Vox Populi
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Deborah Bogen: Risk
In Sappho, the spaces name nothing — but the emptiness still speaks. Here, it says, is where you must imagine a fullness. The right verb. A noun that works.
Sometimes nothing comes. Then you must go slack and let your mouth form the O of emptiness, of zero, of no-idea-at-all. That way the poem will still be at work. Inside you. Nudging you toward life’s true question — how well do you handle risk?
Can you imagine your thoughts mending Sappho’s? In your hand there’s a residue. In your hand, there’s a disfigured beauty in which an urgency remains.
Deborah Bogen’s books include In Case of Sudden Free Fall (Jacar, 2018).
Copyright 2020 Deborah Bogen
This may not be an accurate likeness, as it was
painted several centuries after her death.
Sappho was described in her lifetime as being
“small, dark and ugly” and “violet haired, pure,
honey smiling.”
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“Pompeian fresco of a woman generally believed to be Sappho.
This may not be an accurate likeness, as it was
painted about a century after her death.”
This is a mistake. Sappho lived several hundred years before the days of Pompeii.
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Thanks, Robert. I’ve corrected the text.
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Thank you. I have been experimenting with spaces, emptiness.
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Received this today and I thought you might be interested.
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Such a beautifully accurate statement…. keeping it so I can relight my desire to keep going.
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