POETREE

... the most beautiful thing/on the black earth, wrote Sappho, two and a half thousand years ago.

It was twelve and a half million years ago (this, you see, is why I'm a little inexact: what are a few years between friends?) that Lesbos (or Lesvos) was last volcanically active. And yet: and yet. The Aegean has its volcanoes today, that still bring forth fire and brimstone, but they're a long way south, this being the way of subduction zones and time.

The black earth: it suggests richness, perhaps; dampness. But to me, it also suggests volcanic ash, worried and weathered into fertility.

It is not, you understand, that I intend to provide a close geological reading of this fragment: I am given little else to go on, after all. But I wanted to suggest to you that Sappho's choices, here, said not only fertility, but also home.

What I'm really here to do is to give you a necessarily brief overview of what has grown in that soil, through the gulfs of time and silence between us.

(There is - are - also Michael Field, the pen name adopted by a lesbian couple who lived from around 1850 to the beginning of the First World War. The main bulk of their work, prior to 1906, had among its influences the traces of Sappho, as she was understood by Victorians.)

Borges wrote that every writer makes their own precursors: that a work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. I cannot, I'm afraid, tell you much about Sappho's precursors - but I can tell you who I see looking back at me from the shards of fragment 16.

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