Is the Goddess a Formalist?

Towards A Poetics of Pleasure & Immanence

Ishtar, 2200 BC

Dearest Readers!

I’m excited to share with you that I am preparing a new project: a full-length book of poetic theory, my first since The Ghost of Meter in 1993, and, amazingly to me and perhaps to you, actually building on the same basic ideas about meter and meaning. This time, though, I am no longer a graduate student preparing for an academic career but a full-fledged poetry witch devoted to Meters’ magic. So the coming book will interweave prosody with feminism, spirituality, my system of Directions, and all things poetry-witchly into a holistic exploratory manifesto for our world’s emerging matriarchy.

It is humbling and quite mind-blowing, as I bring together ideas dating back to my undergraduate years or even before, to realize how inexorably my life has served to develop such a unified, cohesive understanding of poetry and spirit. And most exciting and humbling of all is to realize that despite (or perhaps because of!) the amount of my dedication that went into shaping this system, it is not really original to me at all.

I will be sharing updates, ideas, and passages from the project right here as it develops. For now, below is an excerpt from my book The Body of Poetry that I am using as a reference point. Again, I has shocked me to see how in the nearly 20 years since this essay was first published, my ideas on poetic form have not changed at their core. They have only become more vivid in their impact and more far-reaching in their implications.

As Robert Creeley (whose use of meter I will discuss here soon—drop me a note in the comments to remind me if you want to read it!) would sign his emails, “Onward!”!

Yours in magic and poetry,

Annie