Song of a Reformed Headhunter

"Fever Fragments" is written in response to Idra Novey's "As in Cincinnati," which in turn responds to Kimiko Hahn's "these toys." This extending wire of communication, branching out into others, will be published online next summer as Telephone Project, edited by Jonathan Farmer, poetry editor of At Length . Fever Fragments Can you forget what happened before? —Sappho, “Six Fragments for Atthis” The picture is still so clear to me I cannot imagine you cannot see. The fire’s marks are red, and burn; I turn and turn for your return. Then I see what I did not see: you see a different part in me that when the cold and dark return the fire in you will burn and burn. * All smoke now, the white stars, the stupid wax that crouched too fast under the hooded heat. No stub of toe, no crust of tears, no sex but dissipating wisp, finished, incomplete. * I would make accusation a form of love except it has been done before. * ...

Longinus, in A Treatise on the Sublime, describes Sappho's achievement thus: Do you not wonder how she gives chase at once to soul and body, to words and tongue, to sight and colour, as as if scattered abroad, how, at variance within she is frozen and burns, she raves and is wise? For she is either panic-stricken or at point of death; she is haunted not only by one single emotion but their whole company, All things befall a lover, but she took the extremes of love's history and binding them in one achieved a masterpiece (trans. by Frank Granger). The description is alluring, especially given the fact that, not withstanding the recent discovery of a nearly whole poem, all we have of Sappho's poetry are fragments. And few, therefore precious, are the glimpses of poetry in this ALSC conference where the linguistic currency is made up largely of abstraction. I was glad to encounter a poet I did not know in Sarah Barnsley's talk on "Sappho, Mary Barnard and American Mod...