Edward “Said told me he would be here, chained by Dante”or because a Paris Review reading club clumsily glorified the violence to attract readers. Hence, the “marvelous mangling” (and perhaps, also, because in hell the more improbable punishments might be described as anti-miracles yet still marvels).

But I’ve been avoiding the gesture that keeps the poem restlessly at work in my mind. Sakr wants to “lift him out, whole and perfect” and later insists: “I have taken him out, / wounding the text, the ancient imagining.” What’s remarkable is not the desire to remove a revered figure like the Prophet Muhammad from torment. Nor the desire to make something whole from the wreckage of time remarkable. Nor the desire to wound an ancient text full of harsh words. What’s remarkable is how the poet accomplishes it.

To respond to an iconic work is, in some sense, to be written into it. That might feel like glory or torment depending on the poem and one’s point of view. But Sakr imagines replacing Muhammad whatever the consequences: “so asunder I tear, guts and shit spilling down my legs” in the crudely visceral reality of judgment. So many self-lacerating impulses coincide as the poet addresses himself: “Omar, / Foolish provocateur, no prophet, but sower / Of schism and scandal, yes, he belongs here.” Perhaps this is inevitable for a queer poet caught between or across cultures, as Sakr describes himself elsewhere in his writing.

It’s this act of replacement that I can’t stop thinking about—the generosity of being willing to step into fire and torment for another. Each time I read the poem the final line hits with an impact I am still trying to understand: “Do not use his name if you do not love him: use mine.” There’s so much violence in the Inferno. There’s so much violence in the world, and it seems so rarely can any one person do very much about it. What I admire, here, is the purity of the gesture— fearlessly standing in for another to absorb hatred and disdain. How not to flinch not in the face of violence but in the face of this kind of love. This is the very kind of love often invoked around holidays, be they holy days or not. And if there’s an answer to the question of how not to organize the world around who you are willing to hurt, or to see hurt, for the sake of your own peace: well, perhaps this is a place to start.

On Finding the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in Dante’s “Inferno”

BY OMAR SAKR

I lift him out, whole and perfect.
Said told me he would be here, chained by Dante
To the eighth circle of hell, bettered only by the devil himself.
The Paris Review recapped this canto in 2014, saying
Read along! This week: Mohammed torn asunder.
And so he was, again, “cleft from chin to colon.” In summary
We are assured this is a marvelous mangling.
I cannot abide (t)his pain. I have taken him out,
Wounding the text, the ancient imagining,
And write myself into it so asunder I tear,
Guts and shit spilling down my legs. Omar,
Foolish provocateur, no prophet, but sower
Of schism and scandal, yes, he belongs here. Now
Do not use his name if you do not love him: use mine.

You can find Omar Sakr’s biography, in his own words, here.

Other news? No, again, not much this month. Only to say a final thank you to those who took us up on our offer of free volumes of the print anthologies, Plumes 7, 8, 9, and 10. All in good hands now.

Oh, and another — thank you, that is – to David Breskin, founder and administrator (and so much more) of the Shifting Foundation for his continuing, generous support of Plume these last five years. I don’t know that I’ve ever met anyone quite like him – head-spinningly gifted, modest in the best way, polymathical — as a glance at his website will attest. Much, much gratitude, David!

Finally, our habitual nod to a few of our contributors who have books recently published, soon-to-be, or fresh acceptances.

Brian Swann                      YA- HONK! GOES THE WILD GANDER: COVID DIVAGATIONS
Stewart Moss                     Arrivals and Departures
Jessica Jacobs                  unalone
Diane seuss                       Modern Poetry: Poems
Erin Belieu (editor)
and Carl Phillips (editor)  Personal Best: Makers on the Poems that Matter Most
Peter Vertacnik                   The Nature of Things Fragile: Poems

That’s it for now – be well — as always I hope you enjoy the issue!

Daniel Lawless
Editor, Plume