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FLOWER WHO WATERS ME

Trust me with growing too; how still I am,
Flower who opens my heart to run cool,
Trusting the rain, and the earth and the stem,

Cupped by the blossoms that bend without shame.
Flower who waters me, open my will;
Trust me with growing, too. How still I am.

Here comes a petal, as strong as a gem,
Guiding me down to where starlight meets soil,
Trusting the rain and the earth. And the stem—

Healing the touches I can overcome,
Flower who waters me, watches me wild,
Trust me with growing, too. How still I am:

Moving, I send my seeds. They are not tame;
Fertile, they're rooting to ring out a bell,
Trusting the rain, and the earth. And the stem—

Time-tongued and velvet and rough-cornered calm
Turning to, turning from — shattered, all full.
Trust me. With growing, too, how still I am,
Trusting the rain, and the earth. And the stem—

First published in Puerto del Sol & will appear in my next book, Amulet.

#SpeakItThrice!

Want to invite the power of Meter Magic into your own life and words?

Then come experience the Meter Magic Journey.

In addition to special events, I offer three ongoing options to join me in the Meter of the Month:

• Spellcasting Circle, first Wednesday, 4 pm PT

• Advanced Meter Magic Class, third Sunday, 11 am PT

• Meter Magic Spiral, online community with monthly meter

Click for more information and to register
(Members of Meter Magic Spiral receive a 15% discount on tuition)

TAKE ME TO THE MAGIC

This still-unfinished poem poured out late one night at a cabin in the woods, on the closest piece of paper I could find: the dedication page to my book-in-progress, "Invocation to the Five Directions" (now called "Amulet") which was at the time dedicated to Brigid, the Celtic Goddess of poetry and healing:

Because Orion lies for me,
a glitter-man who makes me free
above the mountains...

It’s a wild ride nowadays, isn’t it? Spring is coming so fast that the wind and the sun and the budding of my life is well-nigh overwhelming, which is maybe why increasingly I find myself coming back to strange turns of phrases from some past life or generation, like “well-nigh." They comfort me. They intrigue me. They make me shake my head at the mysteries of it all, from healing ancestral trauma, to channeling the fervent urgency of seismic spiritual change in the midst of the current mordant thrash, to building my legacies of meter and magic with amazing poets and witches from younger generations.

And, as I FINALLY assemble, this time I think for good, the new collection of poems—the one I have been working on steadily for over fifteen years now—I've simultaneously been gathering some elder poems as well and finding them, blessedly, mercifully, still finished. They really did click shut like

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Dear Subscribers,

Enheduanna, poet and priestess of the Goddess Inanna wrote just at the dawn of patriarchy. This powerful woman was the first poet ever to sign their name to their work. My poem addressed to Enheduanna, which I’ve been working on for over a decade, will appear in my next manuscript of poems. For various reasons, I need to keep it under wraps right now, much as I would love to ask everyone’s opinion! So this vote is just for paid subscribers.

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Dear ones, I am stuck, so please let me know asap in the poll, and if you like in the comments, which version of the poem you prefer? As you can see, the only difference between the two versions

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This video shares a happy day years later: a reading at Harold Washington College in Chicago, April 2012, with contributors and coeditor Marie-Elizabeth Mali celebrating the launch of Villanelles from Everymans Library--complete with its little silk bookmark. Came across the video today and realized it had never been shared before; just posted it on youtube for the first time but thought I’d share it here also because the meter makes me happy. After all, August is amphibrach month in Meter Magic Spiral.

(and here’s a special invitation for all the anthology contributors who may see this (and anyone else who would like to) to comment below! I would love to hear from you! xxo Annie)

BEACH OF EDGES

A drift of snow edges a new drift of sand
As edges grow deeper.  It’s March, month of edges.
Wet rocks yield to pebbles like opening hands.

The glisten of rockweed trails, splutters, and bends,
And sparkles of rivulets bounce down in ledges.
A drift of snow edges a new drift of sand;

It’s March, month of edges, and I’m left to stand
Alone outside time as new light pulls and nudges
Wet rocks.  Yield to pebbles like opening hands,

Light; pull me from winter.  How have I planned
For light that’s not winter, for live light that fledges
A drift of snow, edges a new drift of sand

Beyond my last sight, and waves me like a wand
Out back over the surges of these rocking sedges?
Wet rocks yield to pebbles like opening hands;

I want to go back to him, as to the land;
light, carry me over from the wild old grudges.
A drift of snow edges a new drift of sand;
Wet rocks yield to pebbles like opening hands.

From Spells: New and Selected Poems by Annie Finch (Wesleyan University Press, 2013) and Villanelles (Penguin/Random House, 2012). Copyright Annie Finch.

Venus of Willendorf, 25,000 BC

PPS As of November 2024, I have decided to close the Patreon amd fold all those witchly posts into this Substack. You will soon find them in the section right here called Annie Finch’s Poetry Witchery! (I am keeping this post as is just to provide herstorical context).

Poetry was my first spiritual path. For a long time, the Muse was all the Goddess I knew, all the Goddess I needed. But gradually I began to realize that the Goddess was bigger than poetry for me. Did that mean that I left poetry? No. It meant that I enlargd poetry.

It was a long, long transition for me. Here is an adaptation of a piece I published at the Poetry Foundation in 2009 that includes a stilll earlier piece that describes the beginning of the journey:

Muse-Goddess

There are many stigmas attached to any kind of spirituality now, and pagan/earth/goddess-centered perspectives are particularly invisible (years ago at AWP, Renee Olander, Lucinda Roy, Tim Seibles, and I did a riotously-well-attended panel on the poetry of earth-centered spirituality at which everyone lamented that gatherings and collections of contemporary spiritual poetry routinely include only poets of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic line, and Buddhists.) But to me, there is a special connection between poetry and the Goddess.

Years ago, I wrote the following story about the Muse:

. . .How did I come to think, as a young child who wanted to be a poet, that I had no Muse? The story rides on the kind of convoluted misunderstandings to which children are prone, yet in another sense its logic is impeccable. As far as I can reconstruct it, my reasoning used to go like this:

1. "A woman who concerns herself with poetry should . . . be a silent Muse and inspire the poets by her womanly presence,” wrote Robert Graves. I read this famous statement often enough, stated directly or indirectly, to absorb the idea that not only must Muses of course be female, but, more importantly for me, females must, presumably, be Muses.

2. Men, at least the men in my childhood Bible, Oscar Williams' Immortal Poems of the English Language, address poems to women Muses. And they also address poems to women whose sexuality they desire or fear or admire. Therefore, according to my reasoning, male poets must have a heterosexual relationship with their Muses akin to the one they have with those other women who appear in their poems, Stella or Laura or Julia or Chloris or the Coy Mistress.

3. And therefore, the Muse must be a heterosexual, man-identified woman. Why should she be interested in women poets then? As feminist critics Gilbert and Gubar finally put it, years later, "is the pen a metaphorical penis?" No wonder the Muse was always hanging around male poets!

After I grew up and realized the Muse was still with me, I tried to find out more about this part of me that gave me poetry. The obvious turnabout was to look for a male muse. In Jungian therapy I uncovered my animus. Growing and writing and learning, I found the male side of myself, had long conversations with him, grew to love him. But though eventually I found him in many good forms—characters in my dreams, the wise man, Pan, the Green Man—he wasn't where my poetic inspiration came from; he felt far from the place that is called, in Kundalini, “the empty-womb space where creation occurs.”

Inspired in part by my parents’ shared interest in the Goddess (they both took a class with Merlin Stone in the 1980s), by the Goddess movement in San Franciso where I was living, and by my interests in anthropology and feminism, I began to muse about and write poems about various goddesses, including Spider Woman, Aphrodite, Inanna, Coatlique, and others, for my book Eve. Then I forgot about the Muse for a while. . . until one day when I was reading the wonderful anthology The Muse Strikes Back, Katherine McAlpine and Gail White’s anthology of poems by women to male poets over the centuries. There suddenly I found her, in the seam that links the voices and the answering voices of Meleager and H.D., Homer and Margaret Atwood, John Donne and Mary Holtby, Jonathan Swift and Louise Bogan. Hearing how fundamentally the halves of those dialogues were linked, I recognized the Muse’s voice in all of it—and it was utterly clear that the same Muse-force had been inspiring the women as well as the men through all those centuries. Legend says Sappho was walking on the beach when Orpheus’ severed head washed up near her—still singing—inspiring her to be a poet and to found her school. They sang to the same Muse. And by this time, I had realized that She whom I had been calling the Muse all along was, in fact, the Goddess . . .

AND NOW . . .

And now, here on Substack in 2024, I want to continue the story into the part where I expand what being a poet means to me, so that it is big enough to encompass Her. The other night Glen and I went to the Angelika Theater (oh, i love being back in NYC!) to watch Tuesday, a phenomenal new film by a young Croatian director starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Lola Petticrew. In the film, a chracter swallows something huge, which makes them HUGE as well.

In the same way, after my poetry swallowed the Goddess—after I consciously became a spiritual poet—it made my role as a poet become Huge as well!

My system of Five Directions, which I have had tattooed on my arm for around a decade, was my way to try to make sanity/sense of all the wildly differing aspects of my poetic calling and hence, my life. Over a long and difficult period of many years, I finally boiled it down to something simple and clear: my work as a poet involves five separate but interrelated jobs that correspond to the will, mind, body, heart, and spirit. (wild update: in the process of writing that sentence, a key piece of the whole system finally clicked and I ran in the other room to tell Glen, “Guess what! I finally figured out what a witch is!! “sounds great,” he said. “Yes, this is REALLY important,” I said— and it is! I will share the insight here anon and, I’m sure, often and in many channels/ways—but right now I’m still busy absorbing it!!)

So over the years as I’ve come to inhabit my expanded sense of being a poet, in all five directions of this work, I’ve recognized this HUGE way of being a poet not only in the oral-based poetries where I had expected it but also, in one way or another, in literary poets from Dante, Lydia Sigourney, and G.M. Hopkins through Langston Hughes, W.B. Yeats, and Maya Angelou to Haleh LIza Gafori, Timothy Liu, Monica Mody, Ntozake Shange, and Joy Harjo. And of course, my life-changing mentor Patricia Monaghan—who I feel was, along wth Shange, the first to recognize my poetic role and identity— understood all this deeply and wrote about it in The Red Haired Girl From the Bog and other places.

The more I claim the five directions of my poetic calling and make them conscious, the more I know that no part of my poetry will be free until it all is (I suppose that way of putting it owes something to Goddess Audre Lorde). That’s why I’m starting a Patreon as well as this Substack. Poetry Witchery Substack is mainly for my thoughts, albeit wild and witchy, about poetry. The Patreon will share regular direct windows into my creative process; cultural and philosophical musings on Goddess thealogy, the Five Directions, matriarchy, and feminism; magical living invitations including retreats, witchy greetings, and a mooncircle; behind the scenes insights into travels, teachings, and community; and my poetry witchy theater, ritual and performance. I will continue to post some of all that here as well, but this Substack couldn’t hold it all.

I have thought a lot about this decision. I loved the idea of putting all of everything here—and that was kind of the original idea for this Substack—-but I think it is too HUGE for this space and might prove confusing to some who have come here for my trajectory in poetry and poetics. There are separate, as well as overlapping, audiences for my poetry career and for my wider work as a poety witch, and I want each group to have good access to what they need from my work. I am also discovering that giving each of my Five Directions a place allows them to flourish and in turn, to inspire and strengthen each other.

So, here we go! I hope to see some of you in the Patreon!

With love, hugs, and a billion thanks for your beautiful and inspiring company on this spiraling journey!

Annie

PS If you are someone for whom both the Substack and the Patreon both call strongly yet the monthly fee is an issue, please contact me through my website and let me know. If there is enough need, I will do my best to create some kind of a twofer package. xox

PPS As of November 2024, I have decided to close the Patreon amd fold all those witchly posts into this Substack. You will soon find them in the section right here called Annie Finch’s Poetry Witchery! (I am keeping this post as is just to provide herstorical context).

As those of you who subscribe to my Spellsletter know, I am in the middle of some rather long travels through India, partly promoting my new book Earth Days and partly working on a new book about meter, magic, and matriarchy.

It’s been a busy time, with lectures on meter (which I was delighted to find were met with enthusiasm—meter lives!) at four universities so far and of course all the travel through this astounding place. Finally today I have landed at someplace quiet and beautiful where I can be entirely alone by the ocean, and sure enough, my Muse was waiting for me.

Over my morning chai I felt the familiar yet ever new tickle of a poem ready to bless me, and I knew it would be dactylic. I settled myself to receive it, and she came. Here’s a photo of what it looked like (and a bonus monkey I saw ten minutes later):

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THE NAMING

Lopez, Jurgens, Lozowsky, O'Connor, Lomax
(Shoes, and spirals, dust and the falling flowers)
Diaz, Dingle, Galletti, DiPasquale,
Katsimatides

Wounds widen the remembering earth.
Closed eyes see beyond the flames.
Grief opens hands to feel the wind.
Heart beats like ocean and hears the names:

DiStefano, Eisenberg, Chung, Green, Dolan,
Women running suddenly in their high heels)
Penny, York, Duarte, Elferis, Sliwak,
Yamamadala,

Closed eyes see beyond the flames.
Grief opens hands to feel the wind.
Heart beats like ocean and hears the names.
Wounds widen the remembering earth:

Weinstein, Villanueva, West, Sadaque,
(Spirals, dust and spiralling dust and hours)
Bowman, Burns, Kawauchi, Buchanan, Reilly,
Reese, Ognibene,

Grief opens hands to feel the wind.
Heart beats like ocean and hears the names.
Wounds widen the remembering earth.
Closed eyes see beyond the flames.

Kushitani, Ueltzhoffer, Wong, Ferrugio,
(Breathed in only in or beyond the naming),
Inghilterra, Tzemis, Liangthanasam,
Coladonato—

Heart beats like ocean and hears the names.
Wounds widen the remembering earth.
Closed eyes see beyond the flames.
Grief opens hands to feel the wind.

Sanchez, Talbot, Afflito, Siskopoulos
(Every question with a long sob of naming)
Tarantino, Zempoaltecatl, Thorpe, Koo,
Stergiopoulos,
Zion, Zinzi, Song, Shahid, Santiago,
Ortiz, Pabon, Ou, O’Neill, Newton-Carter,
Miller, Mohammed,
Zakhary, Campbell,
Deming, DiFranco,
Chowdhury, Blackwell,
Zucker, McDowell,
Goldstein, Basmajian . . .

Wounds widen the remembering earth.
Closed eyes see beyond the flames.
Grief opens hands to feel the wind.
Heart beats like ocean and hears the names.

9/11 poem and sculpture at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York

HOW GRIEF NEEDS METER

When I was asked to write a poem for the installation of Meredith Bergmann’s sculpture in commemoration of 9/11, I sat with the request for months. I contemplated the image of the moving, terrifying sculpture with its pierced hands; I felt the depths of my own grief and that of the city and country I love; I brought my inner depths of will, heart, and soul into communion with the wills, hearts, and souls of those who had died and those whose lives had been gutted by the deaths.

How to write about such a thing?

No writing could come. No ideas, no words. It was all truly before and beyond words.

But not beyond Meter.

Meter is a pulse, not a thought.

Meter is a communion in itself; it is a state, a way.

One day after months, a rhythm came, and with it a meter, and with it a stanza: the Sapphic stanza, rhythm of hope and grace, rhythm of the heart.

And after it trailed meanings, words, ideas, an image:

women, running.

And this ancient rhythm, developed on an island that remained matriarchal even after patriarchy had begun its 5000 year reign elsewhere—an island where meter was a holy language honored by priestesses in whom the sacred took the form of nature and poetry and dance and love—this rhythm finally opened the poem to the memories of those who had died.

/ u | / u | / u u | / u | / u |

/ u | / u | / u u | / u | / u |

/ u | / u | / u u | / u | / u |

/ u u | / u

And the Sapphic stanza expanded in my heart and mind to encompass names—names originating from all over the globe, knit together, flowed together, in death as in their lives in this capacious city— knit together now, not by work or money nor even by friendship and love, but by something even more primal, a meter, a rhythm shared physically among human voices, human throats, human ears, human hearts even as it has been carried, bodiless and exact, across centuries, centuries, centuries, centuries.

And as I sat with the names and felt the grief and love of such a wild dance of humanity blossom inside me, and as I contemplated the agonizing bronze hands of the statue, another rhythm emerged.

It was a counter-rhythm, a rhythm of wind and body, stone and timeless courage, a rhythm that could change and evolve and intertwine and interweave and transform and wait for us, meet us, still, unshaken, beckoning through the almost endless chant of names—almost infinitely greater than even the chant of these names—those martyred by the 5000 year tragedy of patriarchal violence, greed, hierarchy, monotheism, capitalism, oppression, war, separation, exile.

This was the rhythm of the elements, of nature, of the Goddesses of earth and sky, wind and love and hope.

It had the last words.

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If you subscribe to Annie’s Spellsletter, where I share magical snippets of my poems designed to move will, mind, body, heart, and spirit, then you know that my motto for absorbing/appreciating/adoring a poem is :

#speakitthrice!

I typically approach a poem by inviting myself to speak it three times aloud (either actually saying it aloud, whispering, or simply ‘hearing’ it silently in real time—more on this below). If a poem can stand up to the invitation, the odds are that it will transform itself through rich depths of nuance by the end of the third reading. Of course, it’s no coincidence that thrice is traditionally the requisite number of sayings to activate a spell, for as subscribers to this Substack likely know, meter and magic grow from the same root word.

If you are primarily used to reading poems in free verse, reading metrical poems aloud can help you “en-rhythm” yourself (a word invented by a member of Meter Magic Spiral) with their physical patterning. It will also calm down your inner critics, those anxious inner voices my students often unload about when they first enter Meter Magic Spiral or one of my classes). Meter-fearing voices are widespread in our culture (perhaps especially, based on what I hear from my students, within creative writing classrooms), ready to remind us that the enjoyment of language’s rhythms is “childish,” ‘trivial,” “self-indulgent,” “embarrassing,” or “silly” (let’s remember that last word descends from the Anglo-Saxon ‘selig,’ meaning “holy”).

I’ve posted here before about the deeply subversive potential of poetic meter today—precisely because its pleasures threaten the unquestioned dominance of that smugly super-rational voice (a voice that, paradoxically but not surprisingly, enables the current cultural madness to reign). In my view, the practice of meter—within the context of metrical diversity!— has the potential to be truly “postmodern,” a topic I will post about in more detail later. Each time we #speakitthrice, we honor the body, heart, and spirt in a poem, inviting ourselves to absorb it with the musical right brain as well as the logical left brain, opening ourselves to surrender into fullest enjoyment.

Please don't feel intimidated by this #speakitthrice idea if you know nothing about meter. Most people who have loved poetry throughout history, even most poets who write in meter, haven't known the names of meters or how to scan.  Meter-loving poets such as myself may take on prosody (the study of form and meter) more consciously just because there’s so much healing to do, but in practice, the metrical level in poems is still, as always, designed to work behind the scenes.  Just as you don't need to read music to enjoy it, you don't need to know anything about meter to absorb/appreciate/adore metrical poems. All you need to do is #speakitthrice!

I once summarized my best tips for saying poems into the Introducton to my little anthology Measure for Measure.

HOW TO READ POETRY IN METER ALOUD
Adapted from the preface of  Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters, edited by Annie Finch and Alexandra Oliver (Everymans Library, 2018).

To  enjoy [metrical] poems most fully, READ THEM ALOUD. You can do this in the usual way, or you can read them “silent-aloud”: allowing the sounds of the words to enter your awareness physically as you read. Either way, you will feel how different meters change a poem’s energy, how they affect your heart, mind, and body. As you absorb the poems in this way, you will actually be using a different part of your brain (your right brain, activated when we hear music or metrical poetry) than you use when you read poetry without meter (which you understand with your left brain, where we understand prose).

Metrical poems are meant to be absorbed and savored as you move along. Try reading quite slowly, tasting the feel of the poem in your mouth (this is most fun aloud of course, but you can do it even if you are reading silent-aloud.) To best get the hang of it, at least whisper the poems, if you can’t say them aloud for some reason. It will be fun to pay attention to any physical sensations you have as you read (your heart racing, a sense of excitement in your stomach, your heart slowing, a relaxing of your shoulders, or a sense of calm).

The key to performing metrical poetry aloud, on which all other fluency rests, is to mark the end of every single line with an audible—but not too audible—pause. If it’s too audible, you can distract yourself or your listeners mentally by interrupting a sentence. But what most people raised on free verse don’t realize is that if the pause isn’t audible enough, you will create an even worse distraction, a physical one, by burying the physical signposts created by the pauses at the end of each line.  This end-of-line signpost is necessary to align the lines with each other as we experience the poem. Performing metrical poetry the way we perform free verse—by continuing sentences across the linebreaks without a pause—forces listeners to steal attention from the meaning of the poem while they reorient themselves within the pattern of lines. Good performers of metrical poetry, on the other hand, signal each line-ending appropriately. They communicate, audibly and with grace, sensitivity, and panache, the place of each line-ending within its own sentence and also within the larger passages and movements of the poem.

Luckily, metrical poems that know what they are doing make it easy and pleasurable to perform them well. When you encounter a sentence that continues past the line-ending, try giving just a slight physical bow to the line-ending by lengthening the final syllable of the line just a hair—maybe by about 25% of the length of a normal syllable—as you pass it by. Aim to signal the line-ending clearly and unequivocally with your voice—yet to do it so briefly that, even while the listener’s body is acknowledging the start of a new line, their mind won’t even notice but will remain entirely focused on the words, just as if they were hearing prose.

When the line ending corresponds with a comma, a phrase ending, or some other break in the meaning, you can pause a tiny bit longer. And when the line ending corresponds with a sentence ending, then you will have the opportunity to stop as long as you like, choosing the most expressive length for your pause. Finally, if the line ending coincides with a larger turning in the poem’s meaning—a place where words offer the opportunity for reflection or suspense—you might pause still longer for really dramatic effect. One of the joys of performing great metrical poetry is the opportunity to embody a poem as if it were music. And the choices we make as we interact with the line-endings of the poem, in real time, are some of the most important musical instruments at our disposal.

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Annie Finch, 1975. Photo by Lou Dohme

Just now I signed into the online version of that superb magazine of place-based literature, Ecotone. to make sure all was set with my poem “Fog’s Garden,” in the new issue.

I was unprepared for the unshed tears that pricked at my eyes as I thought about when I first wrote this poem and the 43-year journey to its publication. There were tears of compassion for the 24-year-old version of myself at a brutal life-juncture: for the struggling young poet who showed this poem to Galway Kinnell after a Poetry Society of America workshop in 1981, what that felt like, and what happened after (which will be told in a memoir I’m writing). There were tears of astonished humility at the sublime miracle of life’s precise meanderings and sure timings: the moments when they are glimpsed and the surely the more constant moments when they remain invisible. There were tears of gratitude for Ecotone’s remarkable editor Anna Lena Phillips Bell and the unique role she played in this poem’s journey. And there were tears of awe at that tensile, sure-footed, generously endless & endlessly generous, wisely relentless & relentlessly wise interpenetrativity of woven word-web that somehow, in spite of everything, holds together the magical miraculousness that is Metrical Poetry.

So why did this poem (free online at Ecotone for the next two weeks) so much need to wait through 43 years of the magical word-web to be published? I believe it was waiting for a moment of editorial healing—a moment that would only be possible when four decades of nascent ideas had snaked their heads up through the earth, found their way into the poetic awareness of a new generation, and fully ripened into transformational possibility.

I wrote “Fog’s Garden” at age 24. I was living in my parents’ home recovering from a severe bout of what doctors were calling “temporary reactive psychosis”—(a diagnosis that later turned out to be in error), suffered while hitchhiking in Africa with my best friend (yup; also part of the memoir). After 18 years of writing poems and some deep study of meter in college, I was still, then, barely beginning to catch a glimpse of the metrical ways I would later come to walk, and dance, and fly in.

But I felt it —looking out the window, sensing the gathering moisture of metrical momentum seeding through my life like condensation saturating a cloud—the weight of that wordless strangeness within and without, and the hope of survival it carried. And I also felt a bit of fear at its strangeness, at something unnamed that clung to it, likely remembering Joan North’s remarkable fantasy novel The Cloud Forest—the only novel for which I’ve written the author a fan letter).

Fear or not, the cloud dripped heavy and the poem came to me with the names of meters in it:

And here is fog.  Only the iambic fog in particles,

the rain in trochee drops, can cool my garden's mind . . .

I am quite sure I typed up “Fog’s Garden” that spring and mailed it to The New Yorker with a few other equally surreal poems—I remember one called “Plough” and one called “Nobody Has Feet,” another poem with a metrical theme—to wait for the inevitable thin envelope and then file it away for decades with the other postmodern metrical strangenesses I was writing (my 2013 book Spells contains 40 of what I came to call “The Lost Poems,” and there are dozens more).

Four decades, to be exact.

Flash-forward to 2021: I’m sending the poem to Ecotone’s editor Anna Lena Phillips Bell—whom I met in the mid-1990s when she transferred from Guilford in North Carolina to Northern Iowa for a year as an undergraduate, at the behest of the poet Carolyn Beard Whitlow, so she could learn about meter from me. Who does that? So I shouldn’t have been surprised (though I was!) when Anna Lena wrote to say that, although she loved the poem, she thought—in part, I might imagine, based on some of my own ideas about the #metricalcode and #deepscansion—that “dactylic”would be a more appropriate meter to describe the fog than “iambic.”

While preparing to send her the poem, I had had the same thought. In view of The Ghost of Meter and my other work on the patriarchal connotations carried by iambic pentameter, I had considered switching “iambic” to “dactylic” as a more evocative and generous meter (the Meter of the Heart, in my developing Five Directions metrical system). I had abandoned the possibility.

But Anna Lena, once my brilliant student—one whose openness to the resonances of meter early on helped grow my confidence to continue with my ideas—knew better, She held the poem’s terminology accountable to the wisdom of the metrical universe we were both coming to know. And the end, her insight changed the poem completely.

Here are a few excerpts from this correspondence, which remains one of my favorite email conversations :

Jan 12, 2o21
Dear Annie,

We'd be very glad to read a few poems if you'd like to send them, as you mentioned last fall. I'd be pleased to share them with our team as we make final decisions for the issue. . .

Jan 12, 2o21
Dear Anna Lena,

Wonderful! i will be happy to send some tomorrow. And sorry I dropped the ball— I ended up moving rather suddenly to Portugal this fall and a lot of things fell through the cracks.  . .

Feb 9, 2021
Dear Annie,

Happy new month and new week! I hope you are doing well in your new home. My colleague Sophia Stid and I read the poems you sent with appreciation, and particularly enjoyed "Fog's Garden." That last stanza, especially, is exquisite!

Earlier in the poem, we had a question, about which I'd be curious to hear what you think. In the third stanza, we were stopped a bit by the description of the fog as iambic. When I imagine fog, it seems easier somehow to picture a triple meter...(side note: thinking of fog and meter, I came to dactyls and Sandburg's "The fog comes in / on little cat feet" : ). Though perhaps there will come a time when this feels less the case, somehow still the word/idea of iambs (if not always the meter itself) still carries a lot of people-world/patriarchal-world associations, for us, and the fog of the poem feels so different from that, a rebuke or alternative to it—so we spun out of the poem at that spot, wondering. I'd love to understand better what you mean there!

Thanks in advance for your thoughts, and thanks again for sending these! So good to see this work.

All my best,

Anna Lena

Feb 9, 2021
Dear Anna Lena,

You are truly an amazing editor, as I have always felt...i can't believe you picked up on this!  Before sending the poems, I contemplated this exact question for a long time.

The truth is, "Fog's Garden" was written a very very long time ago--in 1980, when I was 24 years old and still thought of myself as a free verse poet who had written some formal exercises. I hadn't

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my daughter just after being born at home

I am moved and humbled that the Academy of American Poets sent out my poem “Moon for Our Daughters” today, in honor of Women’s Herstory Month (in the company of poems by sheroes including June Jordan, Lucille Clifton, Maya Angelou, and the amazing Marilyn Chin—truly a serious honor!).

Since then the poem has been receiving sweet comments on its form and meter. So it seems a good time for a few witchly thoughts around its inspiration and shaping.

MOON FOR OUR DAUGHTERS

Moon that is linking our daughters’
Choices, and still more beginnings,
Threaded alive with our shadows,

These are our bodies’ own voices,
Powers of each of our bodies,
Threading, unbroken, begetting

Flowers from each of our bodies.
These are our spiraling borders
Carrying on your beginnings,

Chaining through shadows to daughters,
Moving beyond our beginnings,
Moon of our daughters, and mothers.

The poem is a spell. Like all my poems and like all spells, therefore, it is designed to be read or spoken aloud. Because nowadays we are trained almost entirely in free verse, we tend to think of poems as best understood on the page. So, whenever possible, I remind those who encounter my poems, with the hashtag #speakitthrice, to read them aloud.

As a spell, the poem intends to make a change; after all, the great witch Starhawk defines magic as “the art of changing consciousness at will.” On the day that inspired the poem, I had just celebrated a ritual with my family to mark my menopause. I was thinking about a ritual to mark my daughter’s first menstrual period. And it was also a time when I was helping my mother frequently, two years before her death. At the time, I thought of the poem as a spell for menopause, menarche, and reproductive autonomy. I now see it as a spell with a wider goal—to heal the mother-wound that plagues so many of us under patriarchy.

Looking back at this poem now, I see the magic of its form as a way of bringing back the power of the mothers. Reading the poem freshly again today, I suddenly saw something about how the form does this that I had never noticed before:

The first trio of words gives a sense of something missing, a shadow preventing a full flowering of the new: daughters/beginnings/shadows.

The second trio, voices/bodies/begetting, is the only one in the poem that has no repeating connection to any other. Breaking entirely away, it even replaces the word ‘beginnings,” which appears in all the other stanzas, with “begetting.” Why ? Separation and breaking away are necessary to find ourselves, so we can reconnect with authenticity and freedom. This stanza breaks away to establish a necessary boundary.

The third trio, bodies/borders/beginning, manifests new strength after the breaking away. “Borders”brings in new boundaries have been established, “bodies” is free to return, stronger, and “beginnings” returns, free of the shadows.

The final trio, daughters/beginnings/mothers, returns, healed, to the first stanza. “Daughters” and “beginnings” are reunited, and in the same order, and “shadows” has been replaced with “mothers.” A patriarchal wound has been healed.

The meter of the poem is dactylic. This is one of my very favorite meters, the one I think of as the rhythm of the heart, healing, compassion, and unity. I call the dacytlic rhythm “Water Beat” (its rhythm embodying the meter of its name) because I associate it with the element of water, which is of course the element of gestation, the uterus, menstruation, and, I feel, of the bonds across generations of women.

If you are a regular reader of this substack, you will have noticed that many of my close analyses of poems involve the analysis of metrical varations. But in this poem, to my ear, the meter is completely regular without metrical variations worth commenting on, save the replacement of each line’s final dactyl with a trochee throughout. This is a common strategy in dactylic meter, and those trained in classical meters may think of the final two-syllable foot as a spondee rather than a trochee. Think of the closings of some of Longfellow’s hexameters in Evangeline, which clearly intend to evoke the classical option of a spondee as one way to end a dactylic hexameter. If we hear the final feet of each line of this poem as spondaic, we might think of them as evoking dactylic hexameters also—adding more epic, primal weight and power to the healing mother-work of the spell.

Goddess knows, we need more healing mother-work in today’s world! So, if you would like to invoke and evoke the full power of the spell, I urge you, once more, to #speakitthrice: say the poem aloud three times.

You could whisper it, shout it, recite it with or to others—maybe in front of an altar or a photo of someone in your motherline. You could audio or video record it, perhaps while facing West to increase heart energy, You could even say it aloud inside your mind, so you feel each syllable resonate silently within you. That works fine also—as long as you don’t cheat and start to race your inner voice ahead of your inner ear, to “think” the poem instead of taking the physical time needed for “speak”ing it.

Why?

Because the key aspect of the speaking—the part that makes it magic—is the poem’s body. A poem has a fully complete physical reality. It has symmetry, shape, physical weight, and constraint. It begins. It ends. It takes time. In short, it “matter”s—it has “matter,” which, naturally, comes from the same root as the word “mother.” And “magic.” And “meter.”

That is why this spell exists. And that is why this blog exists. It exists to bring back the healing power of meter, magic, and mother—all of them together, all of them helping each other, all of them forming the goal of the work of Poetry Witchery.

Thank you for joining me in this work.

Yours in love, magic, and poetry,

Annie

Dear|Poetry-Lovers, Sister Witches, and Everyone in Between,

Have you ever wondered why we celebrate Groundhog Day? As with so many delightful and curious things, its origin goes right back into the times of Goddess worship—which feel closer and closer the more one learns about them. Halfway between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox, this day was called Imbolc in the earth-centered, meter-honoring, Goddess-worshipping world of Indigenous Ireland (the story then was that the mysterious Crone Goddess called the Cailleach would gather wood for more winter fires if the weather was clear on this day!)

But now, this day is a day to honor the Goddess Brigid— a powerful Goddess of Poetry.

So here's my incantation to Brigid.  The form with its interlocking rhymes is an exact English incarnation of the ancient awdl gywydd form.  The art is by Ania Aldrich.  You can also watch video of me performing the poem here.

For best results, stir up something powerful and healing in a cauldron and read the chant three times aloud to honor & invoke Her energy!

BRIGID

Ring, ring, ring, ring! Hammers fall.
Your gold will all be beaten
over sudden flaming fire
moving from you, the pyre. Sweeten
your cauldron, until the sun
runs with one flame through the day
and the healing water will sing,
linger on tongues, burn away.

from Spells: New and Selected Poems by Annie Finch (Wesleyan University Press 2013)

#Speakitthrice #Anniespells  

Yours in love, magic, and poetry,

PS Oh yeah, my tattoo—the first tattoo I ever received—Well, I will be telling that whole wild story in the memoir I’m currently writing (please wish me luck!); I’m posting updates about my progress on Instagram and excerpts from the manuscript on Patreon.

Meanwhile, here’s the tattoo:

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