Annie Finch

Early life and The Encyclopedia of Scotland'

In "Desks," an autobiographical essay in The Body of Poetry, Finch claims that the poetry of her mother Margaret Rockwell Finch and her father Henry L. Finch's library of literature, philosophy, and religion influenced her work. In an interview in American Poetry Review, she describes how living for fifteen months in Europe and the Middle East at the age of six affected her sense of language as incantation. After graduating from Yale Finch moved to the East Village in New York City, where her creative friendships included artist Alix Bacon and poet Eileen Myles and where she self-published and performed the experimental longpoem The Encyclopedia of Scotland in 1982. She went on to pursue poetry and poetic theater at the MA program in creative writing at the University of Houston, where her thesis director was poet and playwright Ntozake Shange. Her doctoral studies at Stanford University, directed by feminist scholar Diane Middlebrook, focused on feminist literary theory, poetics, and cultural studies, culminating in the publication of her landmark essay "Dickinson and Patriarchal Meter: A Theory of Metrical Codes" in PMLA. She married environmental advocate Glen Brand at the Rothko Chapel in Houston in 1985 and with him has two children, Julian Brand and Althea Finch-Brand.

Poetic career

Finch's poetry first found its first national readership in 1997 with the publication of her second book Eve (Story Line Press), a finalist for awards including the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets, which drew attention from reviewers for its unexpected use of traditional forms and meters for feminist mythmaking and incantatory "shapeshifting." Her third book, Calendars (Tupelo Press, 2003), was shortlisted for the Foreword Poetry Book of the Year. The Readers Guide released by Tupelo Press in 2010 notes 15 different meters in the book Henry Taylor noted Finch's differences from the usual school of New Formalist poets in a review. Experimental poet Ron Silliman compared Finch to Robert Duncan and Bernadette Mayer, saying of Finch, "her loyalty is to the language. She gets it.".

Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams combines elements of opera libretto and epic poem to tell a story of abortion and goddess-centered spirituality. It received strong reviews and was awarded the 2012 Sarasvati Award for Poetry from the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology. . 'Spells: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2012) excerpts the previous books along with fifty previously unpublished poems, including a selection of experimental "lost poems" from the late 1980s, translations, and verse drama; it arranges four decades of Finch's poetry chronologically for the first time. Finch's poetry appears in anthologies including The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Her translation from French of the poetry of Louise Labé was published by University of Chicago Press, honored by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, and included in the Norton Anthology of World Literature.

Finch's poems for public occasions include the keynote poem for the Inauguration of the Women's Poetry Timeline at the National Museum for Women in the Arts, the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Poem for Yale University, and the memorial poem for the September 11 attacks accompanying the commemorative sculpture by Meredith Bergmann installed in New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Her interest in reaching a wide audience with poetry is discussed in essays such as "Occasioning Occasional Poetry" and "Where Are You, General Audience?".

Critical work and teaching

Much of Finch's poetics centers on the role of repetition and pattern. In the title essay of her book of essays The Body of Poetry, Finch connects the use of poetic meter and form with Goddess spirituality. Other essays in the collection describe her own creative process, discuss translation and women's poetic traditions, and advocate for "Metrical Diversity," the idea that formal poetry is more versatile, effective, and eloquent when it encompasses other metrical patterns in addition to iambic meter. Her books on writing poetry, such as An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, coedited with Kathrine Varnes, and A Poet's Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry, which includes a guide to writing in meter and has been called "nothing less than an MFA program in 600 pages", are assigned widely in university writing programs.

Finch's critical writings on women's poetic traditions, notably her 1987 article on metaphor and subjectivity in the poetry of Lydia Sigourney, are also influential, known for being perhaps the first to take a serious critical approach to the aesthetic she has called "poetess poetics.".

Finch has taught writing as a faculty member at New College of California, Miami University, Stonecoast MFA Program, where she served as Director from 2004 to 2013, and at the MFA in Creative Writing Program at St. Francis College. In 1997, she started the Discussion of Women Poets listserv, known as Wom-Po, and facilitated the community until 2004 when she delegated the role to poet Amy King. Her conference teaching has included many years on the faculty at the annual West Chester Poetry Conference as well as Poetry by the Sea and many women's spirituality conferences.

Creative collaborations and performance

A number of composers have set Finch's poetry to music. Her opera libretto, Marina, based on the life of poet Marina Tsvetaeva, was produced by American Opera Projects in 2003 with music by Deborah Drattell, directed by Anne Bogart, and with the lead sung by Lauren Flanigan. A libretto version of her epic poem "Among the Goddesses" is interwoven into the narrative version in the 2010 edition of the poem. In 2012 Finch's multimedia verse play Wolf Song was produced at Mayo Street Arts in Portland, Maine.

Earth-centered spirituality

Themes and images in Finch's work have been inspired by earth-centered spirituality. Eve is organized around a series of poems on ancient Goddesses, and Calendars has a framework of pagan holidays. Claire Keyes notes in the entry on Finch in Scribner's American Writers, "A strong current in [Finch's] work is the decentering of the self, a theme which stems from her deep connection with the natural world and her perception of the self as part of nature." In an interview, Finch stated, "My own poetry has long been heading in a deeply emotional and often spiritual direction. Some of my poems are lyric, some narrative, some dramatic, and some meditative, but all are concerned with the mystery of the embodied sacred, whether in relationships with nature or other people, or with spiritual issues more directly.". Finch became public about her spirituality when she started a blog called American Witch in December 2009. Since 2013 she has been publishing nonfiction prose about witchcraft and goddess spirituality in the Huffington Post, including "The Seven Best Things About Being a Wiccan" and "Nine Goddesses Every Woman Should Know."

Honors and awards

Books of Poetry

Poetics

Poetry Chapbooks

Opera Libretti

Edited books