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!
>
> <g>
>
> R ]
>
Douglas Barbour
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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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