Welcome to Annie Finch's Five Directions
Poems, Meters, Matriarchy, Community, and Magic
Welcome, friend, to this magical, matriarchal, poetic world!
Below is the story of the site. Or, you can just dive into the Quick Guide, then select all or any of the Five Directions on the menu for your subscription pleasure!
Love,
QUICK FIVE DIRECTIONS GUIDE
SOUTH: POEMS
South is the direction of desire, passion, sex, will, transformation, & creativity. Here I share poems, chants, some sexiness, and my experiences as a poet.
EAST: POETICS
East is the direction of the mind, clarity, perspective, intention, and insight. Here are writings on poetics, scansion, and the magic of metrical diversity.
NORTH: MATRIARCHY
North is the direction of earth, the body, abundance, and the world we live in. Here you will find teas and recipes, culture and feminism, animals and amulets.
WEST: PODCAST
West is the direction of the heart, connection, love, healing, and community. Here, magical guests join our healing spiral in the rhythms of life and of poetry.
CENTER: MAGIC
Center is the Direction of magic, spirit, ceremony, ancestors, and intuition. Here are treasures, traces to bless us through the matrix all being shares in.
CENTER: MAGIC
Center is the Direction of magic, spirit, ceremony, ancestors, and intuition. Here are treasures, traces to bless us through the matrix all being shares in.
A STORY OF FIVE DIRECTIONS
Once upon a time there was a poet. Incantation surrounded her. She was a child of poets and magic-weavers going back to Celtic bards, Norse volurs, and witches imprisoned at Salem. She grew up with rhythms, with meters. The words of her family’s voices, the blowing branches of trees, the pulsing of electric powers in her hands, all rose into pattern to sing with her, dance with her.
Following this beloved path, she earned a Ph.D and spent decades as writer, performer, teacher, editor, translator, scholar, playwright, reviewer, critic, feminist activist, ritualist, mystic, and community-builder—all anchored in a passion for the profound, effective joy of the rhythms and structures of poetry.
But entering her wisdom years, she found her poetic life overwhelming. She had learned to complete a poem, channel it in an instant or labor over it for decades, whatever it took to harmonize its parts into a singing spell of transformative wholeness. But what the multifarious poetic career that shaped her waking and sleeping—the poem of her life? How could she channel its rhythms, understand its structure, complete it?
It wouldn’t be easy. It took thirteen years in ritual womencircles; thousands of pages of diagramming, journaling, and musing; tens of thousands of dollars dissolved in a business; hundreds of hours working in multiple healing modalities; and five initiatory tattoos.
But after all that transformation she did find, like the shocking perfection of a fully completed poem, a harmonious, vibrant pattern that arranged the complexity of her poetic role into a glowing whole, a simple design that a brilliant “tattoo fairy” etched onto her left forearm.
The pattern her life demanded was based on the womencircle’s magic ring, akin to ancient sacred circles. With the Five Directions corresponding to Will, Mind, Body, Heart, and Spirit, each role found its place: poet; speaker & writer; witch; teacher; ritual performer.
As I emerge from that thirteen-year-old chrysalis with the Five Directions as a structure underlying my life and work, I am astonished and grateful. The journey has continued. The Five Directions offer a beautiful way to understand numerous other aspects of life: elements, skills, colors, visual patterns, teas, jewelry, clothing, sex, recipes, body movements, Goddesses, perfumes, ritual structures, book organization, and of course poetic meters. The Five Directions have also been shown to help people cope with decisions or any situation where clarity or balance is needed.
I am bemused that, as I enter my Wisdom Years, my work on mistressing meters has led me into a tool with broader uses than poetry itself. After a lifetime of fierce, devoted loyalty to the art and craft and calling of poetry, it’s been challenging to get used to, even though of course I still write poems. Sometimes, to find myself teeming with this new kind of thinking can feel like a betrayal, in this culture where writing poems is considered a “career.”
But then I remember that the magical structures of meters led me inevitably to this wider structure. They were gateways into the same five roles that poets in other meter-based cultures I have visited or learned about have taken on, from a Huichol medicine man I have worked with to Siberian shamans to African griots to my Norse and Celtic ancestors. And it makes sense. A lifetime of work in Meters teaches us to find meaning and pattern in life, to see below surfaces, and to change energy at will, the witch Starhawk’s definition of magic. Since meditating in Meters is how I became a philosopher, witch, teacher, and ritualist in the first place, I can now accept these jobs as a natural extension of being a poet in the world.
That’s why I have renamed this blog (formerly Poetry Witchery) as Five Directions. The framework of the Five Directions encompasses and profoundly illuminates the tools of poetry witchery and meter magic, for sure. But its implications are helpful in so many more ways to people who may not even be thinking about poetry.
On this blog, the Five Directions are manifested in the Five Directions described below. You can subscribe to any or all of them separately using the Sections button in your settings.
Enjoy!
A BIT ON ME…
I am, as my tattoo records, a poet, speaker/writer, enchanter, teacher, and ritual performance artist. I use my expertise in poetic craft to ensure that my poems, spells, and rituals are gifts for the ear and body, not only the mind. My work empowers women and calls up the Divine Feminine. I am also the editor of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion and a feminist helping midwife a matriarchal rebirth for the survival of our sacred planet.
I have published seven books of poetry, most recently Spells (Wesleyan U. Press) and a dozen books on poetic theory, craft, and form including Villanelles, The Body of Poetry, and the textbook A Poet's Craft. My poetry has appeared onstage at Carnegie Hall and in The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. I believe poems exist beyond time. I follow the creative trajectory of my poems unstintingly; while some arrive all at once, it is not unusual for me to spend ten or twenty years finishing a poem. I have a Ph.D from Stanford and have taught and performed across the world. I am currently writing a new memoir, a book on contemporary abortion politics, a book on meter, and a collection of poetms. You can learn more at my website.
yours in poems, meters, matriarchy, and magic —
Annie
Annie Finch's Five Directions is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
AND FINALLY… A CAULDRON OF LINKS!
THANKS FOR JOINING THE MAGIC!
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