After Sappho

by Selby Wynn Schwartz

In dry voices they went on about the aorist tense, while inside ourselves we felt the leaves of trees shivering in the light, everything dappled, everything trembling.

this feeling that Sappho calls aithus-somenon, the way that leaves move when nothing touches them but the afternoon light.

Lina listened only to the silence of stars.

The genitive is a case of relations between nouns. Often the genitive is defined as possession, as if the only way one noun could be with another were to own it, greedily. But in fact there is also the genitive of remembering, where one noun is always thinking of another, refusing to forget her.

For the girl who wishes to avoid being trampled down by the feet of men, Sappho recommends the farthermost branch of the highest tree. There are always those rare few, Sappho notes, that the applepickers forgot—/no, not forgot: were unable to reach.

she had gone out of the back window and into the pine tree to read poems from a century less muffled in fabric.

She had her own ways of escaping the century.

It is while invoking the one who abides and yet must be called, urgently, from a great distance, that Sappho writes of aithussomenon, the bright trembling of leaves in the moment of anticipation. A poet is always living in kletic time, whatever her century. She is calling out, she is waiting. She lies down in the shade of the future and drowses among its roots. Her case is the genitive of remembering.

She seemed volatile, alchemical. Something might flash through her and change everything. As Sibilla Aleramo would say to us later, Lina was a violent, luminous wave.

Often that was the first thing we did when we were changing: we would find a sister and stay with her, taking breakfast in our room.

At her graduation in 1886, when she was decried as a pathological perversion of femininity, Anna Kuliscioff paused briefly to recite the correct medical definition of ‘pathogenesis’. Then she took her degree.

A new name was like a blank notebook; Rina could write herself into it.

A poet is someone who stands on the door sill and sees the room before her as a sea whose waves she might dive through. Lina took her breath in and then strode into the crowd, the shoals of jutting shoulders, the swelling of conversations and the sweep of skirts all around her; finally, arriving at Sibilla, she exhaled, triumphant. At the rush of breath on the back of her neck, Sibilla turned, and there was Lina with her eyes molten. A poet is someone who swims inexplicably away from the shore, only to arrive at an island of her own invention.

the only thing she feared was compromise, the soothing voice that licks down rage until it is nothing but a small smooth lump in your hand.

Anna Kuliscioff clenched her rage jagged and whole in her heart.

we wanted what half the population had got just by being born, and then we wanted to change how it had got that way.

As Sibilla Aleramo wrote in her article, We want women to become human beings: to be at last as free, autonomous, and fully alive as we have until now been subjugated, oppressed, and kept quiet.

At the end of the play, when Nora’s husband insists that above all she must be a wife and a mother, Nora replies, I believe that I am first and foremost a human being, just as much as you – or, at least, that I’ll try to become one. Then she leaves.

Somehow the indescribable parts of Lina made the earth itself falter and skip.

You could hardly have a walk without the world suggesting an ode, an elegy.

Lina Poletti was a brash young poet who believed that if you wanted someone, you wrote verses that poured violets into her lap. You led her down to dewy riverbanks in the evening and you made sure that when she arose again, mosses feathery in her hair, she would never be the same.

Nightmares are the visits of what has come before you undead. They claw into the seam that should sew up your life. They hiss the ancient fates that will have undone you in your very bed, how you could not move while the whole city was falling around you in blood and firelight. The entrails of birds will lie on the stones of your dreams, making signs.

One of the Stephens reported back to the others in 1921 that Laura was still jabbering constant nonsense; the only intelligible phrase she uttered was, I told him to go away.

They stammered and screamed because there was no language in their own language for what they knew.

There had been quite enough of women being given, she thought. It was time for women to write into being what they wanted to become.

Aurel hoped that women writers would disobey the laws that bound men’s books.

there was no way for Renée to translate the impossibly delicate phrases without crushing them bruised in her hands.

Sibilla Aleramo believed that women should become poets rather than the seamstresses of their own enslavement,

Nora was leaving the man who had married her while never noticing she was human. Nora was clicking the door shut on a century of women whose only verb had been to marry. The wet salt burning in Rina’s eyes was not crying, exactly. It was the century leaving the body.

Ellida was who Nora finally became, eighteen years after leaving the man who had kept her in a doll’s house. After she left all of the men who were that man.

A woman, Lina wrote, is someone who gathers the threads of her life into her hands and goes onwards.

What if you cannot write a word that captures what your beloved is?

understand that Lina in these dry rages was devoured by a flame, that she burnt and burnt at the injustices done to women until she scorched her own life.

we were like a chorus that does not yet know if this will be a tragedy.

An invert is not exactly someone thought backwards. An invert is someone thought in a different order.