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University of Michigan Press, 2005
“A must-read for any poetry enthusiast..”
—MiPoesias
“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.’”
-University of Michigan Press
REVIEWS
” . . . 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
“The Body of Poetry seems a highly applicable must-read for any poetry enthusiast. It would work especially well as a textbook for university courses on the writing or analysis of poetry.”
—www.mipoesias.com
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Dedication
A Horse With Two Wings
A Horse With Two Wings
Metrical Diversity
Metrical Subversions: Prosody, Poetry, and My Affair with the Amphibrach
A Carol for Carolyn
Langpo, Pomo, Newfo
Omniformalism: A Manifesto
The Body of Poetry
The Body of Poetry
Liturgy
Walk With Me: On Poetry and Music
Passion in Translation: Louise Labé
H.D., "Imagiste"?
Technology and Inspiration
Poetics: A Taxonomy
Repetition, Repetition
How to Create a Poetic Tradition
How to Create a Poetic Tradition
Mother Dickinson
Letter for Emily Dickinson
The Heart of Phillis Wheatley
Unnecessary Burdens: Cooper, Gluck, Graham
Carolyn Kizer and the Chain of Women
My Teasdale Talisman
Female Tradition, Feminist Innovation
Confessions of a Postmodern Poetess
Coherent Decentering
Desks
Stein the Romantic, Mallarme the Radical
Victorian Self-Making and the Contemporary Poet
Confessions of a Postmodern Poetess
A Many-Sounding Sea
The Dactyl: A Many-Sounding Sea
A Rock in the River: Maxine Kumin's Rhythmic Countercurrents
The Ghost of Meter Revisited
Making Shattered Faces Whole: The Metrical Code in Audre Lorde
In Defense of Meter
Limping Prosody (Holder)
Forms of Memory (Hacker)
John Peck's Hypnagogic Poetry
The Muse
Acknowledgements
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PREFACE
Louise Bogan wrote in 1949, "no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart." Sadly, despite generations of feminist change, many women (and men) are still embarrassed by the form and the feeling of the premodernist women's poetic tradition. 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.
Contemporary literary culture presents numerous obstacles to a feminist, experimentally-leaning, formalist poet. One is the common assumption that formal poetics implies reactionary politics. In my case, this has been untrue from the beginning: my parents, World War 2 pacifists and lovers of formal poetry, met at a lecture on Shakespeare by Auden, a poet whose political and aesthetic views aren't labeled easily by contemporary standards. As a teenager, I treasured a 1938 edition of e.e. cummings' Collected Poems, a gift to my mother the year it was published from her Aunt Jessie (Wallace Hughan), founder of the War Resisters League and twice Socialist candidate for the New York State Legislature. Jessie had written on the flyleaf, in cummingsesque lineation, a note of admonition to the aspiring young poet, my mother: "if you / write / poems like /e. /e./c.,/you/won'/t/get/n/o/more/bo/oks/from/me!"
I adored cummings in part because of his quirkily brilliant ear for rhythm, and Jessie Wallace Hughan's tight ballad quatrains satirizing the war industry were the farthest thing from cummings' poems aesthetically. There was no connection between Jessie's poems' formal characteristics and her political beliefs, as there were none for me as a young poet. But I have long intuited that my feminism and formalism were integrally related. I realized early that my mother's poems and those of the formal women poets she read—from Celia Thaxter to Millay— nurtured and inspired me more than the work of many male poets, but did not receive the same serious attention. In spite of the current neglect of, and prejudice against, the work of these writers, the rediscovery of a women's poetic tradition has offered me a creative antidote to the ego-driven poetics of Romanticism. The more communal and accessible poetics of the "poetess" aesthetic may offer direction and models for those intent on writing poetry both formally resonant and engaged, and certainly for those looking for new models of the poetic self.
Several of these essays map the potentially overlapping territories of exploratory and formal poetics, another neglected area. Here I define formal poetry broadly to encompass strategies used in multicultural poetries and oral, folk, and ritual traditions. My definition of form includes procedural and other poetic strategies based not in syntactic logic but in the physical presencing of words. I reject the widespread aesthetic prejudice that formal poetics implies a closed view of the world and a limited, functionalistic attitude towards language. In fact, exploratory poetics, with its recognition of the importance of language's nonlinear qualities, usefully articulates my own experience of the non-representational power in formal poetry.
Even more than the literary historical, political, and aesthetic implications of this book as I have just briefly described them, its overarching vision remains a spiritual one. Increasingly in the past few years I realize that the threads of poetic inquiry I've been impelled to follow—questions of prosody and form, exploratory poetics, feminism, poetic subjectivity, and the tradition of "poetess poetics"—are not as wildly disparate as they used to seem. I now see how they all embody various aspects of one aesthetic approach that is closely tied with my spiritual roots. I have tried to articulate my sense of this approach in the title essay.
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.
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