Dormant Love
A poem, performance piece, and chapbook by Moheb Soliman with support from Mizna, Aureole Press, and The Great Northern
This poem came out of deep pandemic times, deep cold, freeze, slumber and routine sleeplessness/solitude/aloneness/alienation. Deep insurrection and uprising Trump and Floyd times. Concern, yearning, and burnout. It was made of a younger, sadder poem that, having both these characteristic flaws, had less fight and stone cold determination I guess, less solidarity with others about such fundamental existential experiences as listed above.
It became this lovelorn rumination on the dark depths these depths can go, maturing out of nowhere when I was looking for a text to turn into a performance-video project for a previous, virtual, Great Northern Festival through the Arab lit and film organization Mizna. The change was perhaps because of that profound condition we were all undeniably sharing, during the chilling new heights of multi-form chaos, of being alone together and together alone. Anything can happen then, and much has, and lots not—lots of standstill, closures, deaths, wastes-away, inertia, derailment, holidays' lack-thereof. Lots of love lost, for folks, and between folks, and just within.
When the poem was published later on, into this chapbook, the Aureole Press editor made something I feel really redemptive or meaningful of all this melancholia in finding kinship to the ancient experimental romantic text Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (where the woodcut images come from). Honoring as it is to be seen against this iconic odyssey of antiquity, "Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream" is also deeply sentimental and convoluted and narcissistic—almost absurdly so—a subtext and reading which I also love here and find just as fitting, if not even thrilling (see cherub pissing in the wind).
So here is dormant love timeless as oblivion and fully of our strange time and gripping season as they ceaselessly turn and always will maybe, till something gives, maybe for better.
Good night,
Moheb
Please zoom in to read the full text.
And please see below for the video performance piece.
Moheb Soliman's Dormant Love was part of the 2021 festival event Out of the Depths, curated by Mizna, commissioned by The Great Northern, and co-presented by First Avenue. Moheb was also part of The Great Northern 2023 as producer for Maren Hassinger's Love (for Minneapolis).
Moheb Soliman is an interdisciplinary poet from Egypt and the Midwest who's presented work at literary, art, and public spaces in the US, Canada, and abroad with support from the Banff Centre, Joyce Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, and others. He has degrees from The New School for Social Research and University of Toronto and was Program Director for the Arab American lit and film organization Mizna before receiving a multi-year Tulsa Artist Fellowship and most recently a Milkweed Editions fellowship. His debut poetry collection HOMES (Coffee House Press, 2021), about nature, modernity, identity, belonging, and sublimity through the site of the Great Lakes bioregion/borderland, was a Minnesota Book Awards and Heartland Booksellers Award finalist and showcased in Ecotone Journal and Poets & Writers.