When Is the Muse a Goddess?What is a Poet After All?

How the Five Directions Changed Me Into a New Kind of Poet

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).