FORMFLASH: "The Mountain Dwellers" by Autumn Newman

A deep-scansion dive into a new book, along the fraught line between mothers & goddesses

Autumn Newman with her scanned tattoo

If you are a close follower of Poetry Witchery, you may recognize the name of poet Autumn Newman. Autumn enrolled at Stonecoast MFA in the 2000s when I, as Director, had finally mustered the nerve to require every entering poet to take my crash course on metrical diversity during their first residency (we covered four meters equally over four days) and developed a more advanced form/meter curriculum as well. It worked! Those were amazing times for poetry at Stonecoast! So many strong poets came out of our program with a deep ear for meter and form, including Patricia Smith, Joshua Davis, Amy Alvarez, Amanda Johnston, Quenton Baker—and Autumn Newman. Autumn arrived with the word “Poet” tattooed on her chest and dove into meter more fully than any poet I had ever taught. After graduating, she mistressed meter in my online workshops and literally earned her scansion stripes, adding tattooed scansion marks (one wand, one cup) over that original trochee “Poet.” When I launched Meter Magic Spiral in 2023, Autumn was a founding Meter Mentor there, and she later became my Scansion Assistant for How to Scan a Poem.

Whether Autumn Newman is writing meter or free verse, her poem’s form is awake and aware in every syllable, so that form and meaning prove as inseparable as a face and its expression. Today’s Formflash looks at an ekphrastic poem by Newman about the painting by her mother below. “The Mountain Dwellers” was first published in Ekphrastic Review.

Peggy Newman, ‘Untitled,” 2023

The Mountain Dwellers

for Peggy

Knelt close to the ground, we looked up.
It was new every night or not there at all.
We looked up, and we gave her a name.

When the dark drew down, we looked up.
She pulled blood from women, desire from men.
We looked up. We were shaking and luminous.

In death and at birth, we looked up.
We blew prayers and ash up to her and her children.
We looked up and teased ritual from myth.

Each day at the change, we looked up.
She set fire to mountains we knew were not burning.
We looked up, we looked up, we looked up.

There is so much to explore formally about this mysterious poem—and, as in every good formal poem, following scansion’s call quickly enters us into those precious realms where meaning is unmistakably precise yet fully ineffable. . . .

One remarkable aspect of this poem is that it can be scanned in two completely different ways. The iambic mafia (yes, there is one!) might want to scan it as iambic pentameter, and technically that is possible— So let’s start with that scansion, although I will argue that a far more exciting, as well as more accurate, way to scan the poem is