After Sappho

A poet is someone who stands on the door sill and sees the room before her as a sea whose waves she might dive through. … A poet is someone who swims inexplicably away from the shore, only to arrive at an island of her own invention.

…the only thing she feared was compromise, the soothing voice that licks down rage until it is nothing but a small smooth lump in your hand.

Have you forgotten that a poet lies down in the shade of the future? She is calling out, she is waiting. Our lives are the lines missing from the fragments. There is the hope of becoming in all our forms and genres. The future of Sappho shall be us.

There is always this risk, in life, that we have our parts in a tragedy and we do not know it.

But some of us have always seen the modern world as a sea meant to drown us.

An invert is not exactly someone thought backwards. An invert is someone thought in a different order. A part that others display on the outside, like a bronze breastplate, is instead chambered in the heart. Or inverts may have their warmest parts turned outwards, like orchids or octopuses.

Her dreams were otherworldly birds. They flew out of a stunted yew tree in the garden of her childhood and circled the roof of her house, cawing, years of their hoarse cries and black wings.

The death of a child makes a barbaric sound, even in print.

A poet is always living in kletic time, whatever her century. She is calling out, she is waiting. She lies down in the shade of the future and drowses among its roots. Her case is the genitive of remembering.

A poet is someone who who swims inexplicably away from the shore, only to arrive at an island of her own invention

Nightmares are the visits of what has come before you undead. They claw into the seam that should sew up your life. They hiss the ancient fates that will have undone you in your very bed, how you could not move while the whole city was falling around you in blood and firelight. The entrails of birds will lie on the stones of your dreams, making signs.

We remembered Cassandra telling us that we would invert the order of things: time would turn inside out around us like a portrait swallowing its own frame.

Aurel hoped that women writers would disobey the laws that bound men’s books. It was time for women to take language for themselves, Aurel said, even one word at a time, to take their own names and become. To become even one word.

An actress, Eva confided to Natalie, is someone who still believes in the ancient rites. There may be electric lights and rigging, there may be satin and cinematography, but an actress herself is always at Delphi. She stands on the splintered floorboards as if amid the great stone circles of seats, the temple of Apollo rising at her back. An actress is like a sibyl, she sees after and towards at the same time.

We were going to be sappho, but how did Sappho begin to become herself? P.

Now bareback by pale steed, now limping heroically, Julian traversed the chapters of Challenge with a manly grace Vita began to envy; for what was a man's life but the inalienable right to verbs of action?

Readers according to Colette were like lovers. The best were attentive, intelligent, exigent, and promiscuous. She urged us to read widely and well, to seek out precisely the novels prohibited to us and lie down for hours in bed with them.

Generally the citizens of great empires did not wish to understand Cassandra. She was a foreigner. She was always seeing serpents and flames, birds and blood. She was always saying that she had seen this future before.

Moreover Hamlet was wilful and proud, like Sarah.

To Lina Poletti, actresses were like verbs as yet unconjugated: they contained in themselves the heady potential for any deed, any command, any future. It was by their brave hands that an object would bear its action.

X was not a willing housewife. X remained unmoved by squalling infants, would not wear skirts that swaddled the stride, had no desire to be pursued by the hot breath of young men, failed to enjoy domestic chores, and possessed none of the decorous modesty of maidenhood.

The only thing she feared was compromise, the soothing voice that licks down rage until it is nothing but a small smooth lump in your hand.

They called their villa Trait d’union, or The Hyphen: the mark of a union, the juncture between two individual subjects who do not obliterate each other but rather remain linked at a single, voluntary point.

…character goes underground before we are born, like the winding mass of roots that were weave down through the soil, anchoring an oak tree to this madly spinning planet.

When will you arrive? Why is your radiance distant from my eyes? You drop through the branches when I sleep at the roots. You pour yourself out like the light of an afternoon and yet somewhere you linger, outside the day.