American Witch

New Address for American Witch: americanwitch.tumblr.com

2011-12-03T05:59:00.000-08:00

Dear Fans, Friends, Followers: It's been a wonderful couple of years on this blog. Thanks to you all for your support and great comments as I got American Witch started. And now, on the eve of the second anniversary, American Witch is moving to an awesome new home at americanwitch.tumblr.com. If you are "following" American Witch now, it's easy to do so over there--just click on "Follow." You can even follow and comment by email. I will miss you all until you meet me there, so please come soon! Much love and Blessed Be, Annie
P.S. Posts from the blog's first two years will remain here, always timely, as the wheel of the year spirals back through the seasons of the year and our lives. . . I will still read and respond to comments on this blog as well as the new site.

Give Thanks for Mercury Retrograde

2011-11-26T10:21:00.000-08:00

Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving.. For the first time in many years, I spent the day with friends and my own family, but no-one from my family of origin. One result: I ended up appreciating how precious my family of origin is to me!

For several years now I've actually been enjoying Mercury Retrograde. The transit seemed to become less stressful after I turned a corner in the healing process, so that at last there was less I needed to clear up from the past than I wanted to experience in the present. Here's one of the more useful posts i've seen on the positive aspects of Mercury retrograde. Enjoy, and, as my dad used to say, "happy days!"

Getting Ready for Samhain

2011-10-28T18:00:00.000-07:00

I'm very excited about Samhain this year. On Halloween, I'm going to celebrate my 55th birthday with a special gathering of a few witchy friends—and at the same time, celebrate and inaugurate the beginning of the writing of my memoir American Witch—the story of the long strange trip that brought me to be here, on this blog, writing to you all about the beauty and power I find on this magick path and in this sacred world. If you enjoy this blog, please send a thought my way on Sunday night as I officially start out on this project. After 40 years of focusing entirely on poetry, it's scary and electrifyingly intense to be embarking on a big nonfiction book project—but I feel lots of support and love and encouragement from many quarters. So I say, "Bring it on!"

And then last night, I performed my poem "Samhain," from Eve, as part of the Halloween show at Poets Theater of Maine. The promotions described it as a "ritual poem," and it felt that way, perhaps more than any time I've read it in the past. Was it the costume—black cloak, white dress, amber beads? Was it the fact that for the first time for any poetry performance, I worked with a director, Assunta Kent, to prepare? Was it simply (and not simply—very importantly!) that I was truly "off book" and able to channel the words to the audience without the interference of the page? Was it that my daughter was part of the performance, acting the part of my "young mind" in Kent's staging? Whatever the reason, it was a special way to usher in the season of this profound New Year in the pagan calendar when the veil between living and dead feels so thin, because it brought me close to my beloved Grandy, described in the poem (you can see a photo of Grandy and me in an earlier post here). May you all find beautiful ways to bring meaning to the season by connecting with those you love, living and gone. Here's the poem. Blessed be, and Happy Samhain!

Samhain

In the season leaves should love,

since it gives them leave to move

through the wind, towards the ground

they were watching while they hung,

legend says there is a seam

stitching darkness like a name.

Now when dying grasses veil

earth from the sky in one last pale

wave, as autumn dies to bring

winter back, and then the spring,

we who die ourselves can peel

back another kind of veil

that hangs among us like thick smoke.

Tonight at last I feel it shake.

I feel the nights stretching away

thousands long behind the days

till they reach the darkness where

all of me is ancestor.

I move my hand and feel a touch

move with me, and when I brush

my young mind across another,

I am with my mother's mother.

Sure as footsteps in my waiting

self, I find her, and she brings

arms that have answers for me,

intimate, waiting, bounty.

"Carry me." She leaves this trail

through a shudder of the veil,

and leaves, like amber where she stays,

a gift for her perpetual gaze.

from Eve

On Yoga, Sprawl, and the Black Earth Institute

2011-10-05T12:40:00.000-07:00

I'm getting ready to head out to the annual retreat of the Black Earth Institute, where I have the honor of being a Senior Fellow this year. It's always an extraordinarily inspiring weekend, with powerful presentations by Fellows on their work in progress, hard-hitting and urgent conversations, and, not least, memorable wine from BEI founder Patricia Monaghan's homegrown organic grapes. How fitting a way to acknowledge this time of rich, succulent early-October ripeness.

It was at BEI that I met Christina Eisenberg, which that ultimately to my writing the play "Wolf Song." The theme of our readings for this year's discussions is "Hope and Renewal"; who knows where this year's conversations may lead?

This year, one thing I plan to talk about is my passionate belief in the ideas expressed in this talk by James Howard Kunstler. Kunstler's book THE GEOGRAPHY OF NOWHERE was what I was reading when I gave birth to my daughter. That book seemed to point the way to a more inhabitable world.

It's easy to live in the head and forget the importance of the physical. Poetry, particularly the rhythms of of formal poetry, reminds me constantly that the physical IS the spiritual--and in the last few months, as I've been getting back into doing yoga after a long hiatus, I've been reminded that this is true in every sphere, not just that of poetry. And it seems to be, in turn, the gist of Kunstler's urgent message for the architecture of our public realm.

Poetry, yoga, the built environment: sphere inside sphere, all working towards greater balance and harmony. It's a challenging time right now for all of us on the planet--but what beautiful, and increasingly sustained, glimpses we keep getting into more hopeful and renewing ways of living.

Merry Mabon: Equinox Invocations and Andy Goldsworthy at the Beach

2011-09-27T10:32:00.000-07:00

Mabon was glorious this year. For the first time, I cast a circle by using the invocations to the directions I wrote to structure my new book of poems. It has taken me two years to get up the courage to use these invocations, maybe because I was so afraid they would sound forced instead of magickal.

But they did sound magickal; they worked!

Compared to a normal circle, where we just improvise our invocations according to the spirit of the moment, this time I felt a significant difference: the circle was much more tangible. What a special feeling to create a magic space out of words you have crafted; it reminds me of how I felt after writing the Rune poem in the ancient Celtic form of Rionnard tri-nard.

Later, Glen and I went to the beach, where I thought about Andy Goldsworthy, one of my favorite artists, as I found myself crafting spirals and tunnels. Then we walked along the beach and found that other humans had left very similar traces--more sacred circles, silently invoking their own sets of four directions.

We humans are amazing creatures!

A Chant for Lammas--and my Garden

2011-08-04T06:48:00.000-07:00

photo by Georgia Etheridge

Happy Lammas, All! Here is the lammas chant from Calendars. Though it says two voices, we performed it the other day in four groups of voices, just moving through the poem three times, and it worked out great. If I can get the technology down, I'll also add the audio version from the Calendars CD

LAMMAS CHANT

(August 1)

(two voices, alternating)

Fill the earth's belly full.

Fill the earth's belly full.

Bring the food, bring the grain.

There are cold months ahead
Give them peace in the ground.

Bring the food, bring the grain.

Fill the earth's belly full.

bring the food, bring the grain.

There are cold months ahead.
Give them peace in the ground.

Fill the earth's belly full;

bring the food, bring the grain.

There are cold months ahead.
Give them peace in the ground.

From Calendars (Tupelo Press, 2003)

Among the Goddesses review

2011-08-03T08:43:00.000-07:00

Yay! Here's a nice little review of Among the Goddesses!

And if you like the book, here's the page where you can like it on Facebook--it has some fun information too!

Sand, Close Up

2011-07-20T12:12:00.000-07:00

The wonder never stops! Photos by Gary Greenberg:

forward, forward

2011-07-05T06:48:00.000-07:00

I picked up a copy of an odd book at a library sale over the holiday weekend: Ethel Morton at Chautauqua, by Mabell S.C. Smith, published just about a century ago, in 1915.

It's an eye-opener to see what things were considered wild and modern at that time: not only airplanes and electric lights, but also learning to swim, kids earning money (considered "commercialism" and cause for concern among parents), and girls wanting to be considered "individuals" :
"[Helen] was too young to realize it, but it was the cry of her time that she was trying to express—the cry of the woman to be considered as separate as the man, to be an individual." (p. 106)

These Julia Margaret Cameron photographs of girls are beautiful. They also strike me as sad, and I don't think it's just the slow-lensed technology. As Ethel Morton at Chautauqua reminds me, in Cameron's day, girls were even more imprisoned and their parents far stricter than they would be in Ethel's day; there's an extended discussion in the book of how they are less strict in 1915 than in previous generations.

When I look at the faces of Cameron's women with their open eyes and flowing hair, in a way they remind me of women I know now, so many sensitive and beautiful women I have met in my various spiritual groups and endeavors, all working on strengthening ourselves, healing from the past—sometimes from many generations of the past—and becoming stronger, happier, and freer human beings.

I like to think that we are doing it, on some level, for them. Not only for ourselves, but for all those women before us, equally complex and sensitive, who had so much more to contend with than we do, for whom sexism, sexual abuse, and limited opportunity were so much more daunting, who literally did not have, most of them, the power we have to be free human beings.

The big difference is that for most middle class women now, even with financial and other responsibilities, the main thing holding us back on our path is ourselves. As Cara, one of the women in my coven, said recently: "to take as good care of ourselves as we would of someone else--what a radical idea!"

Radical, and the necessary next step. So, for those of us who are still afraid of being "selfish,"let's do it not just for ourselves but for Helen, for Ethel, for those sometimes sad looking, long-gone-but-still-here sisters in the photographs.

It's them we are freeing, and it's us. Let's do it!

Yeats Springs Eternal: Happy Birthday WBY!

2011-06-13T05:02:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday to you, William Butler Yeats! I am inspired by a myriad of poets, but perhaps you inspire me most of all;
your ear and your adoration of poetry, and also your care for folk art, your passion for politics, your willingness to be a public poet, your spiritual openness. When I began to write critical prose, I read your Essays and Introductions looking for an authentic way into my own critical voice, and when I began writing memoir, I studied yours. Here are photos of me being blown away at the exhibit about you in the National Library in Dublin, taken by Ted Deppe just after he asked if I were Yeats' incarnation. Sometimes I think so. ..

And now it seems I, like you, have started a theater company. Poets Theater of Maine got an employee ID number last week, opened our first play, Wolf Song, this weekend, and today, on the auspicious date of your birthday, I am going to put the first deposit in the bank account. I feel you with me today, I honor you, and I thank you.

Yeats is often acknowledged as one of the poets who knew how to write about age, but he is not as often acknowledged as one of the poets who knew how to write about youth. I have heard "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" discounted as a sentimental piece, not as rich or complex as the mature Yeats. Why not instead appreciate it as a poem of youth, of the direct passion of youth for the natural world, of youth's close attention to the inner spring of the soul's necessity?

It's one of the first poems of his I loved, and still count as one of my all time favorites. Last time I was in Ireland at the Stonecoast residency, I did my over-the-top imitation of him reciting it and we all laughed.

I hope you would have laughed as well, William! Many happy returns!

THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,  

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;  

Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;  

There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day  

I hear the water lapping with low sounds by the shore;  

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,  

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Five Commandments

2011-06-06T04:45:00.000-07:00

Do you notice something odd about this Biblical quote?

Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. — Romans 13:9-11 (AV)

I just came across it on John Edminster's website. It's from St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans—the most important theological statement by the person who defined Christian theology.

I see only five commandments here! And they're the good ones. . .

So why aren't the "christians" who want commandments posted in public buildings pushing for 5 instead of 10?! It would certainly be more theologically accurate!

Wolf Song: In Drama Begins Responsibility

2011-06-03T17:59:00.000-07:00

I write this from the sidelines of one of the final rehearsals of my play Wolf Song. Its very first performances are next week. The deer chorus is singing, "deep inside the belly of the wolf/where the dark growls begin. . ." I'm
watching just a segment of the unbelievable crew of creative people—director, composer, musicians, maskmaker, puppetteers, choreographer, lighting designer--who are bringing the wolf to life in this show. It's all just a remarkable experience.

An earlier incarnation of this group actually incubated the play; act by act, I wrote it with the art of particular people in mind: images of Libby Marcus's puppets and masks, the dancing of Oren Stevens the hunter, and, as the final group took shape, Mihku Paul's props, Assunta Kent's direction. Somewhere along the line, it all led to founding a new theater company with Assunta and Erica Vega. And it was worth it. The opportunity to write a play for a living troupe, to collaborate with incredible artists, now including choreographer Brigitte Paulus, lighter Stoney Cook, costumer Kristina Skillin, and many wonderful actors, and to work so intimately with its first performance, is more complex and satisfying than I ever could have imagined. . .

As an artist, I'd say the lesson I am learning the most from all this is responsiblity. Increasingly, as I've been coming along through this life we all share, I've discovered, as maybe you have, that the limits of my strength and power are not as close as I thought they were. With the decades, the months, the weeks even, it seems I am able to get stronger, as long as I am willing to move and let go of the parts of me that I don't need. With that strengthening, that stronger stretch, comes growing power (here's Lucia Rene's blog on how power is growing for women now!)--and with the power of course comes responsibility.

But this is the surprise: the nature of the responsibility. For a long time I thought of responsibility as a sense of duty, an obligation, as if a weight were being added to me. But now, since I have found my long-lost heart again (during a shamanic soul retrieval journey I will write about anon), I feel responsibility as a lightening--an increased need (and ability) to respond.

The root meaning of respond is to "give back." "promise back." What I'm learning is that giving back is not only an obligation but a freedom; it creates a lighter heart.

Poison Ivy Season...

2011-05-23T08:15:00.000-07:00

Does or did anyone else out there get poison ivy? Last year, using Louise Hay's affirmation for poison ivy/poison oak, I avoided it for the first time since suddenly becoming vulnerable to it 25 years ago. Here's another post on the same topic. This is the kind of wisdom I want to make more widely available; I know it would have saved me decades of trouble. What are your experiences?

Shamanista Dawn

2011-05-23T08:14:00.000-07:00

I am in NYC just back from a phenomenal weekend of shamanic work with Shamanista Healing Circle. It confirmed my knowledge that Witchcraft and Shamanism are the same thing. The movement of energy, the spirituality of the earth and everything in/on it, the importance of intention, the centrality of freedom, integrity, and respect--it's all there--or can be.

I know I'll be writing much more about all this in future. For now, I'll just say that after doing a soul retrieval journey for someone this weekend, I felt the need to channel a small healing poem for him--a kind of a charm, talisman, that he could use to embody his healing, carry with him, and re-cast the spell whenever he needed it.

The connection between poetry and healing is ancient. And one thing I learned this weekend is that the ancient things are not far away, just because they are ancient. In fact, they may be the closest to us of all, because they are the things that arise naturally out of being human.

My Old Screensaver and My New Screensaver

2011-05-19T06:33:00.000-07:00

I've had this screensaver for months now:

It's a painting by John Singer Sargent that used to hang here in the Portland Museum of Art. The brilliant curator had hung it at the end of a long, quiet corridor so you got to approach it slowly
and appreciate it from various distances. Glen and I discovered it one day and stood there together for a very long time appreciating it--the subtle, exuberant layers of white and the lightest yellow paint for the light on the stairs--it made me so happy, calm, and slightly wistful, and it evoked a long-ago memory that has haunted me for many years of squatting at the foot of my parents' gray wooden back stairs and playing in the sunlight. (I still wonder what that memory was about. . . it's the source of a line in capital letters in my book The Encyclopedia of Scotland: ("AT THE FOOT OF FADED GRAY STAIRS". . . Here's me standing on those stairs c. 1970:

A few days ago I was wondering about the Sargent painting, when and whether I would ever change my screensaver. I've had the stairs there for so long, and they've been inspiring me with the excitement of discovery. . . but lately I've been noticing the corner at the top of the stairs, and wondering what's around that bend. Still, I couldn't imagine what could ever replace those singing, operatic stairs.

And then this morning, the day after a wonderful journey with my local shamans which connected me joyfully with masculine divine energy and the spirit of the woods, I received this photo of fiddleheads in an email from Cathy Taylor. I don't think I know Cathy personally; she may have been associated with last year's Wild Weeds Poetry Contest on this blog, because that phrase was in the address field. Cathy's fiddleheads have become my new screensaver! Thank you, Goddess, spring, and Cathy, not to mention the Green Man whose energy these ferns convey to me so deeply, for their gorgeous, searching, eloquent new beauty.

Scottish Beat Burning Man Wolf Song

2011-05-17T15:51:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Wendy Babiak for telling me about this link to Scottish drummers and pipers at the Edinburgh Festival. The more I learn about the world, the clearer it seems that we are all so closely linked physiologically, artistically, psychologically. Meanwhile, I've been thinking about the connections between meter, rhythm, wicca, and shamanism while developing ideas for a workshop on Spell Rhythm for the upcoming Burning Man Festival. And listening to the incredible music for the Wolf Song play, the rhythms of the instruments, singers' voices, and dancers' feet bringing my words to life as if had always been meant to be heard that way...

Answers for Kailee

2011-05-05T09:26:00.000-07:00

Kailee is a high school student who wrote me a note one day. Here's our correspondence:

Hello Annie,

My name is Kailee Hocker. I live in Hiawatha, KS and I'm a junior in High School. Our english teacher wanted us to do research on a famous poet that we like; as well as contact them in any way and ask questions. I looked at a lot of poets and I thought your poems were very pretty. I would really like to get to know more about you. So, please e-mail me back ASAP :) I have some questions I would like to ask you regarding your poetry!

Thank You.

Your New Fan,

Kailee Hocker :)

Dear Kailee,

Thanks for your email. It's always nice to hear from people who appreciate my poems! I'm really busy working on my next book of poetry, so I can't answer your questions in detail.

You can find out a lot about my poems and how I wrote them in the Readers Guide to Calendars here: There are also some interviews at my website here, and some audio interviews here

But if you still have a particular question about a certain poem that you feel you can't find the answer to anywhere else, email me back and I will try to answer as soon as I can.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of facts you might like to know just to get you started:

The original title of "Pearl" was "Voyeur."

The second stanza of "The Intellect of Woman" was written 10 years after the first.

"Imbolc Chant" has four different meters in it, and it was written to be danced.

Above all, please be sure to hear my poems aloud--it's how they were meant to be heard. You don't have to actually read them aloud (though that would be great) -- you can also read them aloud silently by hearing them inside your head as if they were spoken.

Enjoy!!

Love and blessed be,

Annie Finch

PS By the way, is Hiawatha named after Longfellow's poem? That is a wonderful poem! Here is my blog post about listening to the whole poem in one afternoon: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/04/audacity-of-voice-the-poet-as-actor-michael-maglaras-hiawatha-marathon-and-how-i-made-my-cd/

The part about Hiawatha is in the last 3 paragraphs.

Dear Annie!,

I would like to start off by saying... I am terribley sorry for the LONG amount of time it took me to get back to you. I feel aweful. I did not see that you relplyed back to me! Plus I have been very busy with athletics and other school work. I feel extremely estatic that you replyed back to me tho! :) I was hoping you would. There are many questions that I would personally like to get from YOU... If that's okay :)

1) How did you begin to write poetry? Age?
2) What inspires you to write? People? Places?
3) What do you enjoy most about writing?
4) Are there other poets that you look up to or that inspire you? Who? Why?
5) Did you always want to write?
6) Do you do it as a hobby... or is it a job?
7) Where do you like to concentrate and write your poetry? Why?
8) Do you ever get stuck on a poem or get stressed?
9) What is your favorite poem you've written? Overall? (Any poem from any poet)
10) Last but not least... What quote of advice do you give admirers and fans to live by? :D

I know it's a lot! But I really wanna know a lot about you! Just answer them as best as you can.

Also...The thing about Longfellow's poem... The Song of Hiawatha... Umm... Well I am not completely sure. I asked my mom about that one. She said she thinks it is modeled about his poem. I mean we have a street named Longfellow up by my High School and Hiawatha is an indian name. Our school mascott used to be the Redskins (unfortunately now the Redhawks). But I guess it's about a lil' indian boy named Hiawatha... but I'm not sure if it's actually linked to our town. I will do some research on it though! I think my grandparents actually have the poem (A.K.A. pretty much a book lol) at their house. So I will try to see but Im not sure! :( Lol

Your New Fan,

Kailee Hocker :)

Dear Kailee,

Here are your answers. I hope they are helpful. I am planning to post them on my blog to that other students might be able to find them useful. Do you mind if I use your name there, saying that you wrote asking me these questions? I can just say"Kailee H.," or I can just not use your name and say "a student."

Good luck finding out about Hiawatha. It does sound as if a lot of people in your town used to love that poem, at least!

Annie

1) How did you begin to write poetry? Age?

I began to write poetry at age 7 or 8. I think it might have been a school assignment, but I just never stopped. I showed some poems to a librarian in the public library when I was 9, and she sent them to a magazine which published them.

2) What inspires you to write? People? Places?

Feelings that come from people, places, ideas, or experiences.

3) What do you enjoy most about writing?

The feeling of doing what I am meant to do.

4) Are there other poets that you look up to or that inspire you? Who? Why?

Yes, there are hundreds. A few of them are W.B. Yeats, George Herbert, Langston Hughes, Rumi, Audre Lorde, Gerald Manly Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Hart Crane, John Keats, Sara Teasdale, Gwendolyn Brooks, Basho, Frank O'Hara, Marina Tsvetaeva, Hafiz, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Odysseus Elytis, Sylvia Plath, Edmund Spenser, and Emily Dickinson. Each of them inspires me through their skill in poetic language and music, and I look up to them because they had the courage to follow their unique path and"Wh vision.

5) Did you always want to write?

Yes

6) Do you do it as a hobby... or is it a job?

It is a calling. I guess you could say that a calling is sort of a combination of a hobby and a job.

7) Where do you like to concentrate and write your poetry? Why?

Sometimes I like to have people around--in a cafe, on a train, on a plane, on a bus--and sometimes I like being alone--at a desk, or lying on my bed, or outside in nature. Either way, it's better when I'm not interrupted.

8) Do you ever get stuck on a poem or get stressed?

Sometimes, but then I try to just leave it alone and do something else until I can come back with a fresh approach.

9) What is your favorite poem you've written? Overall? (Any poem from any poet)

A lot of my poems feel like favorites. A few of them are: "Walk With Me," "Summer Solstice Chant," "Landing Under Water," "Butterfly Lullaby," "Chain of Women," "Goddess,"

and "October Moon." I have hundreds of favorite poems by all the poets listed above and by others. Some of the first poems I loved when I was young are "Where Go the Boats" by Robert Louis Stevenson, "Your Catfish Friend" by Richard Brautigam, "Little Tree" by e.e. cummings, and "The Tyger" by William Blake. Other favorites are: the Anglo-Saxon poem "The Seafarer", "The Flower-Fed Buffalo" by Vachel Lindsay, "Nuns Fret Not" by Wordsworth," "A Birthday" by Christina Rossetti, ""The Illiterate" by William Meredith, "We Wear the Mask" by Paul Laurence Dunbar, and "Do Not Go Gentle" by Dylan Thomas.

10) Last but not least... What quote of advice do you give admirers and fans to live by?

"If it harms no-one, do what you will."

Anapestic Ribaldry

2011-04-27T05:18:00.000-07:00

I read at the University of Vermont a week or two ago, and Glen and I had the pleasure of meeting the very charming Irish-born poet Angela Patten. Yesterday arrived in the mail a remarkable gift from Angela: a copy of Ciaran Carson's translation of the 1780 Irish comic narrative poem, The Midnight Court (Wake Forest U Press, 2006). Wow. Thanks Angela! I plan to read it on the plane to LA today, for the story—apparently it's about a Faerie court of women trying a man for his (non)use of his sexuality, rather a pagan theme—but meanwhile, what a treat to see a recently-written poem that uses meter--let alone a noniambic meter!— with such skill and wit! It's a rare recent poem—or translation— that reminds you why poetry is considered an art for the ear. I think this one is a must for Poetry in Rhythm, working title for an anthology of metrically diverse poems I am coediting with Canadian poet and Stonecoast MFA student Alexandra Oliver. Check out this excerpt:

Not long was my slumber when nearby, thought I,

the land rocked and rolled and a turbulent sky

Brought a storm from the north, an incredible gale

That lit up the harbor as fire fell like hail.

In the blink of an eyelid--a thing I still see—

A female approached from the side of the quay,

Broad-arsed and big-bellied, built like a tank,

And angry as thunder from shoulder to shank.

Of her stature I made an intelligent guess

Of some twenty-one feet, while the hem of her dress

Trailed for five yards behind, through the mire and the muck,

And her mantle was slobbered with horrible guck. . .

I could imagine settling in to hear a full reading of this poem, just as I described doing at Michael Maglaras' reading of Hiawatha, which recently kept a sizable audience (and not an audience of poets, either!) happily listening for over five hours. . .

Cousin Chas on Graffiti

2011-04-25T15:09:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite of Chas's art posts on the topic of a graffiti exhibit which i hope to see when I'm in LA next week to read from Among the Goddesses @ the LA Festival of Books. Every time I see great graffiti, I feel like I'm in the presence of a powerful wild animal, one that looks me in the eyes and knows far more than i do--like Aldo Leopold's moment of encounter with the Wolf: "We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view." Thank goodness, we have learned a bit from the mistakes of that generation and now we can look out the train window and appreciate the wolf's eyes, maybe even bring them into the museum, maybe even begin to build a true ecosystem, like this collaboration between Yo Yo Ma and Lil' Buck. You tell em, Chas!

Ostara Vibrations--

2011-04-25T01:09:00.001-07:00

Positive!!!

This is my favorite Ostara altar ever, thanks to daughter Althea.

love to all for spring!

Choice Among the Goddesses, or How I Finally Wrote About My Abortion

2011-04-10T03:06:00.000-07:00

Here is a guest post I wrote for Ruth Ellen Kocher's very fine blog Aboutaword, which I wanted to share also with you, dear loyal readers of American Witch. . .
My book Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams came out recently and now I am doing readings and a blog-tour about the book--(there's even a Facebook group started by the press where you can share experiences and get updates on readings and performances of ATG). The book has a unique structure; it intertwines an epic poem and a poetic opera libretto that tell the same story in narrative and dramatic form, spiraling around each other if you read the book straight through. You can also read one side of the page only as an epic poem, the other only as a poetic libretto.

I am having an unusual time publicizing this book for several reasons. I’m still figuring out how much to sing and how much to speak when I perform, with or without musicians. Also, the tangled history of writing the book, described briefly below, sometimes makes it feel like I’m living in two or three decades at once. The main reason, however, is the abortion.

The book’s only review so far (by Jane Galer, in Coreopsis) points out that Among the Goddesses “might be the first opera about abortion.” Even when I first conceived (pun intended) the poem around twenty years ago, I knew that an abortion would constitute the climax of the action. I had not had an abortion. But I still felt it was the most important theme I could write about. I wanted to help create, or express, a spiritual basis for reproductive freedom: not just a tolerance, but a reverence for women’s ability to become pregnant and the consequent power that has always lent us over human life and death while a baby is part of our own body.

When I started writing Among the Goddesses, I had not had an abortion. But eventually, in fact, I did. I became pregnant by accident, at age 44 with two carefully-spaced children including a 1-year-old baby, a struggling marriage, financial challenges, and three demanding careers. I agonized over the choice, and my husband and I finally chose abortion as the best course for our family (afterward, I was interviewed for Jennifer Baumgartner’s wonderful film Speak Out: I Had An Abortion ; someone has posted a brief excerpt of the interview here.

I am a deeply spiritual person who finds life and death intense and almost unbearable mysteries. It was impossible for me to think of an abortion as a purely physical act, “just like going to the dentist,” to quote Maude’s daughter on the 1972 TV episodes which seem to be not only the first but possibly the only positive depiction of abortion ever broadcast on U.S. network television. And it was equally impossible to take the only other choice offered by mainstream culture: to frame my abortion within the values of a male-centered, judgmental religion based on the dualistic denial and transcendence of death. It was a no-win dilemma.

After the abortion, although the epic poem was finished, I pulled it from its scheduled publisher and began another decade of work on the project. I wanted to add to the story’s mass without diluting its archetypal force. Over ten years, I turned the epic poem into an opera libretto, put the two side by side, and finally interwove them, finding, in that new and spiraling shape, the kind of repeating, archetypal oral tradition I had been looking for. Just before the book was published, I added as an appendix the most personally revealing piece of writing I have ever published: a ritual I wrote for my family to heal ourselves when it became clear that believing in a spiritual context for abortion was not enough. We needed to act ritually on that belief as well, in order to fully enact the abortion and also to heal from the pain created by the mainstream no-win dilemma. The ritual had worked, freeing me to move forward in peace with the book and my life, and I wanted to share it with others who might finish reading the book and wonder about a possible next step.

At the launch of Among the Goddesses at the AWP writing conference last spring, given Red Hen Press’s two-hour challenge to sell as many copies as I possibly could because otherwise I’d have to bring the leftovers home in the suitcase I’d already stuffed to overflowing with other people’s books, it was hard to have any doubts about the book’s future. “It’s the feminist epic of the 21^st century,” I told anyone who would listen. “Isn’t the cover gorgeous?” (it is). A lot of people listened, and I sold 60 copies in two hours. People loved the title, and several told me that goddesses are “coming back” now. They also enjoyed the epic-libretto format. In fact, in a van on the way to the airport, several writers cooked up a plan for me: I would travel the country performing benefit performances of the book with local musicians, for birth control clinics and feminist groups. What a great idea!

But even if I do a traveling musical tour, even if the book bears on a living moment and a contemporary controversy, it remains timeless in the same way as my other poetry. In the final analysis, isn’t it in the timeless realm that I want it to live? This is the way I’m used to thinking about my poems. A poet for as long as I can remember, I’ve given readings for many hundreds of people, and I’ve read to a dozen. I’ve published in magazines with huge circulations, and magazines with the teeniest of circulations. And it’s all been fine to me; it hasn’t really mattered. All my poetry has been written for the eyes of the Muse and the future.

Greek Goddess Demeter

But this book is turning out differently. I never anticipated, when I added my personal post-abortion ritual as an appendix at the last moment, that because of that action, the whole thrust of the book could change. All along I had known there was a lot at stake for me. As a woman, I wanted to create a spiritual context in which the deep, free, and responsible choice for my own abortion in my own body could be recognized as part of a greater sacred whole. As a citizen, I wanted to feel I was helping tip the culture out of that no-win dilemma which undermines female-centered spirituality and, thus, ultimately, women’s capacity for full self-empowerment. And as a poet, I needed to ground the most dramatic theme I could imagine in the most charged imagery I could conjure.

Now that the book is out, I’m beginning to learn more about what’s at stake for others. At a party last week, I met a women’s studies professor who told me that two students had come to see her the previous week in agony because they felt they needed abortions, knew that was the right thing to do, yet had no spiritual context in which to conceive of doing so. She said she would shareAmong the Goddesses with them, not only for the poem (these were girls who don’t normally read poetry) but also, or maybe even more, for the appendix at the end.

Sumerian Goddess Ianna

The more I notice the rollback of women’s reproductive rights and freedoms (like today’s news of the closing of a so-called loophole for rape victims in Indiana, or the shocking attempt to defund Planned Parenthood as part of the federal budget agreement) and the closer my own daughter and her friends get to the age of sexual activity, the more it matters to me that this ritual is out there, that people have a concrete, physical model for a new approach to abortion. (I'd also like to mention, and thank, and recommend, a very wise and useful book that helped me get to the point of realizing I needed a ritual: Peace After Abortion by Ava Torre-Bueno.

In the final version of the poem, the poem’s heroine, Marie/Lily, receives guidance and company from the goddesses Demeter, Kali, and Inanna—all balancers of life and death, as goddesses tend to be— as part of her journey of self-determination, which takes her through a symbolic mythic abortion and out the other side. Only many years after that experience does she finally have her baby, and when she does, the baby is welcomed into a community she has helped to build and never could never have dreamed of, the first time she became pregnant.

Hindu Goddess Kali

After twenty years of gestating this odd and fully-formed newborn young adult,
I need to acknowledge that it’s here, it’s come out, it’s been born—and like any newborn, it has a life utterly its own ahead. I find myself mystified and surprised when I think about the future of my creation and the new world into which it has emerged. I’m surprised at how central that abortion ritual feels to me, like a seed, or a baby, cast out on huge, dark, unknown water in the boat of this strange book, Among the Goddesses. And I’m mystified as I wonder what their fate will be.

Recipes at Thea's Kitchen

2011-04-03T10:08:00.000-07:00

Snow still on the ground here after a white April Fools Day surprise, but thank the goddess I just came across these heartening and very witchy early spring recipes at Thea's Kitchen.

On Hokusai, Wind Farms, Pound, and My Old Friend Michi

2011-03-19T14:28:00.000-07:00

So my cousin the art critic writes a review of an uncanny and moving art show at the Japan Society in New York, which strangely prefigured the tsunami in the work of a group of brilliant young artists. And my husband the environmentalist forwards a pointed article in Grist called "Japan's wind farms save its ass while nuclear plants flounder," showing windmills standing heroic and simple above the waves. And Yoko Ono tweets how to donate. And I can't stop thinking about

Aunt Evelyn's gray silk kimono with the cranes that I used to dress up in, and Aunt Jessie's embroidery of the chickens, gifts of the Japanese government, and the prints that filled one of my favorite books almost as soon as I could look at books, and the blue china and the secret wooden boxes and the rhythm of haiku. Japan seemed to send me generous and wordless reminders that life could be simple and complex and meaningful, even when it had no words.

Or when words came last, as Ezra Pound learned from Ernest Fenollosa that they could. And as all the legacy of poetry I inherited in the 20th century told me they could. And though I struggled under the yoke of that idea, still all the objects and images grew with me, grew from the china and the haiku to the chopsticks and the futon, all of it part of a beauty that was never far off like a fresh scent down the years, taken for granted so often and now thrown back into a fragile treasure under the new and powerful light tragedy casts.

Dearest Michi, though we haven't managed to get together since college and I didn't make it to Tokyo that time a few years ago, I'm thinking of you a lot, as I have over all these years, wishing a core of peace to you and your family that radiates outward all around you in waves of love.

Love, Annie

Happy Ninth Wave!

2011-03-09T13:26:00.000-08:00

So this is it, the first day of the ninth and last wave of the Mayan Calendar, known as the time of universal consciousness, the beginning of the age of love and the end of separation. Brooke Medicine Eagle has good insights about these times in her series of videos.

Till 6 pm today, EST, there is a "synchronized global breathing event" in the Universal Breathing Room where you can breathe with others to usher in the ninth wave with others around the globe, in oneness through the wonders of the web.

On Meter Rhythm, and Birds

2011-03-05T13:58:00.000-08:00

I've long promised to post here some of the original posts from the predecessor blog to American Witch. Today's archival post is inspired by a marvelous news item about a newly-discovered genetic connection between human music and birdsong, which I posted on Facebook this morning, and by the link Sue Zemka sent in response, to an equally amazing story about birdsong-chants passed down over the millenia in India.

On Meter, Rhythm and Birds

I’m convinced that humans learned poetic refrain from birds. . . In dry southern California this morning, between readings in San Diego and LA, I wake in my sister’s riding trailer, used to follow horses on

week-long mountain races. Birds are very close—unfamiliar birds, with a drier and quicker call than I am used to in New England. I hear their harmonious chatter in a new way. I think of the questions and answers after yesterday’s reading at UC San Diego: much talk about music, timing, pacing, meter, and rhythm. In response to a question from Eileen Myles, I found myself articulating a relationship I have long felt between meter and rhythm, but never consciously remarked. The standard late twentieth-century rap has been that rhythm embodies itself in the whole wide flexible music of language, while meter reduces rhythm to a few certain repeatable patterns. In this model, meter is something of a killjoy, a librarian, a sexless uptight track-keeper, while the real deep juice and joy of poetry is in the rhythm—and by implication, of course, in free verse, the poetry of real men and women (the order of these nouns is conscious) from Whitman on: the spurting blood-jet of poetry (with apologies to the ghost of Sylvia Plath for using her phrase in this way) that, to use Dr. Williams’ phrase, “ends the idea of poetry for ladies.”

Yesterday, I found myself articulating an alternative model in which meter is, poetically, broader or at least as broad as rhythm: meter (coming simply from the Greek word for “to count”) is any system based on a structuring language element that can be counted, and hence predicted (and, perhaps, departed from) as an element of poetic shape. A pattern of counted words, counted phrases, counted erasures (to erase every third word of a text in a predictable pattern, for example) could be the basis of a meter. Rhythm is the play of accent and lightness (also syllable length, articulation and pause) in speech. In the area where rhythm and meter intersect—where accented and light syllables are the basis of pattern—arise the patterns we usually think of as meters.

I confessed to Eileen that I sometimes choose the word ‘rhythm’ when I should technically use ‘meter’—for example, in the poem spirals on my website, where if you click on the spiral called “rhythms,” you will find numerous meters. I do this because I know that when people see the word ‘meter’ they tend to imagine only iambic meter, so they ignore the whole realm of meter as something overly familiar, narrow and confined—not the huge, complex, intricate array of intersecting patterns that is my understanding of meter, and which I hope the feeling of my rhythm spiral conveys.

Before the reading, I had the pleasure of visiting the Mingei Museum of Folk Art with Rae Armantrout. There we discovered a treasury of intricately patterned silverwork, rooms of wrought silver things spanning centuries and continents: headdresses, buckles, and necklaces, anklets and wristlets, some from places across the globe bizarrely similar, some aesthetic worlds apart. Last night as I described all this silverwork to my sister, I was physically encompassed, almost overwhelmed, by the physical memory of being among such a wealth of patterns. This is also how I feel when I imagine the metrical universe—I feel surrounded, almost massaged, by such a wealth of combinatory possibilities, each pattern rich with the memories or possibilities of so many words that have been worked into it.

And this encompassed, massaged feeling is how I imagine people used to feel about birdsong, when to be human meant to be surrounded by birds, before our sprawling destruction of their habitat started to drive them away and destroy them. A couple of years ago, when asked to comment on “noise” in a poem, I chose “Spring” by Thomas Nashe (love that website soundtrack!):

Spring, the sweet Spring, is the year's pleasant king;

Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,

Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing,

Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

The palm and may make country houses gay,

Lambs frisk and play, the shepherds pipe all day,

And we hear aye birds tune this merry lay,

Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,

Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit,

In every street these tunes our ears do greet,

Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

Spring! The sweet Spring!

After being reminded of the magnificence of this poem at an MLA conference panel organized by Bruce Smith, I had found I couldn't get it out of my head. I suspect the reason is that the noise in it is untranslatable. It is what it is. And then I began to understand something else: a person walking out of a rural or village house in the Renaissance, before automobiles and the destruction of habitat had so impoverished our ears of birdsong, would have heard so much more of a riotous and inspiring music from the birds than we can ever hear now. This makes the noise in this poem even more precious: a missive from the past, a time capsule from a time before tape recorders. (comments on "Spring" adapted from my comments in Triplopia).

And now I hear that songbirds can think in appositives; starlings have been trained to use “recursive grammar,” another of those many things that humans used to think exclusive to humans and which we are finally learning characterize non-human persons (a term I learned in Peter Nabokov’s extraordinary book about Native Americans and the land, Where the Lightning Strikes.)

Thanks to the birds, centuries ago, and now, this spring, for your inspirations of refrain and joy. . .

(originally posted on Confessions of a Postmodern Poetess, April 28, 2006 )

A Strange Handful of Valentines

2011-02-12T08:48:00.000-08:00

Last year, it was the Valentine Ball. This year, we had too much else going on--travelling, Glen's job interviews, and what not--to throw a party. We decided to stay home (and the world threw us a valentine party, the demonstrations for freedom in Egypt rocking my heart; check out this video~!)

Usually I write a valentine for Glen every year. This year, so far I've been more than preoccupied with a poem for the Phi Beta Kappa dinner at Yale I've agreed to write. I am still hoping to get to the annual romantic penning--but in the meantime, I have had a trilogy of somewhat unusual Valentine experiences: I'm participating in a wonderful art event called The Jar Project, where I decided to fill a jar with anniversary rosepetals, romantic mementoes, and lines from my poem "Paravaledellentine"; I was interviewed for a newspaper article about how to write valentines; and then a TV show interviewed me on the same topic. Now I just have to take my own Valentine advice! And look back with joy on last year's Valentine Ball.

Housekeeping and Snow: Happy Imbolc!

2011-02-02T11:02:00.000-08:00

Some good Imbolc thoughts from Jane Galer, forwarded by my very first publisher, Robert McDowell:

"Imbolc (pronounced Im-olc) is the ancient Celtic day that marks the halfway point between the solstice and the equinox. This is a cross-quarter day then, a reminder that time is moving and we have obligations. In ancient times, perhaps we simply cleaned out our fireplace, set aside a burning taper, cleaned out the ashes, and then kindled the warming fires of winter again. This was a safety issue, a housekeeping issue, and yet it has deeper implications. This is a night time moment, a time to clear out the “ashes” of our lives, kindle a stronger fire, a stronger sense of purpose for ourselves. This is a time to notice whether we have done the work of winter. Have we told the stories we need to tell? Have we rested, feasted, and shared our hearth with our larger community?"

Some of my most memorable Imbolcs have been spent making candles for the following year and burying them in the snow to harden, or fashioning Brigid's crosses to hang on the door. But this year, it is a matter of snow endlessly falling, a fire inside, being delayed from heading to the AWP conference in DC, and doing all sorts of literary housekeeping, much involving poems I have committed to write. It's a time of tending. Let's put our own houses in order.

Wrought Words: On Writing the First Rionnard Tri-Nard (With a Nod to Lewis Turco)

2011-01-01T16:06:00.000-08:00

Late last spring, the outlier veteran formalist poet Lewis Turco dropped me an email out of the blue, asking if I'd be interested in writing a poem in an ancient Celtic form called a "Rionnard Tri-Nard." Generally, an email like this is about the most fun thing I can imagine receiving, so I was prone to say yes, even before I absorbed the form's daunting requirements:

4 hexasyllabic lines ending in disyllabic words

line 2 rhymes with line 4

line 3 consonates with both of them

there are 2 cross-rhymes (end of one line with beginning of the other line) in the second couplet, but none in the first

there is alliteration in each line

the last syllable of line 1 alliterates with the first accented syllable of line 2

the stanza ends with the same first syllable, line, or word with which it begins

Not only was this more different rules than I could ever remember seeing invoked for a single four-line stanza (including my previous record-holder for difficulty, the Awdl Gwyddyd, another Celtic form which I learned about from Lew's classic form handbook The Book of Forms and used for my poem "Brigid"; it seemed as if some of them might almost preclude others, or at least that there would be an extremely narrow shared territory that some of these rules could occupy together. In short, I was captivated, and when Lew closed his email by mentioning that no-one had ever, to his knowledge, actually used the stanza in English before, the deal was sealed. I didn't even think to ask why he wanted me to write it.

Though writing it was another matter. I did discover that it was not a good form for paper; my focus seemed much better when I simply thought about it, preferably with my eyes closed, more preferably still in a dark room. As my mind wandered in and out of the edges of the form, I began to wonder about the poets who had invented it: Celtic bards—and the still higher-ranking poets, the "filj" and "ollam"—like those described in Patricia Monaghan's essays on Celtic culture. Patricia says that the power of poetry was held to be so great by the Celts that in this culture, poets were respected more than priests; they were the only people who were allowed to wear a certain rainbow-colored robe, the only ones allowed to criticize a king. Wrestling with this form, I began to get an inkling of the intense mental focus and power these bards must have developed in the course of their poetic labors—one can't say "literary" labors, because letters had nothing to do with it; this form was developed by the poets of an oral tradition, long before written poetry (and yes, you're absolutely right, I shouldn't have written"inkling" either).

So, during various dark nights and quiet moments, I tried, not to write, but to make my Rionnard tri-nard, but it didn't really happen. It was a busy spring, and life and light and words and screens and print and people and voices had a way of washing out, or drowning out, or flooding, the fragile little roots I was trying to lodge into the rich dark secret earth I imagined nourishing this project. It wasn't until mid-July, as I was packing to take my daughter on our first hike on the Appalachian Trail together, that things began to change. I had the idea of copying out the rules on a piece of paper and bringing them with me, and they stayed in the hip pocket of my hiking shorts for four days, ducking through brambles and wading through fetid mud and scrambling up slippery rockfaces. As I trudged on with my backpack that seemed far heavier than it needed to be, I found that with every step the poem was finally, marvelously, beginning to root in my head, encouraged, perhaps, by my regular footsteps and the solitude they protected, as my daughter and I each found our pace on the trail.

At first, I pulled out the paper once in a while to doublecheck on those crazy rules, but soon enough the growing poem itself became my constant companion, aggregating absurdly slowly in any other context, but at exactly the right speed for our green-infused journey. It grew about a line a day, passing discarded verbal possibilities through itself steadily, like soil casings through the body of an earthworm, and when I took off my hiking boots at the end of the four days, I had my Rionnard Tri-nard.

After the poem was finished and I wrote it down, I found I missed its growing. But the first night back, as I lay in the dark and recited the completed words inside my mind, checking them at first, I suppose, to make sure they were right, at some point I stopped being the poet and became a hearer, and the stanza then, suddenly, gave me something tangible back. I moved my mind into and out of its turns and patterns, feeling as if I were fingering a Celtic brooch, and a completeness grew inside my mind, something profoundly nourishing that I can still conjure up palpably, the peace that can come from a challenging meditation.

Then I imagined the bards, women and men both, restless minds resting inside caves for long dark nights of silence, turning and turning these patterns over in their minds, no books to read, no other voices awake, just these wrought words, powerful as stones, talismans against despair and frustration, talismans of wisdom and care.

"Rune," it turns out, was not just a whimsical plot of Lewis Turco's to make my life miserable for a few months; I've just learned that the poem will be included in his Book of Odd and Invented Forms, due out next year from University Press of New England. I'm glad I didn't realize there was any such point to the poem while I was making it (it's a hard habit to break, the habit of using "writing" as the verb for making a poem, but a habit I'm glad to be breaking, and high time too, since so many of my poems are, in fact, not "written" when they first come to me). I love the thought that the Rionnard Tri-nard came to me as a gift, hard to recognize at first but indeed a gift in the end, a companion on a journey, and a companion in the dark.

RUNE

Ring of words, each woken

By craft, felt past fearing,

Set to sing clear among

Us here, hung in hearing.

A Poet's Carols: Songs for Yule

2010-12-24T10:36:00.000-08:00

As a Yule gift to readers of American Witch, here is my personal collection of pagan-friendly carols. Some are traditional and unchanged. Some are the very best neopagan adaptations I could find by others— signed or anonymous—sometimes as stand-alone songs, and sometimes as second verses of the originals. Some I have altered myself, keeping as many words of the original as possible, so they are familiar but can be sung with full gusto by those who want to encompass female as well as male-centered spirituality. Except for the virtuoso "13 days of Solstice," which I couldn't resist including, I have tried all these out on my ever-skeptical daughter and they have passed her muster; we'll be singing them this afternoon with a group of friends and neighbors, and I may make a few adjustments after then as well. In the spirit of the collective folk tradition in which all these songs partake to one degree or another, I offer them to you here. You should be able to paste these into a document in this order, and they will make a little carolling booklet with 1 or 2 songs per 5" x 8" page. A copy shop can run it up for you. Happy Yule!

A WREATH OF CAROLS FOR YULETIDE

JINGLE BELLS

Jingle bells, jingle bells

Jingle all the way,

Oh what fun it is to ride 

In a one-horse open sleigh, O

Dashing through the snow

In a one-horse open sleigh 

Through the fields we go 

Laughing all the way. 

Bells on bob-tail ring 

Making spirits bright 

What fun it is to ride and sing 

A sleighing song tonight.

Jingle bells, jingle bells J

Jingle all the way,

Oh what fun it is to ride

In a one-horse open sleigh.

JOY TO THE WORLD

Joy to the world! The Lord is come.

Let earth receive her King.

Let every heart prepare him room,

And heaven and nature sing,

And heaven and heaven

And nature sing.

Joy to the world! The Goddess is come.

Let earth receive her Queen.

Let every heart prepare her room,

And heaven and nature sing,

And heaven and heaven

And nature sing.

DING-DONG, MERRILY ON HIGH

Ding dong merrily on high, 

In heav'n the bells are ringing: 

Ding dong! verily the sky 

Is riv'n with angel singing. 

Gloria, Hosanna in excelsis!  

Hark, now here below, below, 

Let steeple bells be swungen, 

And "Io, io, io!" 

By priest and people sungen. 

Gloria, Hosanna in excelsis!  

Pray you, dutifully prime 

Your matin chime, ye ringers; 

May you beautifully rime 

Your evetime song, ye singers. 

Gloria, Hosanna in excelsis!

DECK THE HALLS

Deck the halls with boughs of holly,  

Fa la la la la, la la la la.  

Tis the season to be jolly,  

Fa la la la la, la la la la.   

Don we now our gay apparel,  

Fa la la, la la la, la la la.  

Troll the ancient Yule tide carol,  

Fa la la la la, la la la la.   

See the blazing Yule before us,  

Fa la la la la, la la la la.  

Strike the harp and join the chorus.  

Fa la la la la, la la la la.   

Follow me in merry measure,  

Fa la la la la, la la la la.  

While I tell of Yule tide treasure,  

Fa la la la la, la la la la.   

Fast away the old year passes,  

Fa la la la la, la la la la.  

Hail the new, ye lads and lasses,  

Fa la la la la, la la la la.    

Sing we joyous, all together,  

Fa la la la la, la la la la.  

Heedless of the wind and weather,  

Fa la la la la, la la la la.  

SILENT NIGHT

Silent night, holy night,

All is calm, all is bright.

Round yon sacred mother and child

holy infant so tender and mild,

Sleep in heavenly peace,

Sleep in heavenly peace.

HARK THE HERALD ANGELS SING

Hark! The herald angels sing,

Glory to the newborn King!

Peace on earth and mercy mild,

God and sinners reconciled.

Joyful all ye nations rise,

Join the triumph of the skies,

With the angelic host proclaim,

Christ is born in Bethlehem!

Hark the herald angels sing

Glory to the newborn king!

Brothers, sisters, come and sing

Glory to the new-born king! 

Gardens peaceful, forests wild 

Celebrate the Winter Child! 

Now the time of glowing starts!

Joyful hands and joyful hearts!

Cheer the Yule log as it burns! 

For once again, the Sun returns! 

Brothers, sisters, come and sing! 

Glory to the new-born King!

Brothers, sisters, singing come

Glory to the new-born Sun 

Through the wind and dark of night 

Celebrate the coming light.

Sun’s glad rays through fear's cold burns 

Life through death the Wheels now turns

Gather round Yule log and tree 

Celebrate Life's mystery .

Brothers, sisters, singing come 

Glory to the new-born Sun.

THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS

On the first day of Christmas,

My true love gave to me

A partridge in a pear tree. . .

Two Turtle Doves, 

Three French Hens, 

Four Calling Birds, 

Five...Gol...den...Rings..... 

Six Geese a-laying, 

Seven Swans a-swimming, 

Eight Maids a-milking, 

Nine Drummers drumming, 

Ten Pipers piping, 

Eleven Ladies dancing, 

Twelve Lords a-leaping . . .

(THE THIRTEEN DAYS OF SOLSTICE, words by Pashta Marymoon)

On the first day of Solstice the Goddess sent to me  

the will to 'harm ye none'. . .

God and Goddess blessings,

Three-fold law,

Four directions called,

Five-point pentagram ,

Six realms of being, [Tibetan book of the dead]

Seven glowing chakras ,

Eight holy sabbats, 

Nine chanting muses,

Ten spheres of kabbala,

Eleven kin of the circle,

Twelve signs of the heavens,

Thirteen full moons shining . . .

O COME ALL YE FAITHFUL

O come all ye faithful,

Joyful and triumphant,

Oh come ye, o come ye to Bethelehem

Come and behold them,

Lady, lord, and child,

O come let us adore them

Oh come let us adore them

Oh come let us adore them,

Lady, lord and child.

Yea, Lord, we greet Thee! 

Born again at Yuletide; 

Yule fires and candles flames 

Are lighted for You! 

Come to thy children

Calling for thy blessing

O, come, let us invoke Him!

Our Lord, the Sun!

O SOLSTICE NIGHT, words by Glaux ( tune: "O Holy Night")

O solstice night,

the stars are brightly shining,

It is the night of the Sun God's rebirth.

Long lay the world

in cold and darkness pining

till he was born and his light warmed the Earth.

O thrill of hope! The weary world rejoices

For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

Lift up your hearts! O hear the ancient voices!

O night divine!

O night the sun is born!

O night divine!

O night, O night divine!

THE WASSAIL CAROL

Here we come a wassailing 

Among the leaves so green,

Here we come a wandering 

So fair to be seen.

 Love and joy come to you, 

And to you your wassail too,

And God bless you and send you a happy New Year,

Goddess send you a happy New Year.

We are not daily beggars 

That beg from door to door, 

But we are neighbours' children

Whom you have seen before. Chorus

Call up the Butler of this house, 

Put on his golden ring; 

Let him bring us a glass of cheer, 

And the better we shall sing. Chorus

God bless the Master of this house, 

Likewise the Mistress too; 

And all the little children 

That round the table go. Chorus

Eclipse, Solstice, Yule, Blogaversary, Carols: Thoughts on Creativity and Recurrence

2010-12-21T07:12:00.000-08:00

What a special, special Solstice night. My daughter and I, in rooms at two ends of the house, were both awakened at around 2:40 AM (just as, it turns out, the eclipse was heading into its fullness) by what seems to have been an identical feeling: a warm rush of happiness entering through the crowns of our heads. I lay there for a while and felt the world, in every detail and in every commonality, united in a harmony of unity and love. Soon I went downstairs to look for the moon, which had been full and clear when I went to bed. It was hidden by clouds, but I stayed there, mindful of astrologer Gretchen Lawlor's words in an email to me yesterday evening: " I've just realized it is important, at some time during this eclipse to stand up and feel the alignment, be part of the drama, another channel for the light. When you stand, the Earth and past it the Sun will be in alignment beneath your feet, and the Moon directly overhead, at your crown. Even if it's cloudy and we cannot see it." I stood and felt the channel, exactly as she had described it.

How different from last year's solstice celebration, described in the very first post on American Witch, which was also wonderful in a completely different way. That was rousing, external and solar, this one, so far, peaceful, internal and lunar. But each, incontrovertible. I love how being a Wiccan gives me so much flexibility to find the Spirit how and why I need to find it. This year we will also be partaking in many of the traditions of last year, but there is so much space for creativity every year as well. What will we be doing? Will I finish my own solstice carol? I know I will be posting here, soon, my new versions of Christmas carols, invented during a concert this weekend and suitable for Goddess-believers to sing along!

This morning, Starhawk is featured in an essay for the Washington Post, and also quoted in an article on this singular confluence of astrological events--the second in 2000 years: "But for Wiccans, astrologists and others, Starhawk wrote, the coincidence offers an opportunity to "step out of time. We are free of the past, and we can consciously create the future, for ourselves, for our communities, for the earth.""

Creativity is, by definition, about stepping out of time. And yet it is time that connects with it, inspires it, feeds it, stimulates it and gives it the otherness it needs to grow. Just as, in a line of poetry, the words and the rhythm interact, so my own creative newnesses interact with the recurrences of time: the dawns, the moons, the Solstices and the whole Wheel of the Year. It does so often spontaneously and unpredictably, as befits a type B blood type—but that's all the more reason I treasure the recurrences that are there.

I remember the feeling of excitement I had last year, just after Yule, to be starting this blog; I was a little scared to begin "coming out" as a Wiccan, stepping out into the moonlight, as it were. A year later, here's Starhawk being quoted matter-of-factly in the Post. In many ways (not least, Senate candidate Christine ODonnell's widely-noticed, inadvertent video advertisement for Wicca), it's been a year of mounting energy for Wiccans, ending with this awe-inspiring solstice eclipse, this twice in 2000 years moment of realignment betweeen the feminine and masculine energies.

It's also been an inspiring year of blogging for you all. Thank you, each one, for reading and sharing American Witch and for all your comments, good wishes, and support. I love hearing from you and knowing you are here with me on this blogging adventure! Thanks also for the wonderful Solstice poems; it will be an annual call, so if you didn't send one in and would like to, you can get to work on next year's Yule poem. For inspiration, you could check out these new Christmas carols (some very beautiful) solicited by Britain's poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, and also these incredible photos of last night's solstice eclipse.

Solstice Call for Solstice Poems

2010-12-18T18:39:00.000-08:00

So, this coming Solstice will be the first time in 456 years (or 307 years, depending on which calculations you are following) that there has been a lunar eclipse on the Winter Solstice. There has been much conjecture about the meaning of the connection; this article (thanks, Chas!) takes a common sense approach ("Wiccans don't think of things as being good or evil—they just are") and provides a pleasing interpretation, regarding the conjunction of female and male energies. It's certainly looking to be a specially powerful solstice, and I'll be posting again on the season soon.

Meanwhile, in honor of the occasion, I'm sending out a call to share Solstice poems. If you have one or know of one, please post them in the Comments section. Solstice songs would also be great.

One of my aims with this blog is to up the quantity and quality of the canon of pagan/earth-spirited/goddess-inspired art, literature, and music. So poems are always welcome at any point in the wheel of the year.

Happy Season!

My Thanksgiving Shadow

2010-11-25T09:59:00.001-08:00

I confess: for many years I have not found it easy, as a comfortably affluent European American, to feel the deep and thorough gratitude I would like to feel at Thanksgiving. I've tried, but not very far down I keep hitting some kind of obstacle. This year, I was provided with two powerful and apparently contradictory texts that may point a way out of the impasse. The first is a wonderful and profoundly true editation that was handed out at a Thanksgiving yoga class I took this morning. It is worth reading slowly, with contemplation:

"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow." —Melody Beattie

The second was writer Alma Luz Villanueva's Thanksgiving Facebook link to a classic article I've read before, but which only really hit me today, perhaps because I recently visited St. Augustine, Florida, where the genocidal impact of the Spanish on the Timucua people was still palpable: "One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting. In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Mass., one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas.
. . . Simply put: Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the nonwhite but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers." —from "No Thanks to Thanksgiving" by Robert Jensen (please read the whole of this powerful short article here).

How to reconcile these two takes on the holiday? How to open myself to gratitude and also open myself to a truth that I fear will lead to terrible shame and guilt and grief? I can't feel gratitude for the horrible sins of my European ancestors. And yet, how can I exempt such a huge part of my cultural identity from my consciousness and still expect to find the peace within myself from which gratitude arises?

Perhaps the shadow knows. A third text arrived in my life today that seems to point to an answer: The Dark Side of the Light Chasers: Reclaiming your power, creativity, brilliance, and dreams by Debbie Ford. Ford recounts how she faced her shadow racist self (this was a deep shadow, that of a person no-one would EVER think to call a racist, and consequently a difficult but ultimately very transformative self to connect with), and the profound and immediate—really almost miraculous—external effect of that inner work.

Our shadows consist of the parts of ourselves that we disavow and repress. I have been having written conversation with my shadow self (I write both parts, but she definitely has her own voice) for several weeks, inspired by discussion in a therapeutic writing group I am part of at the Center for Creative Healing. Mine was angry with me at first, perhaps because she'd been neglected for so long, but I waited that out and ended up benefiting profoundly from her insightful answers to questions and problems from all areas of my life.

I found I could ask her anything--after all, who knows me better than my shadow? Family issues, career issues, decorating advice...she was right every time. Now I am planning to take our relationship to a deeper level, and to see if this could be the answer, the way that i as a European American can begin to come to terms with the guilt and horror that I feel when I think about the fate of the Native American people on this continent. I am going to read Ford's book carefully and meditate on this question. I am going to see if I can honestly accept my own shadow's acquiescence in the vicious conquest of this continent, so that I may begin to move towards atonement.

That would be where the gratitude comes in; that could be the way to reconcile Beattie's truth with Jensen's truth. I have been projecting my own shadow conquerer out onto others, demonizing imperialism and militarism when I encounter them in others. But I won't be truly free of them until I encounter them within myself. Every encounter with the shadow is a potential teacher, a potential opener, and so, in the small hours of this Thanksgiving night, I give thanks for the shadow. As Ford writes, "You must go into the dark in order to bring forth your light. When we suppress any feeling or impulse, we are also suppressing its polar opposite. If we deny our ugliness, we lessen our beauty. If we deny our fear, we minimize our courage. If we deny our greed, we also reduce our generosity. Our full magnitude is more than most of us can ever imagine."

Image: Timucua Harvest Ceremony

Yes, Lisa, There is Poetry. . .Or, What Makes a Poem a Poem?

2010-11-24T07:25:00.000-08:00

I received this email a few weeks ago. I reproduce and answer it here with Lisa's permission, because it is representative of a widespread confusion:

Dear Annie Finch:
I discovered your February 2009 Harriet blog entry “Poetry in Notion: What Does That Word Mean Anyway?” while searching for a definition of poetry versus prose. I’ve hit up against that same question in my own “poetry” and am very much hoping you might give me your input. Did you ever arrive at a conclusion regarding where poetry begins and prose ends that you yourself found satisfying?
Some background: I think of myself a poet, yet twice in the past few weeks I’ve been told that what I write is prose with line breaks

arbitrarily imposed. I’ve always been deliberate in my line breaks, so this caught me by surprise. I could at least see the objection on the first piece that elicited this comment—but am flummoxed by the second. Which led me to your blog entry.
The “poem” in question is at
http://beeinthebottle.deviantart.com/#/d31y7sb
If you don't mind offering your opinion, is this poetry (even bad poetry!)? It lacks meter and traditional form, but I'd thought it was a poem....
I don’t mean nor want to impose. And please know that I’m not requesting a critique. It's just that I don’t know how much of this comes down to personal style and, because I don't understand, am frankly about ready to hang it up as a so-called “poet.”
Thanks for any comments that you may have to offer. Even if it’s a simple “yes” or “no” to the “is it poetry?” question, I’d appreciate it more than I can say.
Lisa

Yes, Lisa, I did reach a conclusion regarding where poetry begins and prose ends. After decades of thought I settled on this definition (which can be found in my book The Body of Poetry): "a poem is a text structured (not merely decorated) by the repetition of any language element or elements. Any language element can be repeated to structure a poem." In your poem, the repeated language element is the linebreak (see chart below). So in a sense the person who said what you wrote was lined prose is correct, but they are missing the fact that lined prose IS a kind of poetry: the use of the line itself makes your text into a poem.

That lined prose is poetry may sound laughable, but it is not. As I discussed in my Harriet post, the notion that a text has to be good/profound/inspired/lyrical to be a "real poem" (while it was useful to clear out some Victorian cobwebs a century ago), has lately been the root of more evils than it has solved. Nobody goes around saying that my kid's dance concert is not a dance concert, or that my amateur paintings are not paintings; they are clearly paintings, just amateur ones. The art of poetry is the only art where people routinely attach an evaluative judgment to the definition of the art itself. This mis-thinking has ended up eroding the definition of poetry to the point where many people, like you, are not sure they can even recognize a poem--let alone a good poem--when they see one.

While some people have tried to find clarity by asserting that only good poems are "real" poetry, others have tried to find clarity by asserting that only formal poems are "real" poems--an idea you referred to when you mentioned that your poem doesn't have rhyme or meter. But a poem doesn't need rhyme or meter to be a poem; all it needs is for any language element to be repeated in a patterned, structuring way, so that a reader can predict the recurrence of the pattern. In your poem, you can predict that every line will be broken before it reaches the end of the page. That makes it indeed a poem. However, linebreaks are not a very conspicuous language element, which leads us to the final part of the definition: "The more conspicuous (palpable, audible, tangible) the repeated language element, the more formal the poem feels to us." It is this perceptible conspicuousness in the repetition that makes a poem satisfying to many readers. Your poem is a poem, but it is not a formal poem because linebreaks, unlike rhyme or meter, are difficult if not impossible to feel/hear/touch in the body if you are reading the poem, or to hear when the poem is read aloud (unless someone consciously "performs" them).

The chart below should help you get a sense of where your poem fits in the larger field of poetic possibilities. Once you know what kind of poetic structure you are working in, then you can begin to get better at it, to develop skill at using your chosen repeating language element (so far, the line break) to incite power, suspense, pleasure, and insight in your readers, and to consider branching out into using other kinds of repeating language elements as well. I am just finishing proofreading a book called A Poet's Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poems which will be published in Spring 2011. It has chapters on every aspect of writing poetry, from inspiration to how to get published, including how to use tension and surprise to write strong free verse, and how to learn to recognize meters in your free verse so that you can either enhance or avoid them. Maybe this book will be helpful to you also, Lisa. Meanwhile, do check out the chart below, and enjoy! —Annie

"Definition for a Continuum of Poetries"
adapted from The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, by Annie Finch (University of Michigan Press, 2003)

A poem is a text structured (not merely decorated) by the repetition of any language element or elements. Any language element can be repeated to structure a poem. THE MORE CONSPICUOUS (PALPABLE, AUDIBLE, TANGIBLE) THE REPEATED LANGUAGE ELEMENT, THE MORE FORMAL THE POEM FEELS TO US. These are just a few examples of the many language elements that can be repeated to make poems.

REPEATED ELEMENT (MAKES) KIND OF POEM
Note: I have located each elements in the category where I feel its primary impact would strike a reader/listener. But please note that there is certainly overlap: rhyme has a visual aspect, counted verse has an aural aspect, syllabic verse has a conceptual aspect, and so on.—AF

Aural Elements

numbers of beats/accents (MAKES) accentual poetry
patterns of accent and nonaccent (MAKES) metrical poetry
sounds within words (MAKES ) rhyme, alliterative verse
syntactic patterns (MAKES) chants
groups of words (MAKES ) chants
sentences or phrases between stanzas (MAKES) refrain
number of sentences (MAKES )counted-sentence prose poem
terminal hiatus (MAKES ) prose poem

Visual Elements

Terminal hiatus (MAKES ) prose poem
visible shape of language (MAKES ) concrete poetry
numbers of syllables (MAKES ) syllabic verse
spaces on page (MAKES) field poetry
line breaks (MAKES ) free verse
numbers of words (MAKES ) counted verse
hidden elements MAKES punctuation poem, alphabet poem, etc.

Conceptual Elements
operation with extratextual system (MAKES) procedures with source texts
pun and riddle (MAKES ) pun poems, etc.
intertextual operations (MAKES) procedures with missing letters, acrostics, etc..

Medieval Wind Power

2010-11-23T20:40:00.000-08:00

My husband Glen, an environmental activist who often sends me wonderful links, forwarded this story on wind power in a medieval Italian town. I find this, and so many massive changes in energy technology that are currently underway, moving metaphorically, spiritually, and practically--embodied transformation, magick at work to bring us closer to living in harmonious respect and stewardship of the natural world.

Wild Weeds Poetry Contest Results

2010-11-17T19:03:00.000-08:00

The results of the Wild Weeds Poetry Contest have been posted on the Healing Wise Website. The winner will receive a set of Susun Weed's Wise Woman Herbal Series, and those with honorable mentions will receive a copy of Healing Wise. Weedy congatulations to all!

Paolo Nutini's Burns

2010-11-07T04:04:00.000-08:00

Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future: check out this version of "A Man's a Man for A' That" by the Scottish singer Paolo Nutini.

Samhain Journeys

2010-10-30T05:34:00.000-07:00

Annie and Grandy on my 6th birthday, Samhain 1962

For my Halloween-Samhain-birthday gift to myself this year, I took a powerful healing journey under the guidance of two local shamans. Against a backdrop of achingly burnt-orange trees outside their huge picture windows, Evie and Allie accompanied me on a sure, swift, thorough swoop through my inner landscape to pick up lost pieces and resolve longstanding hurts. It is wondrous work, full of metaphor and symbol that is truer than truth, poetry in capital M motion. My first shamanic journeys, with Fred Tietjen in San Francisco in 1991, were a watershed experience in my growth as a Witch; they reunited me with my earliest nourished wholeness in the natural world. This week's journey reminded me, in turn, of the connected fullness that shamanic work reveals as our core state. And this time also put me in far deeper touch with another aspect of the experience, the knowledge of not being alone, of having all the helpers and guides I need to call on, whether spiritual, animal, or ancestor.

The ancestor guide I feel most strongly with me now is my grandmother, Marjorie Hughan Rockwell. She's the "mother's mother" in my poem "Samhain." Here she is, in the only photo I know of myself with her. I'll be thinking of her a lot this Samhain, placing her picture on the ancestors' altar tonight and sending her a note via candle flame.

"50 Best Blogs for Wiccans" (Including American Witch)

2010-10-07T18:33:00.000-07:00

A very useful list of 50 Best Blogs for Wiccans has been compiled by Marcia Colgar, and I'm happy to say that "American Witch" is included!~

Dead Poets at Cundy's Harbor

2010-10-07T15:01:00.000-07:00

Today is Dead Poets Remembrance Day—the very first Dead Poets' Remembrance Day, in fact. The holiday was started this year (and the date set for October 7, Edgar Allan Poe's death-day), by Walter Skold, a person of staunch mission and wide vision, founder of the Dead Poets Society, who has located and honored the graves of hundreds of poets. Lately I have been thinking a lot about my own grave (more on that in a future post), and I resonate with Walter's emphasis on the importance of poets' graves.

So i was happy to be asked to participate in the kickoff celebration in Maine this year, which I did by reading a poem by Maine poet Celia Thaxter early this morning in a beautiful old meeting house in a town called Cundy's Harbor.

Afterwards, several of us stopped up the street at the graves of another Maine poet, Robert P. Tristram Coffin, winner of the 1936 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and his wife and daughter. We read aloud the poems engraved on each stone and discussed poetry, life, and death as Walter's film team documented the occasion. One among us, a fine lobsterman-poet who had not yet published his work, treated us to a recitation of a couple of his poems—the diction of one of which had been indelibly criticized, many decades ago when the poem was new, by Coffin's sister.

So the thread of poetry and meaning, the still-and-always-thriving oral tradition, the chain of verbal culture, so intimately tied, as this morning proved, with the chain of all human culture and the meaning we continually make, continues. Or, as the president of the Harpswell Historical Society told me this morning, when I commented that the town must have a fascinating history: "every single town, wherever you go, every single one has a fascinating history." And of course he's right. And so does every poet.

For the lobsterman poet (whose name I, alas, didn't catch), Walter read aloud in a resonating voice the final words on Coffin's headstone, a powerful couplet along the lines of, "I kept the age-old law, I wrote what I saw," before driving off with the film crew in in his van, "Dedgar," to visit more graves. Gravespeed to them, and I'll be looking forward to next year's Dead Poets Remembrance Day.

Longen Folk: The Parade, the Pilgrimage, the Poem

2010-10-03T09:00:00.000-07:00

"Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages"
—Chaucer

This morning, the Maine Marathon was going by just up the street, and when I saw all the activity, the cars parked all up and down our normally rather quiet block and so many people rushing by with their kids and rattles to cheer the runners on, I felt compelled to join them. I grabbed my favorite percussion instrument, a little hand-drum with a lizard painted on it and a great sound, and made my way up the street to where the local market was handing out cups of water and a trio of bearded Baby Boomers with electric guitars were belting out Beatles songs.

The runners, of all ages, genders, races, sizes, weights, heights, and physical conditions, in emotional states apparently ranging from triumph to desperation, were already straggling by in outfits ranging from lobster hats to high-tech runwear. People around me were waiting for their friends, cheering, and then getting their kids and leaving. My daughter had had no interest in coming, and I don't know a lot of runners; I recognized one (or maybe two, I'm still not sure). But it didn't matter. It seemed they could use some support, and I was finding the experience quite moving. I stayed for quite a while, clutching my hand drum, and as each runner came by, I raised it up and honored them with a little tattoo.

A surprising number of them managed to look up from their sweat and breath to catch my eye, smile, or even say thank you. But even when they didn't respond, why was it so intensely satisfying? It wasn't just the pleasure of helping out, or the novelty, or delight/amusement at the amazing variety of people, or the vicarious satisfaction of participating even so indirectly in the race. It was really about the privilege of witnessing such an honest depiction of the human journey.

I used to feel confused by my love of parades; I thought of them as full of imperialistic pomp, as descendents of Roman victory triumphs, and yet they compelled me. But today I was reminded that any procession can be as much a pilgrimage as a triumph: a group of people, each on an individual journey yet sharing so many challenges, each caught up in their own struggle with self-esteem, discipline, and goal-reaching, each needing something so different from others, and yet each somehow after the same goal.

As I cheered each person on, I realized that perhaps the work was not so different from teaching poetry.

A Very Special Equinox

2010-09-22T20:15:00.000-07:00

Equinox, the time of most balance between day and night, light and dark, happens at 11:09 PM--the very moment I write this sentence tonight. And the Harvest full moon, brightest of the year, comes at 5:17 tomorrow morning. A very special conjunction, a time of powerful balance between, as my dear friend Deborah Knighton Tallerico puts it, Yin and Yang, Masculine and Feminine Energies, reminding us "of the importance of balance and harmony in our lives."

The Chinese have long known how to celebrate this amazing Harvest moon. And according to this link about the Chinese mid-Autumn moon-festival (scroll down to the poets at the bottom) it was the poets who made the festival so popular. That's a mission I can get into--writing poems to encourage an Autumn moonwatching tradition.

Happy equinox, everyone--and though, as Susun Weed points out, pure balance would not be a living condition, may you savor its brief visit!

Mint Tea, Wine, & a Splash of Inspiration

2010-09-18T20:32:00.000-07:00

Slowly I am absorbing Susun Weed's lesson that the plants around us in abundance are offering themselves for our use. For example, after thinking of mint as "invasive" for years and trying to contain it through violent wastefulness, instead I took her advice and started to consume it frequently, matching the pace at which it offers itself. It's easy to tear or cut off the tops to use the leaves, and the flowers that the bees love grow right back out of the shorter stems. Wonderful! And what a great lesson and practice, to gather, in the proportion in which they are given, the other gifts of life, including poetic inspiration.

There's still time to enjoy my favorite new drink: sun mint tea . . . pick and tear up a handful of mint leaves and soak in a jar of water in the sun for a while (I put plastic wrap on top to keep the bees out). Even a few leaves and an hour or two makes water taste magnificent, a drink at once sweet, simple, and sophisticated, loved by both kids and adults---like drinking the sun.

Which reminds me of a quote from Galileo, of all people, that someone told me today at a wonderful harvest feast, a grape harvesting and potluck extravaganza held at Maine Coast Vineyards, our friends' local winery: "Wine is sunshine held together by water and alcohol." There was a lot of sunshine going around this wonderful harvest celebration, kids playing everywhere, generations mixing, work and relaxation--community grounded in food and the earth.

Summer Swirls

2010-07-24T08:24:00.000-07:00

Sometimes my care as a writer gets the best of me as a blogger. I have various posts in the works--one on "Solstice Weddings," since the way I celebrated the Solstice this year was by celebrating a couple of amazing unions. One on my new Tarot deck (Druidcraft). One on the amazingness of the garden. One on Esbats. And this one--the one that I'm not revising, so it is the one that will be posted. This one is just to say that it's the height of the summer and I am in a swirl of happy projects before heading to a writing retreat. Like my garden, I am bursting over. The fertility and fecundity of life has often overwhelmed me, but this week I am just revelling in it. I've discovered if I sit back and just let it run, it does! Happy summer, everyone. Enjoy!

Wild Weeds Poetry Contest

2010-06-16T15:44:00.000-07:00

--I am excited to be judging the first Wild Weeds Poetry Contest in honor of Susun Weed's seven favorite weeds. I am a serious fan of Susun's work. My physical health and overall vibrancy in life has been vastly improved by drinking nettle and other infusions as she taught me. My sense of commitment and community as a poet has been charged and enhanced, and the name of this blog even partially inspired, by my completion of her Green Witch Intensive and initiation by her as a Green Witch two summers ago. And my psyche is still slowly, silently, and I am sure unstoppably, being re-attuned and redirected by the hour my daughter and I spent talking with a small plant, one whose name we learned only later, during her Talking With Plants workshop.

These experiences have nourished me as a person and also as a poet, strengthening my intuition, my sense of adventure, my capacity to zero in on the wordless core from which true words come, and my sense of how much one person really can help the world to heal. I'm grateful to be involved in a contest that will help advance knowledge of Susun's necessary and timely work—and I'm looking forward to the poems I'll be reading over the next couple of months!

If you are curious about my own poems and want to "know the judge" (to quote the game Apples to Apples), there are poems at my website. Check out the Spiral!

Wild Weeds Poetry Contest Details:

--Information on the seven weeds here

--No minimum or maximum length; no entry fee

--Deadline Sept 1, 2010

--Please paste poem into the body of an email (not an attachment)

--Please put Wild Weeds Poetry Contest in subject header.

--Until the winner is announced, entries will be posted here at the Wisewomen Tradition blog--feel free to check out the competition! The winning poem will be published on the Weed's Wisewomen website in September, and winner receives a free copy of one of Weed's books. I'll be posting the winning poem and some honorable mentions here also, with some closing thoughts and comments.

Till then, keep it spiralling!

Love,

Annie

Violets: A Poem by Alice Dunbar-Nelson

2010-06-16T13:52:00.001-07:00

In honor of the Susun Weed Poetry Contest, here is a poem by Alice Dunbar-Nelson in honor of one of Susun's seven favorite weeds:

SONNET

by Alice Dunbar-Nelson

I had no thought of violets of late,

The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet

In wistful April days, when lovers mate

And wander through the fields in raptures sweet.

The thought of violets meant florists’ shops,

And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine;

And garish lights, and mincing little fops

And cabarets and songs, and deadening wine.

So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed,

I had forgot wide fields, and clear brown streams;

The perfect loveliness that God has made.—

Wild violets shy and Heaven-mounting dreams.

And now—unwittingly, you’ve made me dream

Of violets, and my soul’s forgotten dream.

Poetry as Art Criticism

2010-06-02T12:59:00.000-07:00

Who says poetry "makes nothing happen"? My Bourgeois post inspired my cousin Charlie Finch, columnist for Artnet, to send me a couple of the poems he's published as a form of art criticism
over the years: for example, these on Deborah Solomon and Elizabeth Peyton, or this on Louise Bourgeois. Even though we disagree entirely about Bourgeois' art, he has here picked up, albeit mockingly, on her very true message that it is never too late to heal from childhood wounds. This is one of the reasons I found Bourgeois' late work at the Whitney exhibit so moving--the pain of the child was so close to the surface, and it was clear from the rest of the exhibit how much work and time it had taken her to bring it out to that point.

It's exciting, and surprising, that someone not known for writing poetry would choose serious poetry (not only light verse, which is of course used more often for political and social commentary) as a vehicle for actually conveying ideas in this day and age,
when poetry is supposed to be defunct except as a lyrical mode of art-for-its-own-sake. Wanting to acknowledge this effort, I asked Charlie if he'd be willing to respond briefly to a few questions for this blog:

What inspired you to use poetry rather than prose to get your ideas across in these two instances?

All my poems are about women artists; they are a platonic billet-doux, to wit, they and their work inspired me.

The Bourgeois poem is a sonnet, the Solomon free verse. Do you see a connection between form and content there?

Unlike my learned cousin, the foot fetishist, I wouldn't know a spode-ee-o-dee from an anabaptist. It's all rhythm in my head, and I studied poetry at Yale with Richard Howard and Jean Valentine to no visible effect.

Do you know of any other art criticism poems? Do you plan to write any more?

No other art critic, to my knowledge, uses poetry as a means of criticism; I invented it, for better or, probably, worse. I write personal poems to my friends, male and female, all the time; my pal, art critic Sarah Douglas, believes that Twitter will lead to new avenues in doggerel; if the inspiration is there, the poem follows.

Louise Bourgeois: An Unfinished Poem

2010-06-01T03:13:00.000-07:00

(thanks to the great Lemon Hound blog for photo!)

A couple of years ago, I was on the way to New York and poet Lee Ann Brown happened to mention that she'd enjoyed the Louise Bourgeois Retrospective at the Whitney. I had heard legends about Bourgeois' salon, and sculptor Judy Fox had been meaning to bring me over, but I hadn't made it there and didn't really know a lot about Bourgeois' work other than the Spiders. But I knew I had to go . . .

And yes, that exhibit's spiralling journey through the restless curiosity, wild sensuality and heroic courage of her career really blew me away. What a journey of texture, form, and heart, to the very end when the layers of expertise were peeled back and the raw pain of some of her formative experience revealed! What an inspiration to keep growing younger in heart and soul while older in mind and skill!

I felt compelled to pull out my notebook almost immediately, even during the early totem poles on the lower levels of the exhibit, and kept writing raptly as I climbed the ramps as slowly as possible, spiralling back over and over, notebook in hand, moved over and over to words.

I stayed to see a difficult film on her life and career, and from then on tried to absorb everything I could about her. It is so rare that I have felt the heady sense of being alive at the same time as a truly great artist. It's a reassuring feeling, like being in a tribe that feels complete.

And this artist really speaks to my own concerns and feelings.

So why is my poem still unfinished?

I have been trying to find a way to bring it together formally without closing it down-- a way that will do tribute to the organicity of her own forms.

Ekphrastic poetry is always difficult for me, because it forces words to focus on representing images, while much of the reason I am drawn to poetry is because words are musical. In a few poems, such as my very first sonnet, "Still Life"(in EVE), which focuses on an imagined Vermeer painting, it seems the two discoveries, visual and musical, have melded.

In tribute to Bourgeois, I would like to finish the poem soon; but in order to do so, I think I will need to find a new kind of form, one that is "organic" but not in the sense meant by Denise Levertov, where the form of the poem grows out of its content, but in a more mathematical sense, like that meant by Gyorgi Doczi in his book on patterns of nature.

Perhaps I will do some mathematical parsing of my favorite of Bourgeois' shapes, or even her hands. I'll start by watching this youtube clip.

Justice and Prejudice

2010-05-26T03:06:00.000-07:00

This image of Justice and Prejudice comes from David Dismore's collection of Suffragist art. The fascinating account of how the Women's Suffrage movement used postcards and stamps and finally got their message focused is instructive on every level.

On Not Wearing Black

2010-05-20T05:04:00.000-07:00

When I started my sartorial rebirth, well over half the clothes in my wardrobe were black. I had been favoring black since at least age 14, when I padded around barefoot in my favorite black leotard and patched jeans, through college, where I swooped across campus in a long black wool cloak, to clubbing's black miniskirt, graduate school's black v-neck pullover, pregnancy's black cotton maternity dress, poetry readings' black portrait neckline, and so on for nearly forty years. My mother told me she didn't think I should wear so much black; when I asked her why she could only say that it depressed her. She said it for so many years that I never really heard her. A painting teacher said she didn't use black, but darkest purple or brown instead; she considered black a color that hurt spiritual energy. I thought she was making an aesthetic mistake.
Now the daughter who was a baby when I took that painting class was 10, and she was starting to tease me: "mom, you're wearing black again? don't you ever wear anything but black?" I finally started to think about it. I was defensive. "I wear other colors!" "Well, show me!" So I wore some other colors for a couple of days straight. It felt interesting.

Then a week later, at last year's July Stonecoast residency, I was talking with two of our fourth-semester students about the upcoming graduation ceremony: two wonderful, wise, women writers, one deeply grounded and active in Yoruba tradition, and one in the Inuit culture. Neither of them wanted to wear the standard black robes to the ceremony. They told me that in each of their cultures, black was considered a "heavy" color to wear, one that could interfere with one's openness to spirit. Here were two people from entirely different spiritual traditions, with both of whom I felt much in common on a deep level, corroborating form the perspectives of their own cultures what my mother and daughter had intuitively felt.

As I thought it over, I considered more seriously the voices I had been writing off for so long, and I began to notice how defensively and reflexively I had responded to my mother and my daughter. My attachment to wearing black was more than a fashion convenience; perhaps it had gradually become more like an addictive habit. After dressing primarily in black for nearly four decades, without even realizing it, I'd become so attached to the color that I couldn't imagine not wearing it. What if, like any addiction, it was also beginning to interfere with the fullest living of my life? I decided to try an experiment which shocked me by how novel and radical it would be: I would not wear black for a week and see how it felt. . .

It felt like coming out of a cave, a revelation at the cellular level. Pounds of internal heaviness lifted off me. After two or three weeks, I felt as if the sun were peeping out from behind private clouds. I began removing black things from my closet--at first just duplicate sweaters and jackets. As I went through one week after another in other colors, I began to feel lighter, happier, gayer, indescribably, incrutably easier in every way. More weeks went by and I removed more and more, finally feeling the need to purge every black accessory, down to the last belt. I put my very favorite black items in storage just in case, went to the thrift shop, and discovered new favorite colors. Fuschia replaced maroon, tan and apple replaced rust and sage. I indulged in chocolate brown and became drawn to my childhood favorites, navy blue and turquoise, again, after avoiding blue for twenty years.

After two or three months, much of the heaviness I had been carrying felt flushed out, but it took at least six months before I felt as if I wasn't bearing the accumulated decades of vibrational weight under my skin anymore. Yesterday, about nine months after I stopped wearing black, I was going through summer clothes and, somewhat to my surprise, felt like keeping two black sleeveless dresses. I hung them up gingerly, feeling the way I felt when I started adding the occasional cup of decaf coffee back into my life after quitting coffee drinking decades ago. I may be ready to wear black again now, in great moderation. But I doubt I will ever want to go all the way back. And I am now thinking very carefully about the colors painted on our walls...

How could a poet not be happy with a windmill...

2010-05-19T08:27:00.000-07:00

how could I not be happy with a story like this? What I love about living right now is that the movement towards a lifestyle that is cleaner and more respectful and loving of the earth has such momentum--and on every step of this way, poetry becomes more real to me.

What could be realer than the metaphor of wind, the spirit of the air, the cleanser and communicator, powering a place of learning and wisdom? What I love about living right now is that the metaphors provided by such events are clear, pure, open, giving right down to the bottom and beyond. I don't feel a need for prevarication, ambiguity, or torturous paths to access their magic. The metaphorical power of earth, air, fire, water--nature--and our place in it-- is directly accessible to me like a spring of good water.

I learned yesterday from WOM-PO that in the language of the Dagara people of Nigeria, the words for "Art" and "Sacred" are the same. My guess is that a spirituality centered in the earth is exactly what makes this kind of unity possible.

The Goddess Conference, the Middle School Concert, and the Coming Cosmic Convergence

2010-05-05T20:29:00.000-07:00

I am finally back from my many travels, catching up on things, and waiting for the photos of ASWM to come in so I can post one of the Brigid mask reading, which went beautifully. I've had so many ideas for American Witch these last extraordinarily busy few weeks that I feel as if I've been actually posting! I will look forward to sharing them here in coming weeks. There's one on fear, one on male support, and one on menopause, moon, and ritual. More too, that I will probably unearth when I finish unpacking all the notes and papers. And, I want to start a "blog reprise" series of posts, a few favorite posts on poetry from my first blog, "Confessions of a Postmodern Poetess," which is no longer available online.
For those interested in the ASWM conference, here's the most concise update: a small celebratory note I sent to the ASWM website, It's true--I've rarely if ever felt the goddess poems heard more profoundly. No surprise there. The event was vibrant with new

overlaps and connections between people who had been working with passion on goddess material, more or less in solitude, separated from each other, for years. When I was reading, my understanding was wide open attempting to be fully aware of this level of receptivity, and at other times, my eyes and mind were also wide open, my head spinning back and forth, trying to take it all in, images and ideas and myths and stories. There was material there for lifetimes of epic, lyric, and narrative! As happens when I feel a real audience there for my work, I felt deeply inspired to write more.

And tonight, I feel, even more, inspired to listen, to see if more pagan poems could be arranged for choral singing. I have been reminded searingly how much the world needs a good pagan repertoire. Virtually half--6 out of 13 songs--sung by the 5th and 6th graders at the public school concert I attended tonight included Christian content, with words such as "I believe in God" repeated over and over by child soloists (in Spanish); "I'm going up yonder to be with my Lord"; and so on. The justification that seems to be common for this religious imbalance is that Christian music happens to be the only good music available.

I remember when they used to say the same thing about poetry; when I was a graduate student in the 80s at Stanford, people were saying they had to teach dead European male literature only, because that was the only good stuff. Fifteen years later, the same argument, which I had thought long settled, resurfaced during a party I was attending at Yale (enlightened thought does seem to travel west to east nowadays.) "Oh yes," I was assured--and by graduate students!, "whenever some good writing by women of color turns up, I'll teach it." Now I never hear people saying those things any more. But where paganism is concerned, it's back to square one again.

The really interesting part for me is an encounter I had with an actively Catholic neighbor in the parking lot after the concert. When I invited her to join a group of concerned parents who are planning to meet with the principal about this, she said she would never support a move to insist only on secular songs. However, she blew me away by, instead, offering to help me try to get some pagan songs included in the next program!

Her broad but adamantly spiritual perspective seems connected to the direction of the Cosmic Convergence this coming July, which I just received an email about. Wouldn't true unity consciousness involve seeing all of us as manifestations of one consciousness, with each of us taking a particular role in the conversation? Doesn't that make room for all perspectives? Song gives me pleasure, and I have heard that pleasure, and our hearts, are the most reliable guide through these times.

Any good song suggestions for pagan songs arranged for multiple parts? One I'd like to mention, though probably not suitable for kids to sing, is Bruce Rockwell's beautiful arrangement of "Walk With Me." the only poem so far I've had arranged for singing in parts. I truly love his arrangement.

ASWM Rising!

2010-04-13T08:04:00.000-07:00

I am so excited. I have been invited to give an opening poetry reading on the first evening of the first Conference of the Association for Study of Women and Mythology, April 23. I will be reading with the great Diane Wolkstein, whose work on Inanna has been so influential on me, and I am very excited to hear her new work about Kuan Yin, a goddess who has increasingly been entering my life of late.

In honor of this performance, which I take as a charge to use the power of rhythm and poetry invoke the energies of the goddesses into the event, I am trying to figure out how to pack and bring a special secret mask, made by Stonecoast alum, the brilliant fantasy writer and all-around creative dynamo Michaela Roessner. . . tricky because I have to take a plane to read at the Los Angeles Festival of Books immediately following!

Ostara Vibration

2010-04-07T05:17:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been a busy few weeks. I've been travelling a lot for poetry events, gave the keynote poem for the launch of the Women's Poetry Timeline at the gorgeous National Museum of Women in the Arts in DC-and then spent a few days marching for peace with my mother on the eve of her 89th birthday...

But I got back in time for the annual Ostara egg hunt on the beach near our home.
Last year, we dyed with blueberries, onion skins, and turmeric and got beautiful natural colors that looked amazing nestled among the rocks; this year my daughter used dye from the supermarket and got wildly rich colors which also looked amazing nestled among the rocks. The new bunny, Pumpkin, had his first Easter, outside on a leash. And in our local chorus, we are learning to sing an original arrangement of Bob Marley's "Rastaman Vibration."

Yesterday, I felt exhausted after all of it, almost depressed, and then this morning, I woke up and I realized what all the heaviness was about--a poem wanting to be born. Out it popped, just like that.

Spring is more of a gift than I can ever remember to anticipate.

Happy Ostara, everyone!

Thanks to the Illustrating Pirate

2010-03-04T18:55:00.000-08:00

One of the jolting pleasures of being a publishing poet in the age of the Web is to stumble on a poem that has gone on adventures without my knowledge. The Niches section of my website collects links to poems I've come across on, among other places, a Spelunking site and a Wine-tasting site.

But recently I had an experience that topped all these—to find "Two Into Two" at a very special and mysterious website, accompanied by a remarkable choice of illustration that taught me more than I maybe even wanted to know about my own poem. I wrote the poem in an entirely different and luminously innocent context, or so I thought; but this illustration, insightfully it seems to me, brings out other aspects: power and patriarchy and disfigurement.

Oddly, these meanings also seem to have been added onto the text they originally illustrate. The apparent source for the tale, "The Knave of Hearts" by Louise Sargent, is a tale of tarts far, far more innocuous than Parrish's illustration implies.

As it happens, I'd just been reading Christina Rossetti and Illustration, about the impact of illustration on Rossetti's literary career, much more considerable than I would expect. Being illustrated weakened her even as it brought her fame, and not only in a literary critical sense. It's an odd feeling to be "illustrated," and it changes the feeling of freedom and agency that goes with publishing one's unillustrated words.

Before this, my main experience with illustrated poems was when I decided to commission some faux-woodcuts from Alix Baer for the first self-published edition of The Encyclopedia of Scotland.

But now, thanks to the illustrating pirate, I understand the feeling better. I have the sense that most illustrated writers must have as a matter of course: not having chosen, let alone commissioned, the nature of the illustration but having it thrust upon one.

It's a violation— miscomprehending---but also it is oddly satisfying, relaxing in a sort of stunning way, as, speaking of Julie Kane's research which I discussed a few posts ago, the left brain finds its right and the whole thinking buzz-saw stops circling, or at least slows down.

That's why I thank the illustrating pirate.

To Arouse Secrets: The Visceral Magic of Robert Rauschenberg

2010-02-18T13:20:00.000-08:00

Robert Rauschenberg's exuberant, quiet, sloppy, painstaking, organic, sensual, spiritual Combines entered my life during my now-somewhat-infamous days living in the East Village in New York. They perfectly captured and enhanced the major alchemical powers I needed to (barely) get through those challenging years. Shamanic totems, they channeled me through simplicity in the midst of sophistication. I have gotten a visceral charge of joy and power from my encounters with them ever since—most recently in 2005, touring the Met's retrospective of the Combines in the company of Charles Altieri, delightful friend and brilliant literary critic.

The letter above is posted by way of thanks to Rauschenberg—and as a reminder that I aim to "not feel shame in my joy nor regret or fright in history."

The Valentine's Ball: Where The Goddess and Poetry Mate

2010-02-13T04:16:00.000-08:00

I have been decorating the house like mad, since tonight Glen and I are hosting a Valentine's Ball. The decor involves silky sari cloth in rich colors, little silken nooks out of pre-Raphealite paintings, sparkling lights and votives, big sparkly red hearts. There is something extremely liberating about all this, sobering in light of the fact that in some places in the world, one could be jailed for wearing red on Valentine's Day.

This is probably the first mega-party we've ever thrown that wasn't for Halloween/Samhain/my birthday. It's very different kind of fun, and it fits the season—the whiteness of the snow suddenly seeming dramatic, somehow indulgent, more sensuous than stark, the murmurings among the birds hinting at matings to come, the thaw of Imbolc, just two weeks ago now, almost imperceptibly spreading further along. . .

The idea for a party was spurred by the Valentine's dinners thrown by Julia Child and her husband, which I noticed in Julie and Julia. Soon enough the party planning took on a life of its own, as others got involved; by now it is delightfully ambitious in scope, profoundly fun, and very spiritual, in its campy/erotic/delightfully sensual way. After all, Valentine's Day's date of Feb. 14 descends from the big Roman festival of Lupercalia, an ancient erotic celebration in honor of the fertility of the goddess and the time of mating (also, as the name implies, with a connection to the legendary goddess-like wolf who nurtured Romulus and Remus).

This goddess connection has burgeoned from idea to image as the party has taken shape. We will have Valentine-colored foods, and goddess images scattered about—but, my daughter and I agree, they have to be happy ones ( she nixed William Morris's "Pomona"). I had the idea to crown the buffet table with a statue of Aphrodite, and looked all over the internet for an appropriate Venus de Milo. Luckily, none of them were the right size, quality, or price, so I ended up with one I like much better, since she not only has all her arms and fingers, but is surrounded by doves into the bargain. There will be other fertility goddesses and gods, a Shiva, and of course plenty of big fat red hearts—by many lights, a primal ancient symbol of the yoni, vulva, or goddess generally.

In honor partly of my delightful friends from Iran and their tradition of poetry circles, there will be also "love poetry corner," where guests will post copies of favorite love poems they've copied out, and maybe give poetry readings (this was a compromise with those who felt that the last thing we want to do is interrupt the dancing for a poetry reading!)

All these preparations mixed in with an already very busy (!) life have meant less time than usual to write my annual Valentine poem for my sweetie. I know I'll finish something in time, but meanwhile, here's "Paravaledellentine" from Calendars:

The Magical, Manic Poets: Poetry as Right-Hemispheric Language

2010-01-26T17:37:00.000-08:00

"If left-hemispheric dominance for language is not the ‘natural’ condition of human beings aged eight and older, but rather, a side effect of print literacy, then it stands to reason that the qualitative changes in consciousness between
oral and print cultures—from community identity, ‘magical thinking,’ pervasive animist spirituality, and poetry to individualism, science, and rationalism, faith-based religion or agnosticism/atheism, and prose—may be the outward signs
of a fundamental shift from right- to left-hemispheric structuring of conscious thought processes and memories.”

—Julie Kane, "Poetry as Right-Hemispheric Language," p. 16

Wow. After I posted this quote, Julie Kane kindly came by to add to the discussion and provided us the link to the complete article, which is now online here

I've just started reading it, and I've already gotten the chills. i don't know if I really want to get so far to the bottom of my "compulsion to write poetry"--i sense it may confirm too many awful suspicions I've had since childhood--but I know I'd better. So here goes. I hope to see many of you at the discussion afterwards--I know I'm going to need the support!!

On Not Being White: For Robbie Burns Day

2010-01-25T18:46:00.000-08:00

The timing was perfect. Just on Robbie Burns' birthday, a lovely little package arrived from a small town in Scotland--the "Scottish lace panel" I had ordered from Ebay to filter the glare in my writing studio window. It's replete with red deer, Edinburgh Castle, and the word "Scotland" facing four different directions. What more could a Scottish American poet want?

Though i was raised with a steady awareness of my roots, I guess my coming-out as a Scottish American really started last year, as I was sitting in on the "writing about race" workshop we have started offering at Stonecoast due to student demand.
In the discussion, Richard Hoffman pointed out that "whiteness" is not a race but a construct, invented as a counterpart to the counterveiling construct of "blackness." This idea had the ring of truth for me; it passed my truth test of feeling, if uncomfortable at first, in the end genuinely liberatory.

This month, during a community discussion about race and how it affects our writing, I found myself both embarrassed and deeply relieved to talk about my Scottish ethnicity--and my female identity. I have other ethnicities too--English and French and Dutch, and perhaps a touch of Spanish pirate with Moorish blood--but Scottish is how I "self-identify" right now, and claiming the right to self-identify is a great feeling for someone who's been stuck being a "white person" in the U.S. all her life.

Mainly, it's the relief of feeling visible. For so long I've projected the burden of otherness, of having a race at all, onto others, as if my mix of ethnic origins somehow matters less than that of someone who could be labelled "of color." The difference came to me with a thud when, after i finished speaking, one of our students--the New York based poet Cheryl Boyce Taylor, originally from Trinidad--looked at me and, for the first time, "saw" me. Cheryl was sitting opposite me in our circular discussion, and she looked right at me and said, "Annie, I never knew you felt that way, about being Scottish, and being a woman." We looked at each other, human to human, for a blessed minute, balancing our particular individual backgrounds. How much richer, more alive, and lighter I felt than I had felt ten minutes earlier. I realized that for my entire life I have accepted the feeling--a kind of shame, I think-- that I would simply never have an ethnicity I cared about, and the right to choose to identify with it. I anticipated nothing but the generic mask of "whiteness" that so many of us stumble behind in this country.

When I named my strange first book The Encyclopedia of Scotland, I did so with great irony, thinking of the name as a kind of existential pun ("scot" means "debt," as in the phrase "scot-free") on my heavily indebted economic, spiritual, and aesthetic coming of age. And yet there was some hope and innocence in the act as well. The punk 20-something culture underlying that book was characterized largely by the yearning to be part of a "tribe"--a yearning that now seems to me clearly a response to the racial sructure of this country at the time.

I knew, even then, that "whiteness" doesn't do my soul any good. I much prefer feeling like a Scottish American. It led me to wear a skirt made of my favorite tartan (Blackwatch) to the Stonecoast community reading in celebration of Martin Luther King's birthday, and to make a fool of myself singing "My Luv is LIke a Red, Red Rose" during our "Follies" talent show. It brings up wonderful memories of a trip to Galloway with my mother to look at graveyards (one of them the topic of my poem "For Grizzel McNaught" in EVE), when the cab driver who was ferrying us between villages invited us to a village Robby Burns celebration that turned out to be one of the funnest parties of my entire life.

Fully acknowledging that the free choice to identify with one of my white ethnicities--unlike with my gender-- is a great luxury that people of color do not share, one reason I choose to identify with Scottishness right now is simply that it's more fun. Scottishness feels culturally "realer" to me than English or Frenchness. It's more of a folk culture, I guess. There's the distinctive food, the distinctive music, the distinctive dance, and most of all, the national poet. The idea of a national poet of England, or France, doesn't make much sense--but Robbie Burns is the kind of poet who links together a culture. It's hard to imagine the Scottish Nationalist movement without him; he's one of the great examples of the crucial role of poetry in national identity—right up there with Finland's Kalevala

So Happy Robby Burns Day. Here's a present, a ditty by my national poet on my mother's side, one that she used to sing to me, and that I used to sing my own children to sleep with:

Flow gently, sweet Afton,
amang thy green braes,
Flow gently, I'll sing thee
a song in thy praise;
My Mary's asleep
by thy murmuring stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton,
disturb not her dream.

Thou stock dove whose echo
resounds thro' the glen,
Ye wild whistly blackbirds
in yon thorny den,
Thou green crested lapwing
thy screaming forbear,
I charge you, disturb not
my slumbering fair.

How lofty, sweet Afton,
thy neighboring hills,
Far mark'd with the courses
of clear winding rills;
There daily I wander
as noon rises high,
My flocks and my Mary's
sweet cot in my eye.

How pleasant thy banks
and green valleys below,
Where, wild in the woodlands,
the primroses blow;
There oft, as mild evening
weeps over the lea,
The sweet-scented birk shades
my Mary and me.

Thy crystal stream, Afton,
how lovely it glides,
And winds by the cot where
my Mary resides;
How wanton thy waters
her snowy feet lave,
As, gathering sweet flowerets,
she stems thy clear wave.

Flow gently, sweet Afton,
amang thy green braes,
Flow gently, sweet river,
the theme of my lays;
My Mary's asleep
by thy murmuring stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton,
disturb not her dreams.

What is a Witch? What is a Poet? What is a Poetess?

2010-01-11T19:29:00.000-08:00

When the first definition came to me, I was tired from the exciting rigors of a Stonecoast residency but had centered myself with water, air, and thought. I thought of it while driving to the Stone House to teach a workshop:

A witch is someone who is so sensitive to the energy of the physical world that they have found it necessary to cultivate (perhaps initially as a survival skill!) the innate human ability to notice and change that energy. (Starhawk put it more succinctly: a witch is someone who can change consciousness at will).

The second definition arose in stimulating and excellent workshop discussion of poems and their meters with Stonecoast student poets:

A poet is someone who creates what is not apparently in stories but truly arises from them (as opposed to a fiction writer who creates stories. (And of course poets routinely used to, and can and do still, create both simultaneously)).

The third definition occurred through reading an article about Patti Smith sent me by Chas ( my cousin Charlie Finch)—a useful piece that helped me understand why things were the way they were when I lived on the lower east side in the early 80’s and, more importantly for me at this moment, helped me conceptualize the aesthetic distinctions between the terms “poet” and “poetess” that I’ve been mulling over for years (cf here and here and here).

Janis Joplin called Smith “the poet,” the article claims. And “poet” is by far today’s term of choice. Yet the headline refers to Smith as “the punk prose poetess.” Why? Leaving aside the headline-catchy connotation clash, it isn't simply about gender. “She married poetry to the punk movement,” the article claims. By implication, the poetess is the writer who uses poetry in the service of a movement, a lifestyle, a change in the actual world.

In recent times, even poets appointed Poet Laureate of the U.S. have been, by and large, admired all the more for abjuring both of the traditional central tools of the poet: not only meter, but also the responsibility to mark the shared public transitions and transformations of their society through “occasional poetry.” And all that time, as more visible poets explored the power of the individual unconscious, in fact it was the overlooked tradition of the “poetess” which truly carried these responsibilities of the poet-shaman on behalf of the society at large.

The poetess uses poetry to do the work of a witch, calling up and shaping energies to heal and transform society. The poetess, in other words, is a witch and a poet in one. I share in that work.

At the end of the “essay Confessions of a Postmodern Poetess,” I wrote, “I am a poetess. It’s a relief at last to admit it.” Now, after a further decade spent absorbing and meditating on the implications of the name, I will say it again somewhat differently, here on American Witch: “I am a poetess. It’s an honor at last to admit it.”

Weathering the Work of Change: Marginalization in Popular Culture and Poetry

2010-01-03T13:41:00.001-08:00

My cousin Charlie Finch, writer and Senior Critic for Artnet Worldwide, sent some words of advice in response to my recent post about Avatar: "I think one needs to tread very carefully when dealing with expensive cultural phenomena such as "Avatar" or Susan Boyle. These are cultural anvils dropped from on high with the apparent touch of a feather that are designed to manipuate our emotions and separate us from our wallets and our identities, so "caveat emptor.""

These are wise words, and I agree with them. Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that I am usually more than qualified to say, often proudly but sometimes in real embarrassment at how clueless I can be about things that a lot of other people know about, "cavo popular culture" (i think that would be the correct form of the verb "beware" in Latin). And yet, about Avatar—and about another archetypal meme of female empowerment, Susan Boyle, whose emergence video I watched more than once in tears and forwarded along to many people including Charlie—I have broken this longstanding habit. I have soaked up these phenomena with guileless abandon and, furthermore, in the case of Avatar, I have made a public spectacle of my delight.

Musing about the reasons for all this, I have decided that the longterm habit of marginalization must have bred in me a near-permanent sense of invincibility.
After decades in which my beliefs and passions have been utterly unacknowledged in mass culture, let alone mainstream educated culture, the notion that they could somehow be betrayed by a popular culture exploitation or false portrayal or some kind of 'selling out" feels so patently absurd that I simply haven't bothered to build up any immunity to the possibility or any armor against it.

Yet isn't this just what popular culture feeds on? With a nose bent on sniffing out the juicy aroma of the repressed-nearly-to-bursting, where else would it turn but to the beliefs and tastes held with undaunted persistence for so long by certain perversely stubborn aficionados of the hopelessly marginal? And why shouldn't pop culture respond to the same changes and needs as unpop culture does, even if on a different scale and a different time-line? Pop culture IS culture ("Poetry and Popular Culture" even has its own blog now), and its hunger is further aggravated by the current gap between popular and "high" culture, and the fact that pop culture itself is so marginal in some contexts (for example, Stonecoast's popular fiction degree is practically unique among MFA programs). In fact, freed of the self-feeding, if economically small-scale, loops that nurture high art ( the poetry world was recently and aptly described as a self-licking ice-cream cone), isn't pop culture, however economically constrained, in some ways more aesthetically free to respond to the times?

For whatever reason, some of my personally long-awaited changes are coming true in both the pop and unpop worlds (and of course in those wonderful worlds that span the two—such as Miyazaki's films). Not only has iceberg lettuce vanished, not only does the local TV station wish people a happy solstice over a loop of a burning Yule log, but things I used to be afraid I was making up, from plant and mineral energies to meter's revolutionary power to animals' intelligence to the virtues of Sara Teasdale (touted, for one thing, in Nicholson Baker's new novel The Anthologist) are increasingly, if still rarely, understood to be real. Opera is cool again, and no doubt epic, occasional poetry, and poetry as ritual will reemerge too, just as I always knew they would. I have students who seem to "get it" as far as poetry is concerned—to get what, at their age, I used to despair that anyone else would ever get. Hart Crane is no longer despised, Helen Adam is out in a beautiful new edition, Swinburne is probably due for a comeback. Some young poets get excited about writing sonnets and triple meters. And a movie featuring a goddess-centered culture earns a billion dollars in the first two weeks.

Whether my own work and that of so many others has been helping with the changes; whether we have the age-old power of the pendulum to thank; or whether this strange sense of triumphantly but mildly perplexed relief happens to everyone in their 50s, the weather is changing. So let's just pretend for a moment that the tide really has turned, and much of the beauty and value that I for one have been working so long to salvage out of total oblivion is really going to matter to enough people—whether in the realm of poetry or more generally— that it will survive in some form as part of the cultural conversation.

Whatever the cause, what I'm most curious about is what happens next. Much as I might have joked about it over the years, I really didn't like all those things simply because they were unpopular. I found in them something that inspired me in my particular cultural and psychological situation and moment, that felt essential for my own aesthetic and spiritual thriving. At first, sick of feeling so alone, I fought against myself about them fiercely, but once I gave in to myself, I fought FOR them fiercely in the outer world, and I always knew on some level that I couldn't be alone. Part of the poet's job, after all, is to be a bellwether for the culture, a canary in the mine (hopefully one who can fly out and point the way elsewhere), a lightning rod for whatever energies will be needed next.

I have seen people who have long been fighting a battle whose tide may have started to turn handle the situation in various ways. Some continue the struggles of their youth, maintaining the increasingly surreal-looking stance of the bitter beleaguered from a podium of influence. Others seem to give up doing much of anything.

But perhaps, just as the longterm habit of marginalization breeds a near-permanent sense of invincibility, so the longterm habit of obscurity breeds a near-permanent sense of invisibility. And if the truth is that neither the invincibility nor the invisibility is true, then it seems there will be plenty left to do.

Happy New Blue Moon Year of the Arrow

2009-12-31T02:19:00.001-08:00

I am dubbing this once in a blue moon full moon New Year--which begins with ten-foot tall blue people with tails (as Mihku calls them!) saving their planet from techno-military-industrialization with arrows--the New Year of the Arrow.

Inside me and in those around me, I am finding strengthened clarity of purpose and claiming of agency as 2010 begins to begin. May your arrows this year fly with a minimum of confusion, straight from the center to their intended homes.

It is still early in this world, do you hear me
The beasts have not been tamed, do you hear me
My spilled blood and the pointed, do you hear me
Knife
Like a ram running the skies
Snapping the stars' branches, do you hear me
It's me, do you hear me
I love you, do you hear me

--Odysseus Elytis, from The Monogram, trans. Olga Broumas

Avatar and the Goddess

2009-12-30T05:55:00.000-08:00

When Glen, the kids, and I arrived at Cinemagick to wait in line for a computer to print our pre-bought tickets to James Cameron's Avatar, the show was already sold out—like every showing since it opened. It was probably even worse because we’d decided to splurge 2 more bucks per ticket to see the Imax
version in addition to the basic 3-D. We scrambled to get there earlier than I’ve ever arrived at a movie and still couldn’t find four seats together. So once we settled in our comfy Imax seats wearing those funky glasses and had the slightly-scary experience of a couple of 3-D previews, I was feeling a bit defamiliarized. . .

. . . and not prepared to find, embedded in the usual action film, much in the movie deeply and surprisingly familiar. A culture that treats the interconnected energy of life with respect. Women as spiritual clan leaders. A scientist's dying words, “I’m with Her. She’s real.” In this thealogy, the Goddess “cares for the balance of life.” They call Her the “All Mother,” and men as well as women live as if, in the words of the song, “we all come from the Goddess.” Even the planet’s name, Pandora, is believed by scholars Charlene Spretnak and Merlin Stone to have referred to an original form of the Great Goddess before the later myth demoted her to the curse of mankind.

Cameron borrows from scads of movies, from “Tarzan" and "Dances With Wolves" to “Castle in the Sky” and “Lord of the Rings,” but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Goddess-centered culture depicted so coherently in any film or at least any big-budget film. Have you? It was a wild experience—albeit nowhere as intense as visiting the Museum of Heraklion in Crete and basking in the subtle, sophisticated, and shockingly fresh art of a real Goddess-based civilization.

Yule shopping in our local pagan store last week, I noticed as often before the dearth of serious quality in pagan and goddess-centered art (Mayumi Oda one obvious exception, and please comment here if you know of others!). Cameron’s movie is characterized by an oddly compelling sort of strange ugliness, and, though there is rhythmic chanting in the untranslatable native language, goddess poetry is notably absent. Watching it makes me want to continue to help fill that gap. . .

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