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To Make a Poet Black
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These are lines from a lyric known as “Fragment 47” composed by the poet Sappho who lived in the late seventh century BC at Mytilene, the largest city on the island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea. In the poet Anne Carson’s translation, this is how it reads:
Eros shook my
mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees
Two thousand six hundred years later, this line is still fresh. Even if we translated Eros not as a god but, more secularly, with the eros translatable to our familiar word “love,” there is still something decisively original in it. What makes Sappho’s lyric so striking? What she is describing is so common that the clichés of “falling in love” or “love at first sight” are automatic to us. Yet the lines above sound nothing like a Hallmark card. They have a definite point of view, but they are entirely free of didacticism. There is no judgment from on high; this is not a maxim intended to impress us with the poet’s wit or insight. Sappho is not speaking to a collectively culled piece of accepted wisdom. She is not idealizing a high sentiment nor satirizing a human weakness. Instead, she concentrates entirely on the roiling life of her own subjectivity. Her language draws upon and pulls into itself the imaginative resources of empirical observation, what William Carlos Williams called “the imaginative qualities of actual things.” The power of language to mirror the physical world is transfigured by inverting its location and reflecting it back to us as an interior landscape.
These are lines from a lyric known as “Fragment 47” composed by the poet Sappho who lived in the late seventh century BC at Mytilene, the largest city on the island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea. In the poet Anne Carson’s translation, this is how it reads:
Eros shook my
mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees
Two thousand six hundred years later, this line is still fresh. Even if we translated Eros not as a god but, more secularly, with the eros translatable to our familiar word “love,” there is still something decisively original in it. What makes Sappho’s lyric so striking? What she is describing is so common that the clichés of “falling in love” or “love at first sight” are automatic to us. Yet the lines above sound nothing like a Hallmark card. They have a definite point of view, but they are entirely free of didacticism. There is no judgment from on high; this is not a maxim intended to impress us with the poet’s wit or insight. Sappho is not speaking to a collectively culled piece of accepted wisdom. She is not idealizing a high sentiment nor satirizing a human weakness. Instead, she concentrates entirely on the roiling life of her own subjectivity. Her language draws upon and pulls into itself the imaginative resources of empirical observation, what William Carlos Williams called “the imaginative qualities of actual things.” The power of language to mirror the physical world is transfigured by inverting its location and reflecting it back to us as an interior landscape.
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This density is what makes poetry a literature, which is to say it cannot exist without roots, without knowledge of earlier bodies of poetic expression. This is why when “Instapoetry” proudly declares itself a form of unknowing, it denies itself the power of the thing it claims to be. When the Instagram poet Charly Cox, for instance, writes of the history of poetry that “I didn’t know a thing,” but that it doesn’t matter because “I just knew how to feel,” the hollowness and, yes, the narcissism are distressingly naïve. Every poet from Sappho to Simone White has known that getting feeling into language isn’t the same thing as having feelings.
This density is what makes poetry a literature, which is to say it cannot exist without roots, without knowledge of earlier bodies of poetic expression. This is why when “Instapoetry” proudly declares itself a form of unknowing, it denies itself the power of the thing it claims to be. When the Instagram poet Charly Cox, for instance, writes of the history of poetry that “I didn’t know a thing,” but that it doesn’t matter because “I just knew how to feel,” the hollowness and, yes, the narcissism are distressingly naïve. Every poet from Sappho to Simone White has known that getting feeling into language isn’t the same thing as having feelings.