#sappho inspired poetry

[aurisartblog]

Catullus vere rectior statuit

Numquam cum milia basia tuorum

satisfacta dum lucis brevior sum

Numquam fessa oculos tuos videre ero

Pulcherior mare silvaque quietae est

Semper fac me amica tua anima

[reverie-quotes]

but I am not someone who likes to wound rather I have a quiet mind

— Sappho, If Not, Winter (tr. Carson)

[mythologypaintings]

Sappho Inspired by Love

Artist: Angelica Kauffman (Swiss, 1741-1807)

Date: 1775

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: John and the Marble Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida

Description

Sappho is shown holding a parchment inscribed "ἔλθε μοι καὶ νῦν, χαλέπαν δὲ λῦσον ἐκ μερίμναν" ('So come again and save me from unbearable pain'), the first lines of the last verse of her Ode to Aphrodite in ancient Greek from Joseph Addison's 1735 edition of the work.

[kaleb-is-definitely-sane]

Does anyone else just sit and listen to the wind? Sit and listen as the wind whispers, and try to decipher their secrets? What are the secrets of the winds? They pass, hovering over the face of the stoic earth and the chaotic waters; surely they must know something?

Maybe on the winds are the words we leave unsaid. Maybe on the winds are each “I love you”, each “I’m sorry”, each “I’m… different.” Maybe on the wind is each curse, each rebuttle that was muttered in the prescense of oppression but never spoken loud enough to be heard over the wind. Maybe on the wind is the voice of the Divine, reaching out to us, filling us with life and spirit after our souls have been drained by the drudgery of everyday life.

Maybe it is poetry on the wind.

In the wind, I hear the love-filled melancholic poetry lost to time. But not lost forever: we hear. We know. We remember. We are the someone, in another time, that remembers the beautiful love and the desirous sin that we did in our reckless, wild youth of the past. And this poetry breathes in us, transforming us until we too breathe poetry. Until we too are living poetry.

[whimsicalpaulrevere]

Sappho, the villain, the whore, the elitist

Sappho, the lover, the feminist, the muse

Sappho, the woman

The desiring poet

I do not kneel at your feet

But I cherish your words

In your pages is a soul

Love, desire, unabashedly feminine

The woman you were

Gifted by the muses, unrestrained

I see in the fragments centuries of women

Their hopes, feelings, desires

I see myself, a young sapphic, scared and shameful

I see myself, a grown woman, wishing to be unrestrained

My pen always moving, desiring much

Love from those I love, my virginity so I may be pure, for my pages and mind to be full

Perhaps it is projecting but on pages of words written centuries ago I see a woman

[zombieskae]

That song(Megan Shumway's In Another Time), is so (My oc's) coded. I love and hate it, because it never fails to make me cry

[dream-by-am]

Indeed

[makingqueerhistory]

"Horace wrote in his Odes that Sappho's work was worthy of sacred admiration; she is not someone who can fade away. Her work is known as some of the best poetry of all time, full of wit and eloquence and inspiring other writers for thousands of years to come.

While she lived when she could love other women, each following era seems to struggle with that idea. Some have worked tirelessly to develop theories around her heterosexuality, trying to find a turn of phrase that could prove something that did not exist. Anything to avoid admitting such influential work was written by a queer woman.

Despite all of this, Sappho has become as much a figurehead as she was a poet. Activist groups are named after her. Books are written about her. Queer people themselves identify with her. She is the proof that homosexuality is not new but as old as legends themselves.

She is also proof that through the fires of religious zealots, the carelessness of academic institutions, the fear, the deeply conditional love, queer people remain on the pages of history."

-Harper-Hugo Darling (Sappho)

[17panicattacksinatrenchcoat]

hi caitlin! thanks for the tag

from some WIP poetry i wrote earlier, and am currently editing (for context, it's about sleep paralysis!)

/those nights i wake to find your shadowed arms wrapped up around me/you limbgluer paralysis/multiplying gravity/

(yes, I have been taking heavy inspiration from sappho lately. how could you tell?)

no-pressure tags for mutuals, if you'd like to play, too!

@argyleheir @theinkofbabel @darkluminosity

edit: @nossumusstellae omg I almost forgot to tag you

and open tag for anyone else who would like to contribute!

Last line meme

rules: post the last line that you wrote and tag someone for every word in the line.

Thanks @scienceoftheidiot for tagging! At last i actually wrote something after months of slump. Returned to my most non-pressing wip 😅

In his opinion the latter made her a fair game for sharp comebacks and so they exchanged barbs as often (if not more) than pleasantries.

It's from wip for my smoking-related collection, this time for havolina. I'll take base of 25 and tag 5 😄

Tagging @nichyevosobachka @saecookie @traumschwinge @gerec @khrysopoeia and whoever wants to! 🧡

[macrolit]

NYT's Notable Books of 2023

Each year, we pore over thousands of new books, seeking out the best novels, memoirs, biographies, poetry collections, stories and more. Here are the standouts, selected by the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

AFTER SAPPHO by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Inspired by Sappho’s work, Schwartz’s debut novel offers an alternate history of creativity at the turn of the 20th century, one that centers queer women artists, writers and intellectuals who refused to accept society’s boundaries.

ALL THE SINNERS BLEED by S.A. Cosby

In his earlier thrillers, Cosby worked the outlaw side of the crime genre. In his new one — about a Black sheriff in a rural Southern town, searching for a serial killer who tortures Black children — he’s written a crackling good police procedural.

THE BEE STING by Paul Murray

In Murray’s boisterous tragicomic novel, a once wealthy Irish family struggles with both the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash and their own inner demons.

BIOGRAPHY OF X by Catherine Lacey

Lacey rewrites 20th-century U.S. history through the audacious fictional life story of X, a polarizing female performance artist who made her way from the South to New York City’s downtown art scene.

BIRNAM WOOD by Eleanor Catton

In this action-packed novel from a Booker Prize winner, a collective of activist gardeners crosses paths with a billionaire doomsday prepper on land they each want for different purposes.

BLACKOUTS by Justin Torres

This lyrical, genre-defying novel — winner of the 2023 National Book Award — explores what it means to be erased and how to persist after being wiped away.

BRIGHT YOUNG WOMEN by Jessica Knoll

In her third and most assured novel, Knoll shifts readers’ attention away from a notorious serial killer, Ted Bundy, and onto the lives — and deaths — of the women he killed. Perhaps for the first time in fiction, Knoll pooh-poohs Bundy's much ballyhooed intelligence, celebrating the promise and perspicacity of his victims instead.

CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

This satire — in which prison inmates duel on TV for a chance at freedom — makes readers complicit with the bloodthirsty fans sitting ringside. The fight scenes are so well written they demonstrate how easy it might be to accept a world this sick.

THE COVENANT OF WATER by Abraham Verghese

Verghese’s first novel since “Cutting for Stone” follows generations of a family across 77 years in southwestern India as they contend with political strife and other troubles — capped by a shocking discovery made by the matriarch’s granddaughter, a doctor.

CROOK MANIFESTO by Colson Whitehead

Returning to the world of his novel “Harlem Shuffle,” Whitehead again uses a crime story to illuminate a singular neighborhood at a tipping point — here, Harlem in the 1970s.

THE DELUGE by Stephen Markley

Markley’s second novel confronts the scale and gravity of climate change, tracking a cadre of scientists and activists from the gathering storm of the Obama years to the super-typhoons of future decades. Immersive and ambitious, the book shows the range of its author’s gifts: polyphonic narration, silken sentences and elaborate world-building.

EASTBOUND by Maylis de Kerangal

In de Kerangal’s brief, lyrical novel, translated by Jessica Moore, a young Russian soldier on a trans-Siberian train decides to desert and turns to a civilian passenger, a Frenchwoman, for help.

EMILY WILDE’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FAERIES by Heather Fawcett

The world-building in this tale of a woman documenting a new kind of faerie is exquisite, and the characters are just as textured and richly drawn. This is the kind of folkloric fantasy that remembers the old, blood-ribboned source material about sacrifices and stolen children, but adds a modern gloss.

ENTER GHOST by Isabella Hammad

In Hammad’s second novel, a British Palestinian actor returns to her hometown in Israel to recover from a breakup and spend time with her family. Instead, she’s talked into joining a staging of “Hamlet” in the West Bank, where she has a political awakening.

FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK by Alba de Céspedes

A best-selling novelist and prominent anti-Fascist in her native Italy, de Céspedes has lately fallen into unjust obscurity. Translated by Ann Goldstein, this elegant novel from the 1950s tells the story of a married mother, Valeria, whose life is transformed when she begins keeping a secret diary.

THE FRAUD by Zadie Smith

Based on a celebrated 19th-century trial in which the defendant was accused of impersonating a nobleman, Smith’s novel offers a vast panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters.

FROM FROM by Monica Youn

In her fourth book of verse, a svelte, intrepid foray into American racism, Youn turns a knowing eye on society’s love-hate relationship with what it sees as the “other.”

A GUEST IN THE HOUSE by Emily Carroll

After a lonely young woman marries a mild-mannered widower and moves into his home, she begins to wonder how his first wife actually died. This graphic novel alternates between black-and-white and overwhelming colors as it explores the mundane and the horrific.

THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE by James McBride

McBride’s latest, an intimate, big-hearted tale of community, opens with a human skeleton found in a well in the 1970s, and then flashes back to the past, to the ’20s and ’30s, to explore the town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history.

HELLO BEAUTIFUL by Ann Napolitano

In her radiant fourth novel, Napolitano puts a fresh spin on the classic tale of four sisters and the man who joins their family. Take “Little Women,” move it to modern-day Chicago, add more intrigue, lots of basketball and a different kind of boy next door and you’ve got the bones of this thoroughly original story.

A HISTORY OF BURNING by Janika Oza

This remarkable debut novel tells the story of an extended Indo-Ugandan family that is displaced, settled and displaced again.

HOLLY by Stephen King

The scrappy private detective Holly Gibney (who appeared in “The Outsider” and several other novels) returns, this time taking on a missing-persons case that — in typical King fashion — unfolds into a tale of Dickensian proportions.

A HOUSE FOR ALICE by Diana Evans

This polyphonic novel traces one family’s reckoning after the patriarch dies in a fire, as his widow, a Nigerian immigrant, considers returning to her home country and the entire family re-examines the circumstances of their lives.

THE ILIAD by Homer

Emily Wilson’s propulsive new translation of the “Iliad” is buoyant and expressive; she wants this version to be read aloud, and it would certainly be fun to perform.

INK BLOOD SISTER SCRIBE by Emma Törzs

The sisters in Törzs's delightful debut have been raised to protect a collection of magic books that allow their keepers to do incredible things. Their story accelerates like a fugue, ably conducted to a tender conclusion.

KAIROS by Jenny Erpenbeck

This tale of a torrid, yearslong relationship between a young woman and a much older married man — translated from the German by Michael Hofmann — is both profound and moving.

KANTIKA by Elizabeth Graver

Inspired by the life of Graver’s maternal grandmother, this exquisitely imagined family saga spans cultures and continents as it traces the migrations of a Sephardic Jewish girl from turn-of-the-20th-century Constantinople to Barcelona, Havana and, finally, Queens, N.Y.

LAND OF MILK AND HONEY by C Pam Zhang

Zhang’s lush, keenly intelligent novel follows a chef who’s hired to cook for an “elite research community” in the Italian Alps, in a not-so-distant future where industrial-agricultural experiments in America’s heartland have blanketed the globe in a crop-smothering smog.

LONE WOMEN by Victor LaValle

The year is 1915, and the narrator of LaValle’s horror-tinged western has arrived in Montana to cultivate an unforgiving homestead. She’s looking for a fresh start as a single Black woman in a sparsely populated state, but the locked trunk she has in stow holds a terrifying secret.

MONICA by Daniel Clowes

In Clowes’s luminous new work, the titular character, abandoned by her mother as a child, endures a life of calamities before resolving to learn about her origins and track down her parents.

THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Based on a true story and translated by Lara Vergnaud, Sarr’s novel — about a Senegalese writer brought low by a plagiarism scandal — asks sharp questions about the state of African literature in the West.

THE NEW NATURALS by Gabriel Bump

In Bump’s engrossing new novel, a young Black couple, mourning the loss of their newborn daughter and disillusioned with the world, start a utopian society — but tensions both internal and external soon threaten their dreams.

NORTH WOODS by Daniel Mason

Mason’s novel looks at the occupants of a single house in Massachusetts over several centuries, from colonial times to present day. An apple farmer, an abolitionist, a wealthy manufacturer: The book follows these lives and many others, with detours into natural history and crime reportage.

NOT EVEN THE DEAD by Juan Gómez Bárcena

An ex-conquistador in Spanish-ruled, 16th-century Mexico is asked to hunt down an Indigenous prophet in this novel by a leading writer in Spain, splendidly translated by Katie Whittemore. The epic search stretches across much of the continent and, as the author bends time and history, lasts centuries.

THE NURSERY by Szilvia Molnar

“I used to be a translator and now I am a milk bar.” So begins Molnar’s brilliant novel about a new mother falling apart within the four walls of her apartment.

OUR SHARE OF NIGHT by Mariana Enriquez

This dazzling, epic narrative, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, is a bewitching brew of mystery and myth, peopled by mediums who can summon “the Darkness” for a secret society of wealthy occultists seeking to preserve consciousness after death.

PINEAPPLE STREET by Jenny Jackson

Jackson’s smart, dishy debut novel embeds readers in an upper-crust Brooklyn Heights family — its real estate, its secrets, its just-like-you-and-me problems. Does money buy happiness? “Pineapple Street” asks a better question: Does it buy honesty?

THE REFORMATORY by Tananarive Due

Due’s latest — about a Black boy, Robert, who is wrongfully sentenced to a fictionalized version of Florida’s infamous and brutal Dozier School — is both an incisive examination of the lingering traumas of racism and a gripping, ghost-filled horror novel. “The novel’s extended, layered denouement is so heart-smashingly good, it made me late for work,” Randy Boyagoda wrote in his review. “I couldn’t stop reading.”

THE SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS by Vajra Chandrasekera

Trained to kill by his mother and able to see demons, the protagonist of Chandrasekera’s stunning and lyrical novel flees his destiny as an assassin and winds up in a politically volatile metropolis.

SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS by Ed Park

Double agents, sinister corporations, slasher films, U.F.O.s — Park’s long-awaited second novel is packed to the gills with creative elements that enliven his acerbic, comedic and lyrical odyssey into Korean history and American paranoia.

TAKE WHAT YOU NEED by Idra Novey

This elegant novel resonates with implication beyond the taut contours of its central story line. In Novey’s deft hands, the complex relationship between a young woman and her former stepmother hints at the manifold divisions within America itself.

THIS OTHER EDEN by Paul Harding

In his latest novel, inspired by the true story of a devastating 1912 eviction in Maine that displaced an entire mixed-race fishing community, Harding turns that history into a lyrical tale about the fictional Apple Island on the cusp of destruction.

TOM LAKE by Ann Patchett

Locked down on the family’s northern Michigan cherry orchard, three sisters and their mother, a former actress whose long-ago summer fling went on to become a movie star, reflect on love and regret in Patchett’s quiet and reassuring Chekhovian novel.

THE UNSETTLED by Ayana Mathis

This novel follows three generations across time and place: a young mother trying to create a home for herself and her son in 1980s Philadelphia, and her mother, who is trying to save their Alabama hometown from white supremacists seeking to displace her from her land.

VICTORY CITY by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie’s new novel recounts the long life of Pampa Kampana, who creates an empire from magic seeds in 14th-century India. Her world is one of peace, where men and women are equal and all faiths welcome, but the story Rushdie tells is of a state that forever fails to live up to its ideals.

WE COULD BE SO GOOD by Cat Sebastian

This queer midcentury romance — about reporters who meet at work, become friends, move in together and fall in love — lingers on small, everyday acts like bringing home flowers with the groceries, things that loom large because they’re how we connect with others.

WESTERN LANE by Chetna Maroo

In this polished and disciplined debut novel, an 11-year-old Jain girl in London who has just lost her mother turns her attention to the game of squash — which in Maroo’s graceful telling becomes a way into the girl’s grief.

WITNESS by Jamel Brinkley

Set in Brooklyn, and featuring animal rescue workers, florists, volunteers, ghosts and UPS workers, Brinkley’s new collection meditates on what it means to see and be seen.

Y/N by Esther Yi

In this weird and wondrous novel, a bored young woman in thrall to a boy band buys a one-way ticket to Seoul.

YELLOWFACE by R.F. Kuang

Kuang’s first foray outside of the fantasy genre is a breezy and propulsive tale about a white woman who achieves tremendous literary success by stealing a manuscript from a recently deceased Asian friend and passing it off as her own.

[spacewreck51]

If you ever feel like being one of Deidamia's dancing women or you just love the sound of ancient Greek music please please please listen to Bettina Joy de Guzman! She is multi-instrumentalist ( + uses ancient lutes and lyres in her songs) and historian who performs and composes Ancient Greek, Latin, and world music inspired by classics like the Illiad. She often sings ancient Greek poetry like Sappho and she's very very highly educated so definitely check her out! She has the voice like that of a goddess

[reverie-quotes]

may you sleep on the breast of your delicate friend

— Sappho, If Not, Winter (tr. Carson)

[lord-jen-grey]

when?

When I can, honestly. I love my Petals characters, and I love that story. I genuinely what to share it to make the folks who love it happy.

Part of what is slowing me down is that I’m putting a new book out as we speak, and it’s consumed my life for the last year and a half.

The Brightest Lights

There is definitely some inspiration from Petals in that book (though it’s not the same story). The main character does have a flower obsession and she also receives a few petals of her own. Another of the characters has a fondness for poetry, and recites Dickinson, Teasdale, Sappho, and Wilcox to her love interest.

It’s a big book. As big as some of the Outlander books. It follows 3 love stories over the course of 2 months. The love stories are interconnected. They’re all mental health professionals, and this is a glimpse into their lives.

When you meet the character of Jason Beckett, you might recognize where some of where the inspiration came from regarding his physical description 😏 and personality 🥹.

Lina made some beautiful sketches of the flowers that represent each character. Excerpts are included in the comments of the IG posts below.

So to answer your question, yes, I plan on continuing petals now that this book is done.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jennifer Rose (@jenniferrosewriter)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jennifer Rose (@jenniferrosewriter)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jennifer Rose (@jenniferrosewriter)

[sapphoswhispers]

♡ Sinful Love ♡

⋆｡‧˚ʚ ❀ ɞ˚‧｡⋆

⋆｡‧˚ʚ ❀ ɞ˚‧｡⋆

the passion from their lips soaks into my skin, all eyes baring from within, my sacred desire for demolition,

unholy matrimony in flaming hollows, destined to rule together, wide eyes witnessing our glory,

from their glaring rage, from their preaches I unfollow, from the depths of sin I bask in a joyful story;

laying together hand in hand, I close my eyes and drift into a queerful slumber, feeling their love, I need no other.

Witnessing our shared sin, I need no savior.

⋆｡‧˚ʚ ❀ ɞ˚‧｡⋆

This was a poem I made for my beloved sapphic lover on November 25th, 2024.

Sappho and Lord Apollo are my inspirations for my poetry, and now more than ever, with Trump in office, we can't stop posting queer things.

♡♡♡ We will get through this together ♡♡♡

[whencyclopedia]

Great Ancient Greek Poets

The poets of ancient Greece are among the most famous in the world and established many of the forms still used by artists today. From the epic poetry of Homer to the more intimate works of Sappho of Lesbos, ancient Greek poetry has inspired, and helped to shape, the works of poets for over 2,000 years.

In honor of National Poetry Month in the United States, this collection presents some of the most famous Greek poets of antiquity, along with their muses. Readers are encouraged to explore the many others not included here.

Continue reading...

[billiemilou]

Day 25 of Classicstober is Sappho! A Poet from Lesbos who is famous for her love poetry ❤️

I took inspiration from John William Godwards paintings of Sappho.