Must You Change Your Life?— Sapphic Soliloquies by Jenny Factor

On Sunday, Jill Alexander Essbaum brought us to the brink of Biblical bliss in a smart, sinuous sermon. On Monday, a day of the week not generally favored in the Biblical sense*, a college friend phoned up to tell me she has decided to leave her marriage in recognition of her growing lesbian identity. I’d last seen her at her April wedding. She’d worn snakeskin boots under her white dress. For what it’s worth, I’ve broken bread with her soulful, milk-gentle husband.

"Poetry books, including one of yours from a few years ago, kept me company," she told me.

Oh no, I thought, feeling instantly light-headed. I don't want to have anything to do with this. Poetry unmakes another life!

More aggravated than supportive, I headed out for a lecture at Antioch University. Eloise Klein Healy (poet and editor of Arktoi Books) was visiting Alistair McCartney’s An Introduction to and Exploration of Queer Literature class. On Monday, the topic was Sappho (6th century songster poet of Lesvos). In recent weeks, this class has covered Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Bishop…

These are my peeps: the women, the queers, the genderqueers. Many of them are also rock-stars featured in the Best American Erotic Poems. (Read my list of favorites here.)

Me? I've long been a fan of Sappho’s. I believe, in fact, that Sappho is our very first (…and possibly only…) non-transgressive lesbian erotic poet!

Transgressive, you ask? Isn't that one of those slippery terms social scientists insist that we define? Okay, let's do that!

When Joe, say, writes an amorous invitation to Sally, and both are unmarried, single, and over the age of 18, this epistle is not transgressive. There is neither a trans (crossing over) nor a gress (regress, egress, congress, aggression nor any other implication of destructively-forceful erotic approach). But add in alcohol (to impair the judgment), a boyfriend on the side (for either Joe or Sally), a prominent fetish (big toe, anyone?), or simply—ahem—a decision that Joe is really Jane, and you've got at least 3500 years of moral and theological constrictive dualistic religion to knock over before that love can thrive.

Transgressive love has to unmake the world a little before it gets on with loving.

All other love only has to knock over the Self.

So Sappho (who existed in the day when Hera could still order Zeus around) was the first non-transgressive lesbian erotic poet because there's not an iota of shame in her. Take a look at this fragmentary sample (quoted from a Mary Barnard translation of Sappho which lends the Bardess a bit of sparse butch bravura, like a pre-Christian Robert Browning):

42 Thank you, my dear

You came, and you did
Well to come: I needed
You. You have made

love blaze up in
my breast—!

By 6PM, Eloise Klein Healy had read "The Singing School" from her book, The Islands Project, and had lifted and descanted the queer lot of us into a merlot-red LA sunset.

Heading to my car, key in hand, I thought of my friend. Is she unmaking a life, or is she making one?

Whatever comes—whatever passion, whatever regret, whatever divine moments of transgression and forgiveness—I wish things for her: strength, agency, courage, dizzy freefall and the footing underneath. But mostly, I wish her love. Real, abiding, creative partnership. I hope she finds that. I hope we all do.

Happy Valentine's Day!

-Jenny Factor

* According to contemporary Jewish theologians, on the Biblical first Monday of the World, God failed to utter the decree “and it was good” while on Wednesday (i.e., today!), God uttered it twice—leading to a universal pleasure in “hump” day, and numerous Kabbalistic Wednesday weddings.

Comments

[Allison Tobey]

Hey Jenny!

It's wonderful to hear a little piece of your life! I've never thought of each poem I write as a sex act, but I am in love with poetry even more now that you mention it.

-Miss Tobey

[Emily Lloyd]

"Transgressive love has to unmake the world a little before it gets on with loving. All other love only has to knock over the Self.
So Sappho (who existed in the day when Hera could still order Zeus around) was the first non-transgressive lesbian erotic poet because there's not an iota of shame in her. Take a look at this fragmentary sample..."

Yes, but--for whom was Sappho writing? Herself, her lover/beloved? In which case, the idea of apology or shame or identity consciousness or politics wouldn't really enter (or be near as likely to enter) into it, would it? How often are we writing in such deliriously pure circumstances?

Good post. Thanks.

[Jenny Factor]

Emily: wonderful comments. Thanks for reading along! As for audience, Eloise Klein Healy had explained that Sappho was widely known and admired in her day. Her poem-fragments--like the one I posted--were in fact found on multiple pieces of papyrus parchment that had been used as fish wrappers. Imagine the way one might get one's groceries wrapped up in old newspapers or playbills--in some commonly found, commonly held item--well that's what these poems were.

Intellectuals of the day waited for each installment eagerly. And evidence indicates that each poem was performed publicly--a group of girls sung and danced to them while someone played a lyre.

So--I guess what I'm saying is that this IS a public expression, however private it may seem.

Emily, don't you have an interesting blog of your own?

-JF

[Emily Lloyd]

Thank you, Jenny--thank you, I (embarrassingly) didn't know any of that. But what I still find interesting is that it was Sappho's audience that made--or the audience was a key player in making--the poems non-transgressive and free of shame--right? The poems were apolitical because of the culture she lived in...whereas now--okay, not a poem, but take the example of the hugely-&-widely banned 2006 children's picture book "And Tango Makes Three"--the true story of two male penguins who formed a family and raised a baby penguin together--the book didn't really get to choose to be non-transgressive--it's all rendered entirely innocently, sweetly, just a story about some penguins, but has been accused of promoting damned lifestyles, etc. So would it be that Sappho was non-transgressive, or that Sappho's audience rendered transgression unnecessary, a moot point? That she could write clearly, purely, without an audience's suspicion...that if she were to write the exact same poems now (or, well, sometime other than when she did), they would be branded transgressive? Is it (more important) that there is no an shame in her work, or that there was no shame in her audience? And that "not an iota of shame" might today be read as "shameless"?

(I have the feeling that this might actually be what you were saying the whole time [grin], and I just read dopily)

Thanks again, glad for your post.

[Kirsten Grimstad]

Jenny,
What a delight to read your blog. Among the many things I enjoyed about it is the reference to Rilke's famous poem in your title. Like Rilke's archaic torso of Apollo, Sappho, too, lingers and shines through the millennia, inspiring lyric poets and countless others to change their lives.

Many thanks for the pleasure of your writing!
Kirsten