Welcome to Annie Finch’s Poetry Witchery!

Dear Magical Being,

Our bodies endow us with the birthright of poetry’s spells. Our breath and our blood beat with power that harks back to meter’s multiplicitous rhythms, uniting conscious and unconscious, body and mind, spirit and will. Invited to open and play by the pleasure of words in a rhythm, our brains spin language from left-brain’s logical ways out through the permeable, vibrant realm of musical magical meaning.

This is what poetry always has done, since millenia before the dawn of writing. And this is what poetry still does, the moment we take on permission to open our bodies as well as our minds to its unabashed pleasures.

Our capacities to absorb poetry have not gone anywhere. We are as human as we ever were! “Meter,” “mother,” and “matter”come from the same proto-Indo-European root. You might not know it to look at contemporary poetry, but meter, our magical mother, still matters. Annie Finch’s Poetry Witchery invites it to matter more: to poetry, to ourselves and our lives, and to our world’s chances of survival —even triumphant transformation!—through an unprecedented era.

The most ancient, matricultural (woman-centered) societies used meter as a central tool for raising energy, tending knowledge, strengthening identity, healing, and connecting with the divine. We too can find power, wisdom, strength, healing, and devotion in the power of metrical poetry. This blog is all about how—and what that might look like. Through meter, form, scansion, magic, and poetry (with witchcraft, matricarchy, and feminism posted in the Annie Finch’s Witchery section), we will explore how we can use the rhythms of language to lead us home to a more sustainable, holistic, and echanted way of being human.

Will you join me at play in the fields of meter and magic? Will you tap with me down into your own poetry witchery? Whether you’re a poetry lover, a poet, a witch, or anyone in between, you are invited to join the conversation! Thanks for joining the circle!

Yours in love, magic, and poetry,

Annie Finch