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.