After Hearing Two New Poems of Sappho Have Been Discovered

The assignment was to write an acrostically inspired poem, based loosely on another which was an assignment loosely based on a poem by Camille Dungy called, "Because it looked hotter that way" .  All week, I couldn't get the discovery of new Sappho poems out of my head, so, I wrote about that. What struck me most about the news were not her poems, but the articles about the poems and how they focused almost entirely on how these poems would help fill in the biographical gaps (about Sappho's brother, etc.).  And I thought, really?  We have re-discovered poems by one of the best poets who has ever lived and we are most excited about how they will tell us more about her history? 


Last night, I had the great honor of coaching two high school girls in the Poetry Out Loud county competition for Sonoma County.  It's a national program I've been participating in as a coach for the past four or five years.  And what I saw, what the whole audience experienced as the girls recited their poems, was not Emily Dickinson's secrets about her recluse life.  They weren't Theodore Roethke's dismal tales of his battle with depression.  They were universal threads of some lyric tapestry that we all share and feel.  Why on earth would we give a shit about biographical gaps when we could listen discover this?

So, here's my draft, which take's H.D.'s "Oread" as an acrostic base. 

After Hearing Two New Poems of Sappho Have Been Discovered

Rise up, text! After so many years sunk under the wine dark sea—ballasted by
the idea of a girl constructed of bone and flesh.  Rise up!  Conglomerate of
bedrock. Lava wound. Rock constructed of voice poured over voice. (Lava cools rock hard).
No one’s fault the centuries are thick and slurring their words. History is, after all,
a Wikipedia page featuring corporate edits—When the papyrus is found it has gone mute behind glass.  It  decorates a marble hallway.

Why is it that when the ballast gives way and the words rise like lost wooden ships, we search their rich dark hulls for biographical gaps? Why not, instead, climb those threadbare sails, feel the Sirrocos winds warm our skin and look out toward s glittering sea, we’d though we’d lost the language to breathe.

What Sappho and Online Learning Have in Common

Last week, I had the pleasure of teaching a f2f workshop on online learning in Clarion, PA.  The class was made up of about 20 professors who teach women's studies courses across Pennsylvania.  It was a great workshop!  One of the topics we spoke about what how when you teach online, you need to think like Sappho.  Don't be stifled by technology as it is.  Instead, reinvent it!  In one of Sappho's most famous fragments, fragment 31, she writes the following:
That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits in thy presence, and hears close to him thy sweet speech

In this poem, she compares the man who gets to sit next to the women she loves to a god.  Now, in Greek poetry before Sappho (most famously in Homer) the only people who were compared to Gods were war heroes.  But, Sappho wasn't talking about war, she was talking about love and she needed a way to embody the emotion she was writing about it.  So, she thought differently and reinvented an existing motif.

When we think about how to use technology to enhance our online classes, we have to think the same way. Not, what is the technology and how is it best used.  Rather, how can I reinvent this technology in order to best use it in my class.