Annie Finch | |
|---|---|
 Finch reading at Folger Theatre, Washington, DC, 2019 | |
| Born | Annie Ridley Crane Finch (1956-10-31)October 31, 1956 (age 68) New Rochelle, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Poet,writer,editor,critic,playwright,librettist,performance artist |
| Language | English |
| Education | B.A., M.A., Ph.D |
| Alma mater | Yale University,University of Houston,Stanford University |
| Genre | Poetry, verse drama, essay, memoir, poetics, poetry translation |
| Subject | Feminism, spirituality, abortion |
| Literary movement | Feminist poetry,New Formalism,Speculative poetry |
| Notable works | Calendars(2003),Among the Goddesses(2010),Spells: New and Selected Poems(2013),Choice Words: Writers on Abortion(2020) |
| Notable awards | Sarasvati Award, Robert Fitzgerald Award, Yale Younger Poets Finalist, National Poetry Series Finalist, Foreword Poetry Book of the Year Shortlist |
| Website | |
| AnnieFinch.com | |
Annie Finch (born October 31, 1956) is an American poet, critic, editor, translator, playwright, and performer and the editor of the first major anthology of literature aboutabortion. Herpoetry is known for its often incantatory use of rhythm,meter, andpoetic form and for its themes offeminism,witchcraft,goddesses, andearth-based spirituality. Her books includeThe Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells,Spells: New and Selected Poems,The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self,A Poet's Craft,Calendars, andAmong the Goddesses.
Annie Ridley Crane Finch was born in New Rochelle, New York, on October 31, 1956. Her mother was poet and doll artist Margaret Rockwell Finch[1][2] and her father,Henry Leroy Finch Jr., was a pacifist leader and a scholar of philosophy whose works include three books onLudwig Wittgenstein.[3][4] Her great-aunt was the socialist organizer, politician, and writerJessie Wallace Hughan.[5] Finch began writing poetry as a child. She was educated in public schools, then for two years at Oakwood Friends School and one year at Simon's Rock Early College, where she studied filmmaking and art history. AtYale University she studied poetry, anthropology, the history of the English language withMarie Borroff, and Versification with Penelope Laurans, graduatingmagna cum laude in 1979. After traveling in Africa with painter Alix Bacon, in the early eighties she settled in New York's East Village, where she worked atNatural History Magazine and self-published and performed the rhythmical experimental longpoemThe Encyclopedia of Scotland. In 1984, Finch encountered the work ofNtozake Shange in a bookstore and "recognized in her a soul-mother, someone else for whom poetry was performative, sacred, curative, indispensable, physical."[6] She immediately applied to the University of Houston, where Shange was teaching, and earned her M.A. in creative writing there in 1985 with a thesis in Verse Drama directed by Shange.[7] Finch earned a Ph.D in English and American Literature fromStanford University in 1990, studyingfeminist theory withAdrienne Rich and pursuing a self-designed concentration in Versification under the supervision ofDiane Middlebrook.
Finch's first poetry collection,Eve (Story Line Press, 1997), was a finalist for theNational Poetry Series and theYale Series of Younger Poets.Calendars (Tupelo Press, 2003), finalist for theNational Poetry Series and shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Book of the Year award, is structured around a series of poems written for performance to celebrate theWheel of the Year.[8] Her third book,Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams (Red Hen Press, 2010), which received the Sarasvati Award for Poetry, is a hybrid work combining narrative and dramatic structure to tell a mythic story about abortion.The Encyclopedia of Scotland was published in 2010 by Salt Publishing in the U.K.;[9] in the same year, Carnegie Mellon University Press reissuedEve in the Contemporary Classics Poetry Series.Spells: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), collects poems from each of Finch's previous books along with previously unpublished poems.The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells (2019), also from Wesleyan University Press, offers small spells of fewer than eight lines, gathered by Finch from the longer poems ofSpells.
Finch's poems are collected in anthologies including theAcademy of American Poets Poem-a-Day,Penguin Book of The Sonnet,Norton Anthology of World Poetry, andPenguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Her poems for public occasions include aPhi Beta Kappa poem for Yale University and the memorial poem for theSeptember 11 attacks installed in New York'sCathedral of St. John the Divine (accompanying the commemorative sculpture byMeredith Bergmann).[10] She has written that she believes it is part of her calling as a poet to composeoccasional poetry on topics of personal and cultural importance.[11]
Finch's dedication to writing in meter and her role as a scholar, editor, and critic of poetic form led some reviewers of her first books to classify her poetry within the movement known asNew Formalism.Dictionary of Literary Biography named her "one of the central figures in contemporary American poetry" for her role in the reclamation of poetic form.[12] But reviewers soon noticed key differences between Finch's poetry and that of other new formalist poets.Henry Taylor, for example, claimed that Finch was not a typical new formalist because she did not focus on the realities of contemporary life,[13] and C.L. Rawlins emphasized the incantatory use of form inEve, writing, "Finch is a poet in her bones . . . . What she proves inEve is that rhyme-and-meter isn't just a formerly fashionable sort of bondage, but a bioacoustic key to memory and emotion."[14] Cindy Williams Gutierrez made a similar point in a review of a later book: “Finch is more shaman than formalist. She is keenly aware of the shape and sound of her poems. Whether in a chant, sonnet, ghazal, or even Billy Collins’ contrived paradelle, her skill is effortless: Form is merely the skin that allows her poems to breathe with ease.”[15]
Poet and criticRon Silliman has situated Finch in the context ofexperimental poetry, writing, "Annie Finch can't be a new formalist, precisely because she's passionate both about the new and about form. She is also one of the great risk-takers in contemporary poetry, right up there withLee Ann Brown &Bernadette Mayer in her willingness to completely shatter our expectations as readers."[16] The experimental aspect of Finch's work became more evident with the publication ofSpells, which includes 35 of the poems composed in the 1980s that she refers to as the "lost poems." In the preface toSpells, she describes these as "metrical and experimental poems [that]. . . did not find their audience until the avant-garde's rediscovery of formal poetic strategies just a few years ago."[17]
ReviewingCalendars, poet and Goddess scholarPatricia Monaghan was one of the first critics to articulate the intersection of formal poetics and spirituality in Finch's work, writing, "Annie Finch is a traditionalist. Not in the way the word is commonly used . . . but in a strange experimental way. An oracle, an ecstatic maenad: that is the kind of traditional poet Annie Finch is."[18]
Finch's literary archive was purchased by theBeinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in 2016.
In the preface toSpells: New and Selected Poems (2013), Finch writes, "Compiling this book has led me to appreciate how much I was inspired as a poet by coming of age during the feminist movement of the 1970s. Reading it has helped me understand the ways I struggled over the years to throw off the burden of misogyny on my spiritual, psychological, intellectual, political, and poetic identities. My themes are often female-centered . . . I am proud to define myself as a woman poet."[19]
Finch's feminism is also evident in her prose writing, editing, and literary organizing. Her first anthologyA Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women (1993) collected poems and essays by contemporary women poets. The "metrical code," the central theory of her book of literary criticismThe Ghost of Meter (1994), is cited in the article on "feminist poetics" byElaine Showalter in thePrinceton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.[20][21][22] Her essay collectionThe Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self (2005) includes writings on women poets includingElizabeth Barrett Browning,Carolyn Kizer,Maxine Kumin,Audre Lorde,Lydia Sigourney,Sara Teasdale, andPhillis Wheatley, many based in feminist theory. In 1997, Finch founded the international listserv Discussion of Women Poets (Wom-Po). She facilitated the listserv until 2004 when she passed ownership of the list toAmy King.
In October 2016, anticipating the#MeToo movement, Finch became one of the first victims of sexual assault in the literary world to name writers, editors, and teachers who had sexually assaulted her during her career.[23][24]
In 2019 Finch launched aKickstarter campaign to raise funds for the publication ofChoice Words: Writers on Abortion, which the publisher,Haymarket Books, calls "the first major literary anthology about abortion."[25] The Kickstarter launched two days before Alabama passed anabortion ban and reached its fundraising goal in the first week.[26] Choice Words was published in April 2020.
Claire Keyes notes inScribner'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."[27] In an interview Finch stated, "Some of my poems are lyric, some narrative, some dramatic, and some meditative, but all are concerned with the mystery of the embodied sacred.".[28] Finch writes in the preface of her 2013 collectionSpells: New and Selected Poems that she considers her poems and verse plays to be "spells" whose rhythm and form invite readers "to experience words not just in the mind but in the body."[29]
Finch started a blog called American Witch in 2010[30] and has published several articles about earth-centered spirituality inThe Huffington Post.
Finch's dramatic works of poetry includeThe Encyclopedia of Scotland (1983), originally performed in a libretto version with live music, as well asAmong the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams (Red Hen Press, 2010) andWolf Song, which premiered at Portland, Maine'sMayo Street Arts in 2012. Both plays were collaborative productions incorporating music, dance, puppets, and masks. Finch has also written and performed several works in a genre she calls "poetry ritual theater," combining multimedia poetry performance with interactive audience ritual; these including "Five Directions," premiered at Mayo Street Arts, Portland, Maine, in 2012, directed by Alzenira Quezada, and "Winter Solstice Dreams," premiered at Deepak Homebase, New York, in 2018, directed by Vera Beren.[31][32]
Composers who have set Finch's poems to music include Stefania de Kennessey, Matthew Harris, and Dale Trumbore. Trumbore's settings of the poems have won the Yale Glee Club Emerging Composers Award, the Gregg Smith Choral Composition Contest, and other awards.[33][34][35][36] Finch was invited by composerDeborah Drattell to write the libretto for the operaMarina, based on the life of poet Marina Tsvetaeva. it was produced byAmerican Opera Projects in 2003, directed byAnne Bogart, and sung byLauren Flanigan.[37]
Finch's 1993 bookThe Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse uses prosody and postmodern and feminist theory to explore the semiotics of meter in free verse poetry byWalt Whitman,Emily Dickinson,Stephen Crane,T.S. Eliot,Audre Lorde, and other poets. Building on the work ofRoland Barthes and onJohn Hollander's theory of "the metrical frame," Finch calls her theory of metrical meanings "the metrical code."[38] The essay collectionThe Body of Poetry explores further topics in feminist poetics and poetic form including translation, "Metrical Diversity," and readings of poets includingSara Teasdale,Phillis Wheatley,Elizabeth Barrett Browning,Marilyn Hacker, andJohn Peck.[39] Finch's edited or coedited anthologies of poetry and poetics includeA Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women,An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets on the Diversity of Their Art,Villanelles, andMeasure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters. She has also authored a poetry-writing textbook,A Poet's Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry.[40][41]
At a time whenEmily Dickinson was the only nineteenth-century woman poet receiving critical attention, Finch's 1987 article "The Sentimental Poetess in the World: Metaphor and Subjectivity inLydia Sigourney's Nature Poetry" approached Sigourney through postmodern theories of the poetic self.[42] A subsequent essay on Sigourney was commissioned forLydia Sigourney: Critical Essays and Cultural Views (2018), which also included Finch's elegiac poem for Sigourney.[43] In the essay collectionThe Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, Finch discusses her ideas about "poetess's poetics" in broader terms[44]From 2006 to 2011, Finch served as editor of the Poets on Poetry Series atUniversity of Michigan Press, where she solicited essay collections by poets includingMeena Alexander,Reginald Shepherd,Martin Espada,Kazim Ali, andMarilyn Hacker.
Finch's translation from French of the poetry ofLouise Labé was published byUniversity of Chicago Press, honored by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, and represented in theNorton Anthology of World Literature.Spells includes translations fromAnglo-Saxon,Classical Greek, and Russian. In the preface toSpells and in The Body of Poetry, Finch explains that the physical qualities of the original poem, includingmeter andrhyme, are central to her translation process.
Finch began teaching as a graduate assistant, first at the University of Houston and then atStanford University, where she TA'ed forAdrienne Rich's "Introduction to Poetry" and developed an original course, "Women, Language, and Literature." She has taught on the creative writing and literature faculties of universities including New College of California, University of Northern Iowa, Miami University (Ohio), and the University of Southern Maine, where she served as Director of theStonecoast MFA Program from 2004 to 2012. She has facilitated poetry workshops at conferences and literary centers including Wesleyan Writers Conference, Poetry by the Sea, West Chester Poetry Conference, Ruskin Arts Center, and Poets House; and online at Yale Alumni Workshops, 24 Pearl St. and the London Poetry School. She has been a guest lecturer at universities includingUniversity of Notre Dame,Indiana University,University of California, Berkeley,University of Toronto, andHarvard University. Since 2020, she has taught poetry, scansion, meter, and ritualclasses online.[45]
