Annie Finch once told CA: "Poetry has been the focus of my inner and outer life since I was about nine years old, when my first poem was published. Yet for many years I have felt the need to carve a place for my own poetry through critical writing and editorial work. I found no ready acceptance for my particular poetic blend of passion, music, and female sensibility. Through my critical studies of the female poetic tradition and the complexities of metrical interaction, as well as through editing projects that have expanded the definition of formal poetry to include chants, blues, and experimental poems, I feel I have finally been able to create a literary context in which my own poetry can make sense.

"I am fortunate to have had exceptional teachers from the earliest training in philosophy by my father and poetry by my mother (whose book of poems written from 1936 to 1995 I am currently editing) through John Hollander and Penelope Laurans at Yale, to Ntozake Shange and Diane Middlebrook, my mentors in graduate school. Yet for much of my life I have been self-taught, simply because I found myself in places where other people were not. I have come to accept and to even enjoy this condition, since it liberates much of my energy from nonessentials and directs it where I want it to go, toward the blood, guts, and health of poetry, which are based right now, as far as I am concerned, on a return to the originally mesmerizing structures of the art.

"At a time when formalism is widely associated with reactionary conservatism, I am proud to have acted as a bridge-builder to broaden the definition of form and to demonstrate the value of form to poets who might not have felt comfortable with it otherwise. To me, poetic form, with its unverbal, physical power, is radically important in reconnecting us with our human roots and rediscovering our intimacy with nature. I see it as a key element in the health and survival of our race through a more balanced relationship with the patterns of the cosmos. It is no coincidence that I am currently using arcane metrical patterns to write a series of poems in celebration of the earth's seasons for use by a group of non-poets in 'deep ecology' rituals. I have always wanted my poetry to be useful, and I have found that rhythmic formal poetry is of great value in celebrating, commemorating, and cementing the bonds of community."

More recently, in April, 2000, Finch told CA: "At this point in my career, I am outgrowing my identity as primarily a 'formalist' poet, although I continue to be a devoted writer of poetry in meter. Having accomplished my goal of helping establish legitimacy for metrical verse as a truly contemporary idiom, I am now bringing to the forefront issues of subjectivity and voices that have interested me since the publication of my 1987 essay on Lydia Sigourney. My essay, 'Confessions of a Postmodern Poetess,' explains how I find the 'sentimentalist' writings of the primarily female poetic tradition an inspiring source of postmodern poetic strategy, because these poems construct a diffuse and non-ego-centered subjectivity while also maintaining a coherent and productive view of community and world.

"Many of the poems in my new book, Calendar, currently in circulation, are modeled on the sentimentalist tradition; they attempt to use language that is at once lucid and opaque in addressing emotionally vital issues of human connection with earth and family. My epic poem, Marie Moving (written in dactylic tetrameter after my research for The Ghost of Meter led me away from iambs), forges a similarly postmodern approach to narrative tradition, using a highly stylized allegorical strategy in combination with a lucid narrative structure and an explicitly productive theme of spiritual renewal. I have also been exploring the nexus between traditional formalism and experimental poetry by editing a book of essays on poetics in collaboration with language poet Jena Osman."

Fall Poems

Thanksgiving Poems