Watching Hamnet last week, I said to my husband, “if Jessie Buckley wins the Oscar, it will feel like a win for the tradwives.”

And so it does. Like the tradwives movement, that emblematic decision reveals an overall confusion in feminism in the USA right now: layering surface gestures of female satisfaction over a deeper repression of matriarchal agency and values.

The Academy Awards Ceremony, festive and amusing almost in defiance of the mounting world horrors around it, was framed by two wonderful victories for women: the launch of the first-ever Oscar for the female-dominated job of casting director, and the choice of Autumn Durald Arkapaw, first woman awardee in cinematography, who asked all the women in the room to stand during her thrilling speech. On the flip side, the speeches featured a steady parade of people addressing the mixed-gender audience as “you guys.” The last time I heard that phrase spoken so often from a stage was during a brief browse of the Republican National Convention. On the surface, “you guys” honors women by including them in a male club of full human beings whose gender doesn’t matter; underneath, however, it affirms that full humanity is only attainable through renouncing femaleness.

Similarly, on the surface, awarding the Oscar to a female-directed tale about a previously-ignored woman does, of course, honor women. But wait a moment.

When we first meet Hamnet’s Agnes as a fierce, solitary denizen of the woods, she’s calling a hawk to her wrist and following the arcane herbal knowledge of her witchy foremothers. But no sooner does she get knocked up than she drops all that ecstatic self-sufficiency to become a docile helpmeet and nurse laser-focused on her children and her Great Male Writer husband.

Watching this rare and compelling character cheerfully sacrifice her once-sacred independence on the altar of a man and his son (Buckley’s character Agnes’ two daughters barely say a word), am I the only feminist who wants to cry “auntie!”?. Haven’t we had enough female sacrifice (self-inflicted or otherwise) over the past 5000 years?)

Miserably, for a movie directed by a woman based on a novel by a woman, this film doesn’t even pass the Bechdel test (in which two named women must speak to each other about something other than a man). Rather, it “passes” it in a way even WORSE than failing: the only time two women talk to each other about something other than a man is to declare hatred for each other: “You’re not my mother!” shouts Buckley witheringly). Ouch. Ouch.

After Buckley won the award, my husband, Glen, asked why I didn’t consider Buckley’s Best Acttress Award a win for feminism. Aren’t herbalism and a narrative centered on female expereience helpful aspects of reclaiming matriarchy? Of course they are. I’m totally into honoring and reclaiming earth-centered ways, and I consider pretty much any win for women something to celebrate. I agree 1000% with Buckley when she tells People Magazine, “i know women, and we’re pretty epic . . . we contain multitudes.”

But when Buckley used a well-earned moment of glory to call out to her husband in the audience, “you’re my best friend and I want to have 20,000 more babies with you,” all I could think was that J.D. Vance and the MAGA “pronatalist” movement could not have worded it better.

No matter how nice the husband is, that’s not a feminist family, y’all! I know nothing of Buckley’s real-life support network. But in the context of current patriarchal US culture, this unprecedented (I googled “Oscars best actress winner mentioning desire to have babies in her acceptance speech” just to make sure:) remark perpetuates, like Buckley’s character in the movie who lacks a connection with the women around her, the model of woman as breeder in a nuclear family. If matriarchy means anything, it means fully centering women’s agency and connections with other women—preserving the family as a matrilineal clan, whether consanguinous or chosen.

Buckley’s performance in Hamnet is consistently compelling, the theme of parental bereavement is powerful and beautifully resolved, and the whole ending is uniquely wonderful. Still, like the supposedy complimentary phrase “you guys,” the choice of Buckley for the award reflects a misguided and dangerous confusion of form for stubstance where feminism is concerned. LIke the tradwives movmement, this year’s award may honor female experience on the surface, but it does so within carefully preserved patriarchal structures of power and at the expense of deeper matriarchal values.

I would have preferred that Oscar to go to Rose Byrne for her truly brilliant performance in one of the most profoundly feminist movies I’ve seen in a long time. Glen and I also watched If I Had Legs I’d Kick You together. While he (along with, I would imagine, many other men ) found the heroine’s trials bewildering and exhausting, I was relaxed and exhilarated to watch a film capture so precisely (and comically! and tragically!) much of my own lifelong experience living as a woman under patriarchy.

The life of the movie’s heroine, Linda, reflects the contemporary reality of all too many women. It is a life in which the “beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart” that Buckley evoked in rosy terms in her acceptance speech has been stripped of most of its ancient power to shape the world by the sterile violence of 5000 years of the patriarchal system. It is a world in which our deepest matriarchal wisdom is constantly both provoked and frustrated, heedlessly overstimulated and cruelly underutlized, by the bureaucracies, aggressions, and exploitations that all genders still suffer under.

Linda’s home is a shell, empty of matrilineal sisterhood and engulfed in floods of grief. Her daughter is trapped in the endless mirages of big medicine. Her young patient is desperate for the love and guidance of elder women. Everyone needs Linda, yet she has nothing to give them. She sold out her power long ago to build a marriage and career within the judgmental isolation of white patriarchal culture; she seems to have no female support network at all; and she is traumatized by an abortion—one with no spiritual context except the shame and guilt offered by patriarchal religion.

Yet through the pileup of fears, failures, and farces that make this movie so cathartic or excruciating, depending on your perspective, Linda manages to claw back shreds of her matriarchal power. She begins to move forward. In Byrne’s phenomenally honest portrayal, she advances gradually and courageously out of the fatal male-centered house of cards, and if it collapses as she goes, still she moves forward by reaching with compassion towards others and herself.

Rose Byrne’s character faces and begins to heal from the trauma of the abortion she suffered in a patriarchal instittuion. She slightly awakens to connection with other wounded women; she slightly befriends a caring man from a saner cultural background; she slightly recognizes the Goddess-power of the nighttime ocean, and bit by bit she recognizes some of the power she does have to help shape a more matrifocal, humane life for her daughter. Amid such a hellish trumult, these are small steps, often slight steps— but they are true steps, in a new direction.

What a wonderful luxury to be able to compare these two women-written and women-directed movies. (I still remember when it seemed the only way a woman could win awards for a Hollywood film was to make it about men in war.)

We are all at different places in our journeys. May all our steps be true.

On January 14, 1970, 10 weeks after my 13th birthday, I was sexually molested by an uncle— “broken in” by the patriarchy, as I put it in my poem “A Root.” Instructed not to talk about it, I plummeted overnight into a strange new identity as a silenced sexual being. While Donald Trump was making his name in New York in the mid-1970s, I was there too. I accompanied my big sister on double-dates in Manhattan with wealthy guys twice our age and partied with my best friend in another wealthy guy’s pad in Fort Lauderdale.

Now, it’s a little hard to understand why I did these things, except that I could. At that age in the climate of that time and place, in the gap year before starting my freshman year as one of the first women at Yale, I embraced the role of sexual object. It felt far easier to take on the role of what Ghislaine Maxwell would call a “nubile “than not. I had been born, raised, and groomed for it, after all, at least as

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This essay is adapted from a version published in the wonderful feminist review Liber. I love Liber and delight in every issue that arrives into my physical, IRL hands! Check it out!

It’s hard to think of another topic on which educated people in the “developed” world misspeak so glibly as the naturalness of patriarchy. Claims like “most societies have been male-dominated” are tossed out to right and left with only a murmur of thought: uh, maybe men end up ruling through physical strength? . . . uh, or maybe it’s because women are busy with babies? . . . who knows? And then we turn away, further weakened and numbed, as the crucial, core, momentous falsehood sprouts further falsehoods that reinforce it yet further.

How easy to assume, for example, looking back at five or six long centuries of patriarchal miseries, that “human” nature must simply be violent and competitive, that greed and inequality are intrinsic to our species. A grotesque example of this extrapolation may be found in Trump’s discussion of pussy-grabbing with E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan:

Kaplan: “It’s true you can grab them by the pussy?”

Trump: “Well, if you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true.. . .”

And if we were ready to give up on the myth of a “million years” of patriarchy and turn to archaelogy to cast light on its actual origins, archaelogy until recently would not have been much use. As Heide Goettner-Abendroth puts it in Matriarchal Societies of the Past and the Rise of Patriarchy: West Asia and Europe, “Current archaeological practice . . . still perpetuates the patriarchal view of history.”

But, thank the Goddesses, not for long anymore!

First released in German in 1988, and (finally!) published in English in 2022 to the joy of her many eager followers (of which I am one), this book, which traces matriarchal societies from the Paleolithic into the Bronze Age over half the globe, seems capable of sweeping away those unfounded patriarchal axioms and all the stubborn stale lies that cling to them, opening the way for generations of matriarchal scholars to come. In short, this is the kind of book that not only changes knowledge; it changes thought.

Goettner-Abendroth, author of the comprehensive survey Matriarchal Societies: Studies on Indigenous Cultures Across the Globe, is the founder of Internationale Akademie HAGIA and founding mother of the field of research known as modern matriarchal studies. She opens Matriarchal Societies of the Past and the Rise of Patriarchy (MSPRP), her second magnum opus, by laying out the staggering implications of modern matriarchal studies as a “new paradigm” of thought that encompasses “the entirety of known cultural history and . . . societal forms of the present” as well as “the content of all the cultural and social sciences.”

In order to fulfill this shocking and ambitious promise, the author first introduces new terminology to replace the patriarchally loaded term “prehistory.” What is traditionally called “history,” she points out, “always only begins with establishment of classically patriarchal patterns: hierarchical social structures with dominant men at the top; a subordinate status for women and other population groups; the foundation of territorial states with dogmatic state religions. Structures of this kind are hailed as . . . the beginning of civilization, in comparison with which all else is given the prefix ‘pre.’” Instead of following this paradigm, MSPRP uses the terms “pri­meval” or “early history,” which “refer to time sequences and do not imply value judgment.”

Goettner-Abendroth next continues the process of cleaning up patriarchal scholarship’s intellectual messes by turning to “the discourse of eternal war.” This widespread patriarchal projection misunderstands the piles of lovingly cleaned skulls of beloved ancestors placed in early “double burials” as the remains of massacres and “interprets every wall and ditch around a Neolithic village as a ‘fortification’ of a military sort—though these were more likely to be defenses against wild animals.” A related falsehood, which she dubs the “Big Man theory,” is a blatant projection of contemporary patriarchy’s individualism, violence, and greed. Although the archaeological record contains clear indications of egalitarian societies based on matrilineal clans in the Paleolithic era, the Big Man theory perceives the patriarchal nuclear family in that same evidence. In the face of widespread archaeological and anthropological evidence that the earliest societies were based on a gift economy, proponents of the Big Man theory see proof of exchange and exploitation. The Big Man is assumed to have built “megalithic architecture—completely unproven—for himself alone, as opposed to the idea that it was a community project for the communal use of whole clans.” The Big Man even “mutates into a priest who has religious monopoly and ‘controls access to the ritual places,’” in stark contrast to the communal spiritual practices indicated by the evidence. And so on.

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One of the joys of reading this book is the obvious pleasure that Goettner-Abendroth takes in bringing all her expertise together in this career-capping project. She is that rare type of thinker who is not only daring, original, and liberatory in her ideas but equally rigorous, careful, and tireless in the research that backs them up. (The book’s bibliography is twenty-two pages of tiny print long.) Aware of the revolutionary potential of this work, she has set out to make a bulletproof argument. Indeed the first half of MSPRP is jam-packed with detailed, wide-ranging, mind-blowing evidence of the matriarchal roots of our species from around the world, all thoroughly illustrated with maps, diagrams, drawings, and photos of art and architecture: Maltese temples in the shapes of mother-daughter goddesses; priestesses dancing in a sacred grove in Knossos; five large vulvas, each colored red, in a Spanish cave; a goddess on a lion throne; a rock painting of women cultivating the fields from the fifth century BCE; mounted Amazons with weapons; figurines of an ancestral motherline from Mesopotamia; mountains named after a goddess’s breasts; the goddess Lilith as giver of death; etc.

This is the go-to book for any questions you have ever had about matriarchy. What is a matriarchy, really? (It is not the reverse of patriarchy but rather an egalitarian society where all live according to maternal values such as nurturing, respect, and peacemaking). Why use this term? (Goettner-Abendroth sees women not at the top but at the center and the beginning; she retains the term “matriarchy” in view of its literal meaning, “mothers at the beginning.”) What differences or hierarchies structure a matriarchal society? (It is an “age-class” societies with great respect for motherhood.) How is it governed? (Consensus decision-making). What are its economics? (A gift economy.) What is its attitude toward sexuality? (No moral judgments on sexuality; complete independence with women having the final say). What religious structure characterizes matriarchy? (Rooted to the Paleolithic times, “a comprehensive rebirth religion in which the central principle was to honor the Earth as the primordial mother and woman in her image.”)

Goettner-Abendroth marshals powerful evidence that women are the original creators and guardians of human culture, responsible for developing shelter, fire (“all indigenous societies know women as keepers of the fire”), food gathering and preserving, clothing, language and education (which arose within mother-child groups), medicine, calendars (based on menstruation and lunar cycles), and religious ceremony (based in the “rebirth” religion where women are keepers of death and of life—including of animals, so they initiate men into hunting rituals).

Her discussion of women and houses is a good example of her graceful interweaving of extensive archaeological and anthropological evidence. For women’s role in neolithic housebuilding, she finds corollaries in women owning tents in Mongolia and the Sahara, and the fact that “the construction and deconstruction of permanent clay dwellings among indigenous peoples in Africa and the Americas is solely women’s work. Women developed these skills, and the houses are theirs,” she tells us. “The house itself is considered female and is decorated with attributes such as breasts and a vulva symbol at the entrance. Even linguistically, ‘woman’ and ‘house’ are identical, as examples from Africa show.”

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Matriarchy is a fundamentally different structure from patriarchy. Women’s central importance in matriarchy as Goettner-Abendroth describes it does not lead to them amassing extra possessions or power over other people. Although “men probably depended more on the skills of woman than vice versa,” matriarchal society is profoundly egalitarian. Nonetheless:

the mother-child group becomes the basis of all other social groupings. . . . All social forms depend on it and refer to it in one way or another. . . . Even men’s organization of the hunt was not independent of the women’s group. . . . From all this we see the great economic importance of women in Paleolithic times, which has been completely obscured by the fantasy image of “Man the Great Hunter.”

I found the first half of this book profoundly moving and humbling. Absorbing such strong, lovingly gathered research about how human culture first developed under the wisdom of women, I felt I had been wandering all my life in pitch-darkness in a house full of legends of violence and terror, where Goettner-Abendroth had begun walking ahead of me turning on lights one by one. The home of my ancestral lineage, it turns out, is not dark and frightening but beautiful, sensible, inspiring. The obvious reality of the house, in spite of the patriarchal horror stories of “the dawn of man” on which I was raised, is right there for all to see. To read social science that actually matches up with my lived experience, deepest intuition, and common sense is empowering to such an extent that I can only call it radical.

The second half of the book is equally detailed and comprehensive in its description of how patriarchy arose in different ways in Europe and West Asia. Patriarchal Sumerian and Assyrian city-states developed in West Asia due to centralization of power based on increasingly dry and salty soil, while patriarchy arrived in Old Europe via a band of young Indo-European invaders, fleeing an increasingly hostile climate and equipped with horses, bronze weapons, a culture of mass rape, and social structures of male dominance. In each case, patriarchy was first set in motion by climate changes. And in each case, it mutated into a hierarchical, oppressive, monotheistic social structure in which a small group of men dominated, by force, most other men and all women.

Placing Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Germanic civilizations within the context of their violent conquests of older, highly evolved matriarchal societies reveals them in a chilling yet bracing new light. “Only by acknowledging that, before the various patriarchal societies, a completely different social order had been commonplace,” writes Goettner-Abendroth, “can we fully appreciate . . . the role of women as creators of culture.” Also revelatory are her discussions of Minoan civilization, which demonstrated “what brilliant cultural heights a matriarchal society can develop when left undisturbed” (though the Minoans were ultimately, in the wake of a devastating natural disaster, conquered by the patriarchal Achaeans), and of how Amazons, whose existence as an all-female warrior culture is supported by recent archaeological finds, successfully resisted the rise of patriarchal power for a millennium.

This is the kind of book many of us, whether or not we normally read about archaeology, will just want to have around, to dip into at random, to pull from the shelf for expert opinions on the great questions, to browse for inspiration (I have been using it for bibliomancy!), and to remind ourselves that patriarchy is a temporary invention. As Goettner-Abendroth puts it, “This book looks at the emergence of patriarchal patterns. . . . However, as these patterns evolved, it becomes evident that they are by no means natural, but rather historical, and can therefore be overcome.” There are an increasing number of books on matriarchy coming out now at last. This is one to consider the benchmark, the touchstone over the long haul.

Celeste Davis is an ex-Mormon. In her substack called Matriarchal Blessing, her stark experience with gender oppression interweaves with her natural brilliance into a crystal-clear, urgent honesty about the evils of patriarchy that we don’t see too often (especially among white feminists whose thinking is often clouded by the mixed messages of millenia-long patriarchal wounding and recent oppression-complicity).

So, I’m a big fan of Celeste. And when I saw her tackling the elephant in the room—the abandonment of mothers in today’s culture—in her post “Why You Never Need to Feel Like a Shitty Mom Ever Again,” I was elated. Here’s part of the reply I dashed off, which I wanted to share here because it conveys my passion about one of the keystones of matriarchy.

Love,
Annie

NOTE TO CELESTE DAVIS RE “WHY YOU NEVER NEED TO FEEL LIKE A SHITTY MOM EVER AGAIN””

YES!!! You've nailed it again Celeste. For more jaw-dropping, check out Jean Liedloff's THE CONTINUUM CONCEPT about the most ancient indigenous childrearing practices (Main Takeway: society is supposed to be groups of adults at the center living life together, with kids watching from around the fringes---not groups of kids at the center with adults gathered around watching them!).  

Here's my thought: After a lifetime of contemplation of these horrors, and raising two children, I am sure that only one thing can heal this upside-down isolation and loneliness. It is women gathering together. I don’t feel anymore like blaming society (ie, the patriarchal system in power) for its abandonment of mothers. Instead I want to encourage women to heal and move beyond our widespread abandonment of each other! If we can come together in our full, true matriarchal power, nothing will stop us. I smiled ruefully at your point that forging a new society is another item on our to-do list. But truly—if we follow our joy, we will find that blissful item will cross off a myriad of other depressing and unnecessary items all at once!

Truly, we don't need to work alone to forge a new world as we have feared! We simply have to play together to weave a new world as we desire. And the beauty of women’s circles is that the gargantuan work we achieve there is so so easy and so so much fun.

What's needed is so simple it may seem incredible, but it’s true. As Jean Shinoda Bolen describes so well in her book THE MILLIONTH CIRCLE, once women are in regular circle with each other--with maybe a very simple ceremonial structure to keep things aligned--ALL THINGS ARE EASILY POSSIBLE. It is miraculous what a circle of women can achieve with our powers of consensus, wisdom, love, intuition, and unity. It only takes a weekend (I have facilitated such weekends, so I know from experience) and no matter how suspicious and untrusting of women we were going in, by the time we have spent that time together, our world is changed forever.

Based on my experience, I do believe that ideally a womencircle will happen in real time in three dimensions, not online, because that is the only way to guarantee the geographical proximity that will lead to practical daily results in the real world where moms need those results most. Anyone inspired by the idea of a kind of women's local-meetup-site?Maybe separate groups for moms , teens, elders, but the main group being one where all generations of women circle together?

Yes, patriarchy is responsible for the numbing separation, searing isolation, riveting grief, and sheer desperation that I feel almost daily and that I am beginning to suspect ALL women—not only moms but perhaps especially moms—feel, on some level, at the brutal loss of our Goddess-given matriarchal clansisterhoods! And I feel without a doubt that it's completey on women now to overcome our traumatized isolation and commit to connecting with each other in ongoing circles of chosen-clan-sisters,-daughters, -mothers, and -grandmothers-- thus healing ourselves and each other, regaining our full magical powers together as the central carriers of this blessed species, strengthened by our sisterhood to share our desires and needs to the men who love us, finally moving forward into the new world our hearts can already feel, sense and know. . .   

Love and Sisterhood,

Annie

It also put me in mind of the unforgettable

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Folks have been urging me to post more often here—as has that sweet mountain of “almost-finished-posts,” not to mention a more fluid stack,“ideas-flooding-in-to-tell-y’all about.” Ok, ok!

This post is longer now, but it began as a brief FormFlash occasioned by a great comment in response to my post about Alice Miller’s tragic response to the Abraham and Isaac story. In the comment, which you can read below the post, William Marsh brings up this quite remarkable quasi-sonnet by Wilfred Owen.

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

This sonnet is unstructured by rhyme as it tells the miserable, vicious well-worn story underlying the monotheistic, patriarchal Abrahamic religions, the story that gives Alice Miller a profound insight into the heart of human suffering under patriarchy—the story of people hurting each other as they look UP instead of at each other. (BTW the Goddesses, as I understand more deeply every day, do not demand us to look up, nor to look away from each other—and certainly not away from ourselves and the truths of our own hearts—in order to love and honor them!).

Why would Owen— such an unflinching observer of the vicious effects of patriarchy, such a fine wielder of tone and the brutal twist—choose to delay rhyme until after the sonnet is over? I like to tell my students that in a poem that is truly finished,

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A while back, I scanned some well-known sentences in a speech by Donald J. Trump and discovered there a preponderance of iambic pentameter. Today, writing to you from deep amid the anxieties and hopes of Election Day 2024, I am enjoying the other half of the job. Here is my scansion of some well-known sentences in a speech by Kamala Harris. As with so many aspects of the two candidates, the metrical qualities of their speeches are radically different.

My Trump scansions reveal narrowness of character and rigidity of values. Scanning Harris, on the other hand, reveals resilience of character and values rooted in connection to a full spectrum of human capacities. The regular rhythmical patterns in the well-known segment of a Trump speech that I scanned are all oriented to one single meter, iambic pentameter. Iambic is the authoritative meter that has ruled and dominated the English language through generations of patriarchal power; it is also the “meter of the mind.” Iambic pentameter, and its close ally iambic tetrameter, are the meters that Trump returns to repeatedly for heightened rhetorical effects. By contrast, Harris’s more extensive and flexible metrical vocabulary enables her to draw on a range of other meters —for example, the meters of heart, will, and common sense. Harris’s rhythmical resilience enriches her speeches with variety and emotional range.

My scansion of Trump may be found here. Below is my scansion of a well-known passage from a speech by Harris (I have broken up the lines to show more clearly the repeating rhythmical patterns):

Unlike Trump’s either/or approach to meter (iambic or nothing), Harris’s approach is more inclusive: her metrical range adds to but does not replace the dominant meter of iambic pentameter. In time-honored fashion, she uses iambic pentameter to establish authority by opening a key passage in her speech with a line of 5 exact iambs in a row: “I took on perpetrators of all types.” The use of the meter of the mind is effective here to summarize her point in succinct and objective language.

But Harris’s use of iambic pentameter is only one piece of a sensitively deployed wider metrical repertoire. In her next metrical ‘line’ Harris smoothly changes rhythmical course, aiming directly for the emotions of her audience with a passage in exact dactylic meter: “fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their personal gain.” If you would like to experience this shift more intimately, try reading the first two “lines” of the passage aloud (at least once, or #speakitthrice!). While saying the words, stay alert for a shift from mind-energy to heart-energy as you feel emotions move through you—perhaps compassion for the victims and/or rage at the injustice.

In the next two, shorter ‘lines,’ Harris returns to the clarity and authority of iambic meter—but this time in the shorter, more forceful line of 3 feet instead of 5 feet:

“So, hear me when I say

I know Donald Trump’s type.”

The symmetry of these two lines carries a commanding ring akin to that of a spell. Rather than appealing to discursive logic like iambic pentameter, this shorter iambic line appeals to a more intimate, trustworthy aspect of our minds: common sense and our body’s physical recognition of truth. It’s as if, now that she has established a bond of human kinship with our hearts, Harris can now circle back to address our minds with a simple, self-evident, more grounded kind of logic. Interestingly, these iambic lines sound very close to trochaic meter, the grounded meter of the body; the “so” in the first line is almost like a grace note, and the line “Hear me when I say” appeals with a startling directness, akin to a spell (after all, trochaic meter is known as the meter of witches’ spells, including “double double toil and trouble” in MacBeth.)

Harris winds up this passage by bringing in yet another meter: anapests, the meter of the will: “I’ve been dealing with people like him my entire career.” The anapestic rhythm conveys commitment, dedication, pride, and passionate intention—an appropriate way to underline Harris’s promise to put Trump in his place.

Tonight I’m hoping and praying to all the Goddesses I know that we will have the joy of experiencing much more of Harris’s fluent, metrically diverse rhythmical language in years to come!

I like
thinking big.
I always have.
  To me
  it’s very
  simple: if
  you’re going
to be thinking anyway,
you might as well
  think big. 

According to Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, this poetic gem is excerpted

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"Changing Woman" by Helen Hardin, Santa Clara Pueblo Artist, 1979

Sometimes it’s easy to forget how long I have been developing the ideas I’ve been sharing on this Blog. And it’s equally easy to forget how strangely young some of the most important ones are—how recently they found their final form. For example, last fall in India when I read from Earth Days, the collected poems published there, I was shocked to discover how disproportionally many of the poems—poems I still love and enjoy performing—were in iambic pentameter.

Anyone who works with me now in Meter Magic Spiral and my other classes, or who has read the poems that will be in my next collection or followed my thinking on meter for the last decade, is likely to know how central metrical diversity, and the awareness of deep scansion, are to me on every level.

So it’s odd to recall that, during the years I came up, the struggle out from under the fog of iambic hegemony was so very long and hard. The poets who work with me now take the glorious gifts of metrical diversity for granted. That’s what I would want for them and for the world—but it can hurt to confront my previous self and accept that the cutting edge was so different for her back in those iamb-blinded days, with no-one to teach me about metrical diversity but Time and Fear and Wonder, plus a few glowing clues . . .

I guess if you live long enough, and keep growing hard enough as I have always aimed my utmost to do, it’s likel that at one point you’ll find your younger self walking towards you on the road—as when Changing Woman encounters her younger self in the Navajo myth, merges with her, and grows young again. Perhaps I will come to dance with my struggling Younger Self through the memoir I’ve been writing—tending the incarnations of these lifelong metrical ideas until they nurture seeds for still newer futures within them. May the past’s cutting edge become the nourshing earth of the present! And so we go on. . .

The cutting edge for me now, particularly after my matriarchal-focused explorations in India, involves matriarchal lifeways, divine feminine spirituality, and the connections between both of these and meter. The intuition that this is a deep and real connection has been a theme of this Poetry Witchery blog (and, in actual practice, of Poetry Witchery Community) from the beginning. My recent travels and researches strengthen my sense that this connection has not yet been thoroughly explored —and reaffirm how important it feels for me to do so. So I am brushing off my Ph.D mind and bringing out my inner anthropologist (yes, as a junior in college I almost quit the English major for anthropology!), joining them with poet-mind, witch-mind, and priestess-mind on a focused quest to root the meter-magic connection more securely—if for no other reason than to help English to mature in a more responsible way than it is currently on track to do!

As part of this research, I hope to learn more about the ceremonial roles of diverse meters in matriarchal cultures through conversations with interested poets from oral poetic lineages, especially those retaining connections with matriarchal ways. Of course I will fully respect any ceremonial boundaries and keep the discussion to what is accessible and comfortable. Please do be in touch through my website if you know of someone I should talk with, or something I should read. Thank you, dear friends of poetry witchery!

Yours in love, meter, and matriarchy,

Annie