Hearing Sappho in New Orleans: The Call of Poetry from Congo Square to the Ninth Ward (Southern Literary Studies)

While sifting through trash in her flooded New Orleans home, Ruth Salvaggio discovered an old volume of Sappho's poetry stained with muck and mold. In her efforts to restore the book, Salvaggio realized that the process reflected how Sappho's own poems were unearthed from the refuse of the ancient world. Undertaking such a task in New Orleans, she sets out to recover the city's rich poetic heritage while sifting through its flooded debris. "Hearing Sappho in New Orleans" is at once a meditation on this poetic city, its many languages and cultures, and a history of its forgotten poetry. Using Sappho's fragments as a constant companion and guide, Salvaggio roams the streets and neighborhoods of the city as she explores the migrations of lyric poetry from ancient Greece through the African slave trade to indigenous America and ultimately to New Orleans, a city where lyric voice has flourished for centuries.