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I had a splitting migraine the first time I spoke to Eloise Klein Healy on the phone. The idea was that I would breathe through the pain, try to enjoy the conversation with a poet I respect, and keep it short, hoping we could continue the interview the following night. We spoke for an hour as my frontal lobe pounded, my face flushed, and the nausea escalated, symptoms associated with intense migraines. I ended the interview sooner than I wanted to, agreeing to talk again the following evening when my synapses were firing properly.

Feeling better, I called Eloise the following day and confessed to my painful and pathetic state the night before, apologizing for my inability to speak coherently or intelligently about her new collection The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho (ARKTOI). “You did fine,” she reassured me. She then asked Colleen, her partner of twenty years (and to whom The Islands Project is dedicated), about the migraine medicine that she takes. Eloise offered me the name of the medicine. “Try it. It helps Colleen.” This is typical of Eloise. Empathic, intelligent, fair.

My first questions to Eloise fished for her professional biography, and I listened as she retraced an incredible professional history with the humor and modesty that surfaces whenever I hear Eloise pressed to recount her many achievements. She was the founding chair of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. She is the author of six books of poetry, a chapbook, and three spoken word recordings. Passing (Red Hen Press), was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Lesbian Poetry Prize. Artemis In Echo Park (Firebrand Books) was also a finalist for the Lambda Book Award. Women’s Studies Chronicles, a chapbook from The Inevitable Press, appeared in 1998. Ordinary Wisdom, from Paradise Press, was reprinted by Red Hen Press in 2005. Healy was awarded the Horace Mann Award by Antioch University Los Angeles for her contributions to the arts and was simultaneously named Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing.

Eloise’s work has been anthologized in many journals, including Another City: Writing From Los Angeles; California Poetry: From The Gold Rush To The Present; Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals; Grand Passion: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond; The Geography Of Home: California’s Poetry of Place; and The World In Us: Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave. She has been awarded artist’s residencies at The MacDowell Colony and Dorland Mountain Colony and was Guest Writer at Ohio University in 2004. Healy was also the recipient of a COLA Fellowship from the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Los Angeles and a California Arts Council Grant. Eloise directed the Women’s Studies Program at California State University Northridge and taught in the Feminist Studio Workshop at The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. She is the co-founder of ECO-ARTS, an eco-tourism/arts venture. In 2006, she established ARKTOI, an imprint with Red Hen Press that focuses on writing by lesbian authors.

As we continue our conversation, I mention Edward Hirsch’s analogy of how a poem is like a message in a bottle, one that a poet releases from across time and that eventually chooses a random reader. I wonder if Sappho’s poetry is like this for Eloise—like fragments floating down through the ages to find a lesbian poet in Southern California, clear across the Atlantic. I ask her if she’s ever tried singing the poems in her collection. Although Eloise has written music and can read music, it hadn’t crossed her mind. This is indicative of Eloise’s insistence that she is not copying Sappho, not imitating her in the least. This becomes clear after one read. The collection is far more than homage. It is a conversation between two women who knew each other without meeting face to face.

I remember the slide show of photographs Eloise presented to graduate students two years ago during her lecture on Sappho in my third semester at Antioch University. Eloise had assigned Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho for the students to read in preparation for the lecture. As an MFA student earning my degree in poetry, I had limited knowledge of the female Greek lyric poet who lived sometime between 630 BC and 612 BC and was purported to be a lesbian. I learned that while many of her complete poems were destroyed, there are fragments that remain—some of them found in ancient trash heaps or wrapped around corpses.

I found in Sappho’s work a woman who is both confessional and Zen, both fiery and resigned. Her voice maintains its authority even in its fragmented state. Her love songs to young girls are sincere and desperate. Her writing is honest, emotional, and intellectual. Her legacy, though in tatters, continues to inspire writers today. Eloise is not the first poet to acknowledge Sappho’s influence. Plato compared her to Socrates and labeled her “the tenth muse.” She was “The Poetess,” providing the feminine view of life, beauty, and love.