Comments on: Sound and Drink

By: Ange

Ange — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:11:06 +0000

I actually argued the same thing in class once, Simon, and got stony silence. Of course, I brought up the fact that Sappho didn’t write in fragments just after a fellow student made an eloquent speech about the essential correspondence between lesbian writing and the fragment, so maybe my timing was off…

By: yesandno

yesandno — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 02:33:17 +0000

Any of you read Laura Sims (that possessive: would it be Sims’s or Sims’–the latter sounds better but I think the former clunky one may be right) book _Practice, Restraint_? Gawd. Talk about spare infusions. Gorgeous. I hope a lot of people are reading her.

By: Simon DeDeo

Simon DeDeo — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 18:47:20 +0000

The funny thing about the use of Sappho here is that the gaps are entirely extrinsic to her own work — I mean, there is nothing fragmentary, cracked, interruptive about her when history allows her to keep going. Far more than most, the uses made of Sappho seem to really confuse the inner and outer.
When I’m in a grouchy mood, I think of this kind of use of Sappho sort of like a 31st century historian digging up — I remember Hugh Kenner making this point — Yeats.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Of course then I have to think of Radi Os — Ronald Johnson’s erasures on Paradise Lost. (i.e., Paradise Lost.)
I suppose, then, in the end how I want to tell people to read Sappho is not as the kind of Niedecker minimalist that she’s often taken for, but as a complex, large-voiced poet (of Hymn to Aprhodite) worn smooth by a complex, heavy-handed history. (My favourite bits are the ones from the grammarians who quoted her to illustrate a construction.)

By: Ange

Ange — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:46:59 +0000

Thanks everyone. I agree Sappho has quite a grip on our imagination: for the lacunae; for the fact that she was a rare celebrated female poet; and perhaps because it represents the triumph over a long period of time of so small a thing as the lyric voice. Small, I mean, in comparison to politics, encapsulated in that wonderful fragment pitting the value of military ships against the person of Anaktoria. How I love what that means for us!
Steve, I’m struggling with your question because I think the success of this mode depends so much on small vagaries of personality. Everyone does it a little differently, so it almost seems like employing a structural form than a style. Does this make sense?

By: Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:25:13 +0000

Thank you for these. And thank you for the Ashbery piece in The Nation. Particularly, grateful to see Girls on the Run discussed with serious consideration.

By: Major

Major — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 11:00:59 +0000

What a lovely utterance!
“There are seasons here / if you squint.”

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:54:12 +0000

These are neat poems. There is a whole tradition, really, of writing in the voice of Sappho–the lacunae seem to open up imaginative spaces–but most don’t rise to the occasion. I think these do, and they share a quality that the best syllabic verse has–a careful weighing out of syllables against words (as opposed to against feet) and line length. (It occurs to me that maybe in this sense all miniaturist verse is syllabic, even if it is in “free” numbers of syllables.)
“Sappho Hears” is a little gem–and isn’t it true, too, about how Sappho (and the poet generally) turns life into lyric. Right from the get-go, there is the interesting texture of “gossip” (a surprising word in context anyway)–those ss’s framed by guttural and plosive which really one wouldn’t be as like to hear in a “thicker” line–and all the gossipy ss’s lengthening into the more resonant “song.” There is the careful framing of Hears and hears, the chime of song and long, the way “it won’t be long” is the longest line in terms of words, the expansion of syllables over a word into the longest word, the tri-syllabic “everyone”–you feel the gossip rippling out. Too much scholia to pour on such a slender thing of course–anyway, thanks for sharing these. It makes me want to go back to haiku stanzas!

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 01:03:36 +0000

I want to read more of both writers now! With such small samples and such salient effects in each poem I find myself drawn, perhaps hastily, to the poets who seem– each terse in her- or himself– to have served as models: Creeley, Niedecker, perhaps the early Reznikoff (the Rez I like)… it can take a while before I see, with such short work, what makes the poets themselves.
Should Graham Foust enter into this discussion of new miniaturism? Does the line re-start with Armantrout? Or should I shut up about precursors before I’ve read more of each of these new-to-me writers? Probably the latter– but I wanted to say something about these neat poems right away.