Annie Finch
poet, writer, performer
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The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self

Annie Finch: The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self book cover

I wrote each of these essays to inspire, encourage, or create a context for my own work as a poet. I hope that, just as these writings have nourished my own poems, they will also help to nurture a new kind of American poetics, one that will prove increasingly open to poetry’s sustainable, and sustaining, body.

Annie Finch

Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Publish Date: February 22, 2010
Pages: 198
Language: English
ISBN: 9780472068951

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a refreshingly singular critic. . . Finch revivifies the dusty vault of prosody with the arcane dexterity of a necromancer.”

Art New England

From The Publisher

The Body of Poetry collects essays, reviews, and memoir by Annie Finch, one of the brightest poet-critics of her generation. Finch’s germinal work on the art of verse has earned her the admiration of a wide range of poets, from new formalists to hip-hop writers. And her ongoing commitment to women’s poetry has brought Finch a substantial following as a “postmodern poetess” whose critical writing embraces the past while establishing bold new traditions. The Body of Poetry includes essays on metrical diversity, poetry and music, the place of women poets in the canon, and on poets Emily Dickinson, Phillis Wheatley, Sara Teasdale, Audre Lorde, Marilyn Hacker, and John Peck, among other topics. In Annie Finch’s own words, these essays were all written with one aim: “to build a safe space for my own poetry. . . . [I]n the attempt, they will also have helped to nourish a new kind of American poetics, one that will prove increasingly open to poetry’s heart.”

Excerpt

From the PREFACE by Annie Finch

This collection documents my recognition of my own identity as a “postmodern poetess” through redefinitions of key concepts of poetic tradition, form, and the poetic self and through the development of a new kind of formal poetics that I have called at various times radical formalism, tribal postmodernism, or a poetics of thealogy. Under whatever label, this collection, like my poems, aims to give back some of the world’s lost heart by reclaiming the body of poetry.

The essays in the book’s five sections are for the most part grouped thematically. The first section explores the intersection between poetics and the writing of poetry. The second section concerns my ideas of the importance of poetry’s physical presence, whether in incantation, translation, or musical collaboration. The third section addresses the building and finding of new poetic traditions, particularly where women’s poetics are concerned. The fourth section focuses on issues of poetic subjectivity and on the self, in both the poetic and the autobiographical sense of the word. And the fifth section deals with my ideas of the metrical code and metrical issues generally. . .

Reviews

 

 

a refreshingly singular critic. . . Finch revivifies the dusty vault of prosody with the arcane dexterity of a necromancer.”

Art New England

 

 

A must-read for any poetry enthusiast..

MiPoesias

 

. . . offers a glimpse into the criticism and esthetics of a refreshingly singular critic. A self-proclaimed ‘postmodern poetess,’ Annie Finch lives up to the moniker, presenting a simultaneously thorough and mercurial array of musings on poetics focusing on form and meter, remaining three beats ahead of the rank-and-file herd of traditional prosodists. Finch revivifies the dusty vault of prosody with the arcane dexterity of a necromancer. . . . [T]his text is an important one for the serious reader of poetry, particularly those who are troubled by the surface limitations and contradictions of metric formal verse, but who are eager to meet such work on its own territory with an astute and unbiased critic such as Finch as their guide. The most incisive portions of this text belong in any list of essential writings on meter.”

Art New England

 

 

the collection serves well as encouragement and inspiration for any poet who reads it

Moira Richards, womenwriters.net