Less you forget, dear Doug, my own foray of Sapphic improvs from Ann Carson's "If not, winter," in Sleeping With Sappho. The Sappho 'personae' I have 'created' (or 'sleep with'!) - multifarious as she is - is quite androgynous & seems to go after anything that moves. Gender identity is hardly the 'controlling' factor. Age is what does her in finally. A couple of samples:
33.
Why not you, Eleanor,
Fresh oysters, ready to shuck.
34.
stars with no moon
luminous to a fault
here comes Mars
pink, full
and, oh, so close.
118.
Heah, Geronicus, a divorce, just as you wanted
A contract with no deal breaker
And you got the space she wanted
No longer buckled over, straight up on your legs
Sweet as cool water, a smooth feel
In your crotch:
Eleanor got what you wanted, amiably.
If interested, go to:
Sleeping With Sappho (a faux ebook at:
http://www.fauxpress.com/e/vincent/
"...it's like being in a hotel room and listening with my ear to the bedroom wall, and hearing time pass between lovers on the other side, and hearing conversations, and I laugh, or wonder, and sometimes the wall becomes limestone, and sometimes air, with nothing between the reader and the fragment of a voice receding." Jean Vengua
A little self-serving here, but what the hell!
Stephen Vincent
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Right, right, Robin, & I was overstating to make a point.
I think it interesting that some male poets have taken Sappho's
fragments & done something with them as men desiring women, as for
example, the Canadian poet, Bliss Carman, whose poems after Sappho are
among his best romantic lyrics, mainly because her work constrains his.
Yes, Cavafy, for sure.
And that is a delightfully comic poem by Anacreon, from a time before
such terms as hetero-sexual & homo-sexual came into use....
Doug
On 13-Mar-08, at 10:40 AM, Robin Hamilton wrote:
>> That the passion is for other women seems less important than that it
>> sings.
>>
>> Doug
>
> I'd almost entirely agree with you here, Doug, except that I think
> the assertion or implication of gender-identity can often be quite
> crucial in poetry -- the difference between Cavafy's love poetry,
> and Auden's, for instance.
>
> And while it's impossible exactly to map gender roles between
> Ancient Greece and today, ignoring them manages to spoil the point
> of one of the funniest (and wry, sad, and complicated) of Anacreon's
> epigrams, which turns on how he's {generally considered to be} [in
> our terms] gay:
>
> (my translation:)
>
> ANACREON: Fragment 15
>
> That blond-haired boy, young Eros
> Has tossed me his ball,
> Sent me to play catch
> with the girl in laced sandles.
>
> No luck however; she's from Lesbos,
> That fine island, turns me down flat
> Since my hair has gone grey,
> pants after her other.
>
> Then there's Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 ...
>
> Somewhere, Tom Paulin talks about "the clitoral tic of an accent,"
> and isn't it Wallace Stevens who asserts the Sweet Particularity Of
> Things?
>
> Robin
>
> [Once Scotland's Only Lesbian Poet -- sorree, couldnt resist that!
>
>
>
> R ]
>
Douglas Barbour
[log in to unmask]
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
to rid me of
the ugh in
thought
i spell anew
weave the world
out of the or
binary
bpNichol
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