‘Song of My Muhammad’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
Before encountering this poem I would have never put Walt Whitman and Muhammad Ali in the same mental picture, let alone the same poem, but when Ashley M. Jones does just that in ‘Song of My Muhammad,’ it’s as if the two were always in a poem together. The title comes with a footnote that reads “using lines from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, verse 46, and Ali’s own words,” and I take that to mean the entire work is a combination of their two voices. The cadence blend is flawless and stirring.
No friend of mine tells me who I can worship,
no friend of mine stops my dance around the ring,
no friend of mine labels my chair anything but throne,
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy that does not salute me as a king,
I am always up for a remixing of Whitman, someone whose presence lays heavy on American poetry for better and for worse. Reanimating his poetry through such a transcendent figure of Ali is a radical, beautiful and necessary act.