POET
Annie Finch is a poet and a prosodist, critic, editor, translator, and performer of poetry. She is the author of seven volumes of poetry, including Eve, finalist for the National Poetry Series and Yale Series of Younger Poets; Calendars, finalist for the National Poetry Series; Spells: New and Selected Poems, winner of the Maine Women Writers Award;The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells; and a ritual play on abortion, Among the Goddesses, winner of the Saraswati Award. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Norton Anthology of World Literature, and The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, translated into nine languages, and installed in New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Annie Finch’s books about poetry include A Poet’s Craft, The Ghost of Meter, The Body of Poetry, How to Scan a Poem, and nine anthologies on poetry including A Formal Feeling Comes, Villanelles, An Exaltation of Forms, and Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters. She is also the editor of the landmark collection Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books, 2020).
Annie’s music and theater collaborations and ritual performances have appeared at venues including Carnegie Hall, Stonington Opera House, Deepak Chopra Homespace, and American Opera Projects.
She holds a BA from Yale, MA from the University of Houston, and Ph.D from Stanford University and has lectured at universities including Berkeley, Harvard, Toronto, Delhi, and Oxford. In 2012 she was awarded the Robert Fitzgerald Award for her lifetime contribution to the Art and Craft of Versification. Based in New York City, she travels to teach and perform.
COMPREHENSIVE BIO
Annie Finch was born in New Rochelle, NY on Halloween, 1956. Her parents were pacifists who met at a lecture by poet W.H. Auden; her father was a scholar of philosophy and religion and her mother a poet and doll artist. Annie attended public schools until age 14, when she enrolled at Oakwood, a Quaker school in Poughkeepsie NY, and then studied filmmaking at Simons Rock Early College. She graduated from Yale University magna cum laude in English in 1979, earned an MA in poetry and verse drama from the University of Houston in 1983 under the supervision of thesis advisor Ntozake Shange, and completed a Ph.D from Stanford University with a special area of Versification in 1990.
Annie began her poetry teaching career at New School of San Francisco and University of Northern Iowa, then joined the graduate creative writing faculty at Miami University, and served for a decade as full professor and Director of the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. Since 2013 she has been teaching meter and magic at workshops and retreats across the USA and globally, as well as online through her Meter Magic Journeys and in the online community PoetessandPriestess.org.
Annie Finch’s poems have been published in Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Hudson Review, American Scholar, Yale Review, Partisan Review, Poetry, Paris Review, The New York Times, and numerous other periodicals and in dozens of anthologies including Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Norton Anthology of World Poetry, and The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry.
Finch has published eighteen books including poetry, verse drama, translation, literary essays, poetry-writing textbooks, and anthologies. Her books of poetry include Eve (finalist, National Poetry Series and Yale Series of Younger Poets), Calendars (finalist, National Poetry Series, short-listed Foreword Poetry Book of the Year Award), Among the Goddesses (Sarasvati Award from ASWM), and Spells: New and Selected Poems. She has also published books on poetics including A Poet’s Craft, The Ghost of Meter, and The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, all from University of Michigan Press. Her eight edited or coedited anthologies of poetics include A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women and An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, as well as Villanelles and Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters in the Everymans Series from Penguin-Random House. She is the editor of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, the first major literary anthology on abortion (Haymarket Books, 2020). Finch’s poems are also collected in a number of limited edition and micro-press books and in The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells (Wesleyan U.P., 2019).
The New Yorker, New York Times, Writer’s Almanac, and San Francisco Chronicle have quoted Finch’s poems and remarks about poetry, and she has been spotlighted in extensive interviews in AWP Chronicle and American Poetry Review. She has done numerous radio and TV interviews including NPR, Voice of America, and PBS, with poetry featured on MTV’s Def Poetry Jam. Garrison Keillor has noted Finch’s birthday on October 31 on the “Writers Almanac” and quoted her about poetry and magic. Finch’s poem “Winter Solstice Chant” was featured in the Sunday New York Times in an article about the spiritual meaning of the solstice, Kwame Dawes selected her poem “Edge, Atlantic, July” for the Poetry Foundation’s American Life in Poetry column, and the Academy of American Poets circulated her poem “Moon for Our Daughters” as the Poem-a-Day to over 300,000 readers via email and social media on the day after the 2016 election. On Brainpicker, Maria Popova called the poem “a breath of sanity and hope.”
The opera “Marina,” based on the life of Marina Tsvetaeva, premiered from American Opera Projects with a libretto by Annie Finch and music by Deborah Drattell, directed by Anne Bogart. Finch’s other poetic collaborations with theater, opera, dance, music, and visual art have been produced at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Spoleto Festival, Chicago Art Institute, and Carnegie Hall. Her commissioned and occasional poems include the keynote poem for the launch of the Mezzo Cammin Women’s Poetry Timeline at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, a Phi Beta Kappa poem for Yale University, and “Names,” installed as part of the 9-11 Memorial at the Cathedral of St. John Divine in New York.
Annie Finch has also been influential as a literary critic. Her book The Ghost of Meter (1993) laid out a theory of metrical meanings in American free verse of which The Canadian Review of American Studies wrote, “Is there such a thing as American prosody? The question has puzzled many . . . but until Finch’s book no-one, I think, has contributed significantly to the discussion.” Timothy Morris, reviewing the book in Style, wrote, “ I would bet that a whole generation of critics will learn from Finch how to hear the poems they read.” Finch’s essays on poetics are collected in The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self. Her groundbreaking work reimagining the aesthetic traditions of the “poetess,” particularly the essay “The Poetess in the World: Metaphor and Subjectivity in Lydia Sigourney’s Nature Poetry” (Legacy, 1987), is widely cited. In 1998 she founded the international online community WOM-PO (Discussion of Women’s Poetry Listserv), a hub of discussion of women’s poetics for a decade. Much of Finch’s critical work centers on reframing and redefining the role of poetic meter and form in contemporary poetry, and in 2010 she was awarded the Robert Fitzgerald Award for her lifetime contribution to the art of prosody. Finch’s translations from Ancient Greek, Anglo-Saxon, Russian, and French are known for following the meter and other formal constraints of the originals, from Akhmatova’s amphibrachs to the first translation of the complete poetry of French Renaissance poet Louise Labé to follow the original rhyme schemes University of Chicago Press, 2006).
The Dictionary of Literary Biography calls Annie Finch a “central figure” whose work “challenges the various orthodoxies of contemporary American poetry . . . In a milieu shaped by the boundaries between avant-garde, narrative, formal and performance poetics, Finch brings together all of these traditions in her musical poetry, exploratory anthologies, and probing theoretical work. Finch’s poetry and criticism have played a major role in recent feminist poetics and reinvigorated the discussion and practice of formalism for the postmodern era. Uniting all of her work is a conception of poetry as incantatory and performative, marking the deepest meanings of our lives through the body as well as the mind.”
Addressing audiences at hundreds of events, Finch has offered talks and poetry performances at venues including A Room of Her Own, Columbia University, Emerging Women, Harvard University, Modern Matriarchal Studies, Notre Dame University, Stanford University, Oxford University, University of California at Berkeley, Yale University, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. She has appeared across the U.S. and India and in Canada, England, Democratic Republic of the Congo, France, Greece, Ireland, Mexico, and Spain. Finch has been commissioned to write and perform poems including the 9-11 Memorial Poem now permanently installed in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC; Phi Beta Kappa poem at Yale University; and the opening poem for the Women’s Poetry Timeline at National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Annie Finch has held fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center, Wesleyan Writers Conference, the Architecture and Spirituality Forum, and Cherry Hill Seminary where she was the inaugural artist in residence. She is an Emeritus Fellow of Black Earth Institute, taught on the English faculty of Miami University of Ohio and other universities, attaining the rank of tenured full professor, and served for a decade as Director of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine. She has lectured, performed, and guest-taught at dozens of conferences and community centers and at universities including Harvard, U.C. Berkeley, Toronto, Delhi, and Oxford.
Finch’s literary archive was purchased by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in 2016.
A STORY OF 5 DIRECTIONS
Following this beloved path, she earned a Ph.D and spent decades as writer, performer, teacher, editor, translator, scholar, playwright, reviewer, critic, feminist activist, ritualist, mystic, and community-builder—all anchored in a passion for the profound, effective joy of the rhythms and structures of poetry.
Entering her wisdom years, though, she found the richness of her chosen poetic path overwhelming. She had learned to complete a poem, labor over it for decades or channel it in an instant— whatever it took to harmonize its parts into a singing spell of transformative wholeness. But what about the ongoing poem of her own life? How could she channel its deepest rhythms, comprehend and honor its structures, bring to beautiful completion the wild chaos of roles and goals that shaped her days?
It wouldn’t be easy. It took thousands of pages of diagramming, journaling, and musing; thirteen years gathering in ritual womencircles; tens of thousands of dollars dissolved in a “failed” business; a decade of revisions of a few two-line incantatory poems; hundreds of hours working in multiple healing modalities; and five initiatory tattoos.
And after all that transformation, I found it. There it was, distilled into rich simplicity with the shocking perfection of a fully completed poem: the pattern of my life. So I would never lose it again, I asked Jen Moore, now a legendary coach but then a brilliant “tattoo fairy” working out of a parlor in Portland, Maine, to etch it onto my left forearm. There, its harmonious, vibrant structure surged in one glowing whole.
It turned out that the pattern my life demanded was based on the magic ring I had been using in my womencircle practice. It is also interwoven with my work on multiple poetic meters, which turns out to be akin to the sacred circles of earth-centered cultures. But I would never have found this framework if I had not been forced to discover how to survive my own life as a poet in our culture. With the 5 directions corresponding to Will, Mind, Body, Heart, and Spirit, each role in my life had found its place in that sacred circle: creative maker; philosopher; enchantress of life; teacher passing on a legacy; ritual performer.
As I emerge from that thirteen-year-old chrysalis, the structure of 5 Directions seems to underlie most of my life and work. I am astonished and grateful at how this most ancient structure permeates and harmonizes my life. The 5 Directions offers a way to understand colors, elements, food and recipes, body movements, activities, teas, jewelry, Goddesses, perfumes, ritual structures, sex, friendships, book arrangements, moods, decision, and just about any aspect of life where clarity or balance is needed.
I am bemused that, as I enter my Wisdom Years, my work on meters has led me into a tool with much broader uses than poetry itself. After a lifetime of fierce, devoted loyalty to the art and craft and spirit of poetry, it’s been challenging to get used to these implications of my poetic calling. Sometimes, to find myself teeming with this new kind of thinking can feel like a betrayal, in this culture where writing poems is regarded as a fulltime “career” in itself.
But then I remember that the magical structures of meters are the rainbow of doorways that led me inevitably to this wider structure. They were gateways into the same five roles that poets in other meter-based cultures I have visited or learned about have taken on, from my Norse and Celtic ancestors to African griots to Siberian shamans to the Huichol medicine man I worked with in Mexico recently. And it all makes sense. A lifetime of work in Meters teaches us to find meaning and pattern in life, to see below surfaces, and to change energy at will, the witch Starhawk’s definition of magic. After all, that’s why peoples from the Nahuatl to the Japanese have required their political leader to be a poet, as a way to stay connected to that tradiitonal social blessing of poet. And, to be clear, it’s not the poet’s sensitivity as a human being or even their skill with image and metaphor that makes them so revered. Without the requisite metrical skill, it would mean nothing.
So I continue, spreading the message of Meter Magic to those who have ears to hear. Meditating in Meters is how I became a philosopher, witch, teacher, and ritualist in the first place, I can now accept these jobs as a natural extension of being a poet in the world.
That’s why I have renamed this blog (formerly Poetry Witchery) as Five Directions. The framework of the Five Directions encompasses and profoundly illuminates the tools of poetry witchery and meter magic, for sure. But its implications are helpful in so many more ways to people who may not even be thinking about poetry.
The Five Directions are manifested throughout my books, substack blog, podcast, and this site. To start exploring, visit the wheel on the homepage. Enjoy!
MOTHERLINE AND MY MOTHER MAGGIE, POET
My matrilineage includes very creative and powerful women of Nordic and Celtic descent. My great-grandmother Maggie West composed operas, scolded cartmen on the street until they stopped beating their horses, and proudly cheered women’s suffrage marches into her eighties. Her daughter, my great-aunt Jessie Wallace Hughan, was a pioneering Socialist economist and pacifist who started Alpha Omicron Pi Sorority at Barnard College and founded the War Resisters League in her living room. Jessie earned a Ph.D in economics in 1910 and ran for Lieutenant Governor of New York before women even had the right to vote. She was also a skilled, published poet and a public high school English teacher. Her sister, my grandmother Marjorie Hughan Rockwell, was a singer, writer, and teacher who advocated for educational reform.
Marjorie’s daughter, my beloved mother Maggie Finch, was a poet and fiction writer as well as a leading doll artist who served as President of the National Institute of American Doll Artists. Maggie was my first and best teacher of poetry writing, and I was honored to help her publish the first and last of her four collections: Davy’s Lake (which I self-published for her in 1992) and Crone’s Wines: Late Poems (Ablemuse/Word Galaxy Press, 2017). Maggie’s poems are moving meditations on love, nature, aging, the Goddess and death, mostly in skilled meter and full of wisdom, humor, and charm. Copies may be ordered here.
ABOUT MAGGIE FINCH’S POETRY
Margaret Rockwell Finch’s moving lyrics are passionate and lightly elegiac by turns. They speak unabashedly about desire and the human heart, but without the taints of sensationalism or sentimentality. Speak, however, is not the right word; given the delicately turned musicality of these poems, the mot juste must be sing.
—David Yezzi
Haunted, burnished passion echoes through these deft and beautifully alert lyrics. Margaret Rockwell Finch uses poetry’s traditional means to ends that are purely her own. From time’s quarrels, she has fashioned poems that resonate with poetry’s timelessness.
—Baron Wormser
Like the best of the chain of passionate women poets to which she belongs, Margaret Rockwell Finch is skilled in the perfectly torqued line, angled to pull power straight from the personal and often the collective unconscious. So many of these perfect crystals, forged with feeling and dignity out of the heart of experience, shine with the clarity of honesty and the strength of skillful craft. I am honored to count this poet as my literal and literary foremother.
—Annie Finch
The poems in Crone’s Wines often unlock the memories at the fringes of consciousness, making them come alive, or reflect on the mysterious and unspoken, casting them into the realm of the familiar. With a mix of formal and free-verse poems, Crone’s Wines is wide-ranging in style and scope: its many preoccupations include solitude, nature, family, love, even the lightheartedness of cat poems, and aging and death—as befits the “late poems” subtitle, informed by the poet’s age. There is a sense of the spiritual and meditative in the universal poems, and a fierce openness in the poems of personal relationship, often intimate in their recollections. This a rewarding collection with a lifetime of memories and experience, delivered with wit and wisdom.
—From the Publisher, Word Galaxy Press, a Division of Able Muse Press
Maggie Finch was born Margaret Rockwell on April 20, 1921. Her poems have appeared in publications such as The Christian Science Monitor, Saturday Review, and Sequoia, and her three previous books of poems are Davy’s Lake, The Barefoot Goose, and Sonnets from Seventy-Five Years. She served as president of the National Institute of American Doll Artists and copresident of the Maine Poets Society. Maggie, who called herself a witch and was a firm believer in reincarnation, passed over on Jan. 14, 2018.
TEACHING
Annie Finch is the author of six books of poetry including Eve and Calendars (both finalists, National Poetry Series) and Spells: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, awarded the Maine Writers Award). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Yale Review, and The New York Times and in anthologies including The Norton Anthology of World Poetry, Penguin Book of the Sonnet, and Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry.
Annie’s book A Poet’s Craft (University of Michigan Press) has been described as “nothing less than an MFA program in 700 pages.” It is used widely in undergraduate and graduate programs and beyond, along with her books about poetry A Formal Feeling Comes; Villanelles and Measure for Measure (both from Penguin/Random House); An Exaltation of Forms and The Body of Poetry (University of Michigan Press); Lofty Dogmas (University of Arkansas Press), and others,
Finch earned an MA from University of Houston (thesis advisor Ntozske Shange) and Ph.D from Stanford (dissertation advisor Diane Middlebrook). She was the first Stanford graduate student to take her orals exam in the area of Versification. She taught on the faculty of Miami University’s MA Program in Creative Writing and served for a decade at the University of Southern Maine in Portland as Full Professor and Director of the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing. There she developed a unique poetry workshop curriculum based in her work on meter and semiotics at Stanford, teaching poets including Amy A. Alvarez, Quenton Baker, Debra Bruce, Joshua Davis, Amanda Johnston, Autumn Newman, D.G. Nanouk Okpik, Richelle Lee Slota, and Patricia Smith .
She has received the 2009 Robert Fitzgerald Award for her lifetime contribution to prosody. In 2021, she founded Meter Magic Spiral, which she co-directs in the online Poetry Witch Community with Sanya Khurana. She has lectured at universities around the world including Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, Notre Dame, Tulane, Indiana, Toronto, Delhi, Kinshasa, and Oxford.
A MORE PERSONAL BIO
I was born on Halloween morning 1956 outside New York City to a progressive political and artistic family with roots in England and Scotland. My mother was a poet and artist, my father a professor of philosophy. My parents had met at a lecture of Auden’s. Our house was different from anyone else’s I knew, packed with Daddy’s 40,000 books on philosophy and religion and Mummy’s poetry and dollmaking studios. There were five children in the household. And, in spite of the culture and the intellectual excitement, there was much pain.
My safe spaces were the inside of a forsythia bush, the roots of a gnarly maple. I created worlds within my worlds. And then I became a spiritual pilgrim at the age of six, when my parents took my siblings and me on a mutli-continental camping trip that lasted over a year, living in a Volkswagen bus and visiting religious and philosophical power spots across Europe and the Middle East. That year I absorbed the sounds of Spanish, Italian, French, 
Arabic, Turkish, Greek— and learned to understand myself and my own language as other, different, private. After returning to the U.S., I curtsied when introduced to adults, spoke with a quasi-English accent, and ran away in terror from the things regular kids did, like a third-grade meeting about the Brownies troop.
With the support of my third-grade best friend David Wasow, who was the grandson of environmental visionary Adolf Murieand would later be diagnosed as schizophrenic, and the local children’s librarian, and I suppose my mother, i started making poems. I published my first one at age nine, and poetry became my primary mode of experience. Real life happened every summer in the north woods of Maine where I was free to write, run wild and barefoot in woods and field and shore, and seed the permanent passion for reading with Tasha Tudor, Edward Eager, Eleanor Estes, E. Nesbit, T.H. White, in our primitive cabin on Moosehead Lake.
At twelve, my life changed abruptly. I was sexually molested by an 
uncle and forbidden to talk about it. Adolescence was a storm of promiscuity and tears—shot through with spiritual searching, consciousness altering drugs, and adventures in friendship, literature, art, music, and, always, poetry and nature. With my wild older sister I roamed New York, sleeping with men twenty years my senior yet always finding the innocence and power at the heart of it all, knowing in my bones that the demeaning messages what our culture was teaching me about female sexuality was only a small part of the real story of women’s power.
Washed up on the shores of Yale to absorb myself for four years in a self-prescribed deep training as a poet, I began to find some footing on the earth again. But my real journey had not yet even begun. After graduation, hitchhiking to Africa with my best friend the painter Alix Bacon, I took datura with some French friends, not knowing that this plant is so toxic it can cause delirium, death and repeated flashback “return trips.” Living in New York soon after during the first of a series of flashbacks, I fell into a terrifying abyss. While performing my first book of poetry The Encyclopedia of Scotland, I began what would become a decades-long process of seeking and healing to uncover the deeper roots of what was wrong in my soul.
And this journey has turned out to be the journey of my life and, in many ways, of my poetry. It has brought me onto a path of spiritual seeking, political awareness, and commitment to do whatever I can to encourage our connection with 
ourselves, the earth, and each other.d I discovered paganism in San Francisco in 1990 and became a fully-empowered witch in 1999. My path has connected me with the power of the divine feminine and nature-centered spirituality, reminded me of the urgent importance of matriarchal culture, and grounded my life’s work in the importance of rhythmic language as a life-changing force .
There have been magnificent and challenging experiences in the thirty-five years since then. Moving to Houston, earning an M.A. in verse drama with Ntozake Shange as my mentor, marrying my husband Glen at the Rothko Chapel. Living in San Francisco, being a TA for Adrienne Rich, knowing Mayumi Oda, and having Diane Middlebrook as my Ph.D mentor. Staying loyal to my Muse through thick and thin, including never losing trust during the times when the tide is out. Following the trail from another datura flashback through the beautiful healing ways of yoga, acupuncture, shamanism, and earth-centered spirituality. Reclaiming friendships with old friends and nurturing new. Attachment parenting and raising two phenomenal kids. Teaching delightful students all over the country and creating a community that made literary history at the Stonecoast low-residency program. Learning the ways of herbs and the earth. And always poetry, poetry, and now writing prose as well. I’m grateful to have had this journey, I’m grateful to my readers and fans for your support, and I send all my love to you with each word I write!
Annie Finch
2013(?)
