Sappho's Network is a lesbian network in north-central Indiana that was started
in 1993. At our monthly gatherings we have pitch-ins at various locations, socialize,
and share other activities such as watching lesbian-related videos, playing games, and
softball. Sappho's produces a bi-monthly newsletter Network News. Subscriptions
to Network News, as well as more information on Sappho's Network, can be obtained
by writing to the address below:
Sappho's Network
P.O.Box 118
Kewanna, IN 46939
ABOUT SAPPHO
Sappho (650-590 BC), Greek poet, whose poetry was so renowned that Plato referred to her two centuries after her death as the tenth muse. She was born on the island of Lésvos, probably in Mitylene. Although the details of her life are lacking, it appears that she was of good family and was a contemporary of the lyric poets Alcaeus and Stesichorus. According to tradition, Alcaeus was her lover. Another legend holds that because of unrequited love for the young boatman Phaon she leaped to her death from a steep rock on the island of Levkás. She had a daughter named Cleďs and two brothers.The fragmentary remains of Sappho's poems indicate that she taught her art to a group of maidens, to whom she was devotedly attached and whose bridal odes she composed when they left her to be married. Later writers of antiquity, commenting upon the group, accused Sappho of immorality and vice, from which arose the modern terms for female homosexuality, “lesbianism” and “sapphism.”
Sappho wrote nine books of odes, epithalamia or wedding songs, elegies, and hymns, but the extant fragments are few. They include the Ode to Aphrodite, quoted by the scholar Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the 1st century BC.
Sappho's poems are marked by exquisite beauty of diction, perfect simplicity of form, and intensity of emotion. She invented the verse form known as Sapphics, a four-line stanza in which the first three lines are each 11 syllables long and the fourth is 5 syllables long. Many later Greek poets were influenced by Sappho, particularly Theocritus.
"Sappho," Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1994 Funk & Wagnall's Corporation.
GAY/LESBIAN LINKS:
Indiana's oldest gay/lesbian civil rights and advocacy org
Rainbow Room
Freedom (Gay Search Site)
Gayellow Pages
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