Metrical Diversity, Oral Cultures, and Matriarchy: Meeting My Younger Self —

— And Asking Your Help with a New Quest!:)

"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