My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them

Sappho (630 BC): Love, I Implore You in Polyester Lapels

11 Sappho Love, I Implore You in Polyester Lapels Michael Broder Iguess you grow up knowing the name Sappho. Maybe it’s got some vague associations in your mind with poetry and love and lesbians, and maybe not—it’s too long ago to remember for sure. But after college I learned ancient Greek and then I began a doctorate in classics, and in 1986 I took Professor Stern’s Greek poetry survey and that’s when I read the famous fragments of Sappho, including the one that begins: Not an army is it on horseback or of foot soldiers or a fleet of sailing ships that on the black earth is the most beautiful thing but rather whatever someone loves (Sappho, fragment 16; all Sappho translations are by the author, based on 12 the Greek text in If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, trans. Anne Carson [New York: Knopf, 2002]). I was twenty-five years old then and falling for my first great love. He was a boy in my class. We sat across from each other in libraries and cafeterias and deserted classrooms and translated Sappho, and he passed me a note that said, “I’m stoned right now.” A few months later he broke up with his boyfriend and made love to me, and a few months after that he vowed never to see me or speak to me again because he was so ashamed of how he’d led me on. Now he’s dead, but I’ve still got the empty Cuervo Gold bottle from that bitter cold night in Coney Island. And I’ve still got Sappho. When I first read Sappho, the space between language and experience disappeared, and where that space had been there was poetry and love, which are nearly the same thing, one being desire , the other being the voice of desire, its melody, its song, its prayer. The boldness of her conception filled me like sails on a windy sea—That man seems to me to be equal to the gods, he who sits opposite you and up close hears your sweet words and pleasant laughter . . . for when I see you, no voice is left me, I go blind, deaf and dumb, I sweat, I tremble, and I am all but dead (Sappho, fragment 31). Her thoughts and feelings came in a flood and she poured their full torrent through a finely turned spout of rhythmic language, which is to say music. She prayed, she praised, she pleaded, she lamented, she empathized—But I say the most beautiful thing is whatever one loves; for Helen, who surpassed all in beauty, left her fine husband behind and went sailing to Troy with no thought for her children or beloved parents, compelled by desire (Sappho , fragment 16). This was what I wanted from poetry, not so much imagery and symbols as what Gregory Orr, in his “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry,” calls “abstract imagination ” (Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World, ed. Gregory Orr and Ellen Bryant Voight [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996], 275), a poetry of ideas and emotions, what the ancient Greeks called sophia, the wisdom of poets, urgent, soaring, Sappho 13 easy to see and hear but impossible to catch, like a squadron of fighter jets on evasive maneuvers. I came oddly late to poetry. As a boy I loved stories, and that meant prose fiction. When I got older I studied poetry as literature but I didn’t really love it the way I once loved A Wrinkle in Time or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. For a long time my only voice was academic, and when I first renewed my creative license, it was for short stories about secret loves and hopeless adolescent longings. My adult narrator—ironic, detached—looked back with wry self-compassion on his own gay coming of age. But I grew impatient with the narrative arc and I yearned for a language of pure climax. In time, my narrative voice became a lyric persona of its own accord, and I transitioned from fiction writer to poet. As I found that new mode, the model I echoed, the chanteuse, as it were, whose stylings I imitated, was Sappho. Before you say a word, I am yours. Take without asking. Don’t explore; don’t discover. Make use—make me do it. In recent work, I...