James Sale’s HellWard should prove of interest to anyone studying poetry—that of Dante in particular (d. 1321). You might, for example, compare and contrast the effectiveness of Dante’s use of the stanza form terza rima (rhyme scheme: aba bcb cdc…) with a long poem of today.

A study guide of questions and activities might suggest you write a poem that creates a hell of your choosing. Who would you put there? And why? Would you expect to be joining them? And would that be for all eternity, or might there be, in your poetic hell, any hope for escape?

James Sale’s version of the fiery place enlists none other than Dante Alighieri himself as tour guide—or a poetic re-imagining of him—just as Dante had summoned Vergil (1st century BC) from the land of the dead to serve as guide through his own Inferno, which constitutes Part I of his epic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy. The real Dante’s backdrop was a series of secular-sacred civil wars in 13th-14th century Italy. Social ills of the day undoubtedly warranted an examination through his peculiarly insightful poetic lens.

Dante’s work belongs to a whole class of art and entertainments that includes allegorical morality plays like the anonymous Everyman (c. 1500) and allegorical scenes of heaven and hell painted by the Flemish painter Hieronymous Bosch (d. 1516) such as his famous Garden of Earthly Delights. One might think of any one of these works as a semi-theological exercise that happens to indulge artistic impulses, or vice versa: an artistic creation that happens to have a theological bent. If you consider them social commentary or personal propaganda, though, it is up for grabs whether you think their purpose was to reflect or reflect upon, to indict or to instruct, to reform or to revenge. Or all of the above.

Interestingly enough, Sale’s creation, though a child of Medieval tradition, is more importantly post-modern—and post-post-modern as well.

For example, most of any “meaning” we attribute to, say, a monochromatic or abstract painting is invariably supplied by us, the viewer. When an artist inserts letters or words in a collage or mixed media work, the point of the piece lies not merely in the text but in the artist’s treatment of it and what that treatment triggers in us. Likewise, HellWard’s value may lie not in what it says, but in what it provokes us to think.

For example, I found myself posing the same sort of questions I asked you above: If this narrator gets out of this “hell,” will he be back? (The term “narrator” here will refer to the “I” of the poem, as distinct from the “author” of the poem who created that character. A frontispiece disclaimer does state, after all, that this book is “fiction.”) The text suggests answers, but I could not help but indulge my own.

The title of the tome is evocative, too. It could easily have been Hell Wards, as the narrator’s journey begins by fending off death itself in a hospital, followed by several wards of the fictive hell. But the single-word title suggests a trip toward hell, as in a dream, hallucination, or the imagination.

* * *

Be that as it may, the poem is peppered throughout with charged text as evocative as its title.

• When the narrator asks, “How far wrong / Can human beings go” (p. 27), the author seems to be asking us the question, too, with all its implications.

• Hell is described as “where the lost convince / Themselves they’re right, but with no going back.” (p. 13) How often have we encountered a relative or friend who insists they are always right when they are always so wrong?

This syndrome has dire implications today. Rather than damning them to any sort of hell, though, I try to maintain a modicum of hope for those Americans who believed, on absolutely no evidence, certain lies recently strewn by an erstwhile orange-haired politician.

One person’s hell may be the world where he convinces himself time after time that he is right when he is wrong; another’s may be letting him get away with it. Time after time.

• Here’s another evocative invective: “Let learning stay rummaging in the trash.” (p. 27) An indictment of British education, surely, but perhaps the American as well, with its emphasis on filling-in-dots at the expense of filling with thoughts; more recently, with the widespread endorsement of “S.T.E.M.” and abandonment of “S.T.E.A.M.” (the “A” stands for the arts, in case you didn’t know) or “M.A.T.C.H.E.S.” if not “S.T.E.M.A.C.H.” (Since the 6th of January, we overlook Civics and History at our own peril).

• Another salient trope: “Love, then, created hell” (p. 28). This is either not true or indefensible, of course. Nevertheless, it may evoke anyone’s experience of a desperate unrequited passion or a rankling love manqué. This line also made me think about how the love of things, money, or false ideals has led to so much ruin—over the course of history as well as every day.

• An echo, or harbinger, of Existentialism:

. . . humans puffed up with knowing;
Not knowing exactly the hell they’re in
Of endless iteration, pointless doing.” (p. 36)

Don’t we feel some of this pointlessness, too, every time we do the dishes or the laundry, only to have the same chore face us tomorrow, next week, and ad infinitum? You needn’t think of that as hell, but Camus or Sartre might.

• One more: “my anger, too, had turned to sin” (p. 33): Fill in your own episode of someone failing to count to ten before exploding. Someone like you, perhaps?

* * *

The purpose of the poem might equally be conveyed by its “plot”: in particular, the author’s choices of who are consigned to his hell. In canto 2, the narrator visits a former student of his who committed sexual assault—and worse. The student-cum-rapist is paying for his crimes now, possibly forever.

Don’t all of us know of an over-privileged frat boy, or the like, who drugged the punch at a mixer in order to achieve his diabolical designs upon a suddenly unconscious freshman co-ed? Placing such folk in a poetic hell might supply some token of literary justice when earthly justice has proven inept.

This ward’s denizen also calls to mind violators with more famous names, Abraham (from the Old Testament) and Thomas Jefferson, for instance, who not only raped their respective slaves, Hagar and Hemmings, but, in the former instance, sought to convince his wife—and posterity—that God told him to do it.

We do not encounter notable names in HellWard, though, until the tenth canto (out of a total of twelve). From the second to the ninth, the inmates are people the narrator knew personally: mother, friend, boss, & c.

The famous names that finally do appear are hardly noteworthy as sinners or criminals, though, but rather, poets, politicians, and philosophers. Some are contemporary, while others resurrect souls long dead.

Sale alters notable names to create new characters as in a vaudeville, “panto,” or topical review sketch. For example, he assigns to one “poetaster” the name of “Witless.” If this moniker’s first syllable calls to your mind a certain Giant of American Poetry, the poem may very well be achieving its ends.

Such names call to mind not only the allegorical appellations of Medieval morality plays and sketch comedy, but of print rags of yore like the National Lampoon and Mad Magazine. (R.I.P. x 2) Is HellWard’s stylistic intent, then, homage, pastiche, or parody? For when a poem damns famous poets to another poet’s “hell,” how serious can that poem, or that hell, be?

Come to think of it, notwithstanding the indisputably evil inmate of canto 2, was the poem really supposed to be anything other than sheer fun in the first place? Or does the poem purposefully take us on a graduated tour from the darkness of near-death to the levity of light comedy?

The ribaldry of the final three cantos not only seems to be intentional, moreover, but comes as something of a relief. For humor lets us off the hook—that is, from caring, feeling morally obliged to do anything at all about, well, anything at all. Which is perhaps where lies the appeal of topical reviews as well as satire in general, in print or performance.

On the other hand, it could be that such inaction, or apathy, warrants consignment to hell even more severely than, well, anything else at all:

He’d beaten me to hell, as he preferred

To be the winner, and I simply to shrug,
As back then, long ago, I had; ignored
The evidence of every action’s thuggery. (p. 45)

That apathetic shrug, instead of outrage, in the face of outrageous injustices like the ongoing massacres and lynchings (lately at the hands of the police, no less)—the silence that can only be called complicity—may fast be becoming the greatest sin of all:

. . . ahead was dread of what I despised:
To meet ones I’d loved, and shared once a bond,
And so to see them fresh, with different eyes.” (p. 42)

Indeed, the Black Lives Matter and Anti-Colonial/Anti-Holocaust movements are making it nearly impossible not to have our own eyes “freshened” if we but look closely at the present and the past, and the history of the extermination of innocents at the hand of the state, whether it be the Spanish Empire, Nazi Germany, or today’s American police, and whether its champion be Christopher Columbass, Adolf Shitler, or DJ Rump. (These neo-monikers are my own, by the way.)

In fact, Columbus’ writings, now widely available, show himself the author and architect of Spain’s systematic program to enslave and exterminate the innocent original Americans he “discovered” in the “New World.”

As James Sale says, “To know the unbelievable is/ To know.” (p. 28) And now you know.

Instead of relegating Columbus to hell, though, the world has named a South American nation, two American state capitals, a mighty western river, and, in New York City alone, an avenue, a square, and an Ivy League university, after the guy. The question is: What are we going to do about it, today?

A few decades ago, Alfred E. Newman’s face asking “What, Me Worry?” on the cover of Mad provided us with a far more palatable meme than “Silence is Complicity.” But if we allow such entertainments to act as opiates, if satire renders us so savvy, so satisfied, and so smug that we opt for apathy over action, might we justifiably be consigned to some sort of hell ourselves?

Does shining a light, through poetry or parody, no longer suffice?

The least a poet could do would be to place such villains of history—particularly those whom posterity has allowed to “get away with” their abominations till now—in an appropriately chosen hell. I suppose their names should be altered slightly, first, if not for the satiric effect, or even poetic justice, then for the sheer fun of it. Or maybe just for the hell of it.

Which I, at last, have done.