The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells

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Sarasvati Award, Robert Fitzgerald Award, Yale Younger Poets Finalist, National Poetry Series Finalist, Foreword Poetry Book of the Year Shortlist

Finch began teaching as a graduate assistant, first at the University of Houston and then at Stanford University, where she TA'ed for Adrienne Rich's "Introduction to Poetry" and developed an original course, "Women, Language, and Literature." She has taught on the creative writing and literature faculties of universities including New College of California, University of Northern Iowa, Miami University (Ohio), and the University of Southern Maine, where she served as Director of the Stonecoast MFA Program from 2004 to 2012. She has facilitated poetry workshops at conferences and literary centers including Wesleyan Writers Conference, Poetry by the Sea, West Chester Poetry Conference, Ruskin Arts Center, and Poets House; and online at Yale Alumni Workshops, 24 Pearl St. and the London Poetry School. She has been a guest lecturer at universities including University of Notre Dame, Indiana University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Toronto, and Harvard University. Since 2020, she has taught poetry, scansion, meter, and ritual classes online. [45] Honors and awards [ edit ] Sharp-witted, trenchant and bold, Rebecca Tamás’ WITCH constellates the characteristics of instinctual life by pulling sexuality into the realm of the archetypal, where we are challenged to face witch qualities within our own unconscious. By targeting the body, these stunning poems awaken primordial parts of our being, releasing energy that had been mobilized towards repression, so that we become free to taste the radical eroticism of volcanic God-speaking feelings. These spells and hexes reanimate historical female silence, demanding that we listen to all that had been kept latent for so long. Can we accept the witch — the female within ourselves — as she is, without trying to make her conform to our expectations? To do so, we would have to adjust our thinking instead of forcing adjustment in the Other—we would have to change ourselves. WITCH leads the way. Finch, Annie Finch, "Stepping on the Edge of My Doubting," Thank You, Teacher: Grateful Students Tell the Stories of the Teachers Who Changed Their Lives, New World Library, 2016, p.252

Finch is the editor of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books, 2020) as well as nine anthologies of poetic craft. Her other books on Camille Ralphs’ Malkin is a vivid collection of poems about the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612. Illustrated with woodcut-style drawings by Emma Wright. Shortlisted for the 2016 Michael Marks Award. With all that in mind, and with Halloween on the horizon, this month’s Get Creative feature shares poem puzzler activities that use witchy words to spark creepily creative writing.

So begins this Victorian poem which offers us an ambiguous ‘witch’ as its (initial) speaker: she appears to be some sort of outcast, making a journey to visit a man, perhaps her beloved. Is she a depiction of the much-shunned Victorian ‘fallen woman’? She has the power to make the fire die in the grate, so she seems to possess some otherworldly power or aura. Coleridge was the great-grand-niece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Tip: you don’t have to write about an obvious animal, like a cat, bat, or frog. You could go for something more unusual. How about a spell-squawking parrot? Or a monkey that becomes magical by the light of the moon?! Betcher's crown of sonnets ​is an alchemical transmutation where his ordeal becomes a no-holds-barred odyssey that’s profound, funny, terrifying, and utterly dazzling.Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams Red Hen Press, 2010. [Winner, Sarasvati Award for Poetry, Association for the Study of Women and Mythology]. Sarasvati Award for Poetry from the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology, for Among the Goddesses A Poet's Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Shaping Your Poems. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. A passionate space where liberation, creativity, diversity, and truth are paramount and the First Law of Witchcraft is honored: “if it harms none, do as you will”

Finch, Annie Finch, "Stepping on the Edge of My Doubting," Thank You, Teacher: Grateful Students Tell the Stories of the Teachers Who Changed Their Lives, New World Library, 2016, p. 250 Claire Keyes notes in Scribner's American Writers, "A strong current in [Finch's] work is the decentering of the self, a theme which stems from her deep connection with the natural world and her perception of the self as part of nature." [27] In an interview Finch stated, "Some of my poems are lyric, some narrative, some dramatic, and some meditative, but all are concerned with the mystery of the embodied sacred.". [28] Finch writes in the preface of her 2013 collection Spells: New and Selected Poems that she considers her poems and verse plays to be "spells" whose rhythm and form invite readers "to experience words not just in the mind but in the body." [29] Finch's first poetry collection, Eve (Story Line Press, 1997), was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Calendars ( Tupelo Press, 2003), finalist for the National Poetry Series and shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Book of the Year award, is structured around a series of poems written for performance to celebrate the Wheel of the Year. [8] Her third book, Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams ( Red Hen Press, 2010), which received the Sarasvati Award for Poetry, is a hybrid work combining narrative and dramatic structure to tell a mythic story about abortion. The Encyclopedia of Scotland was published in 2010 by Salt Publishing in the U.K.; [9] in the same year, Carnegie Mellon University Press reissued Eve in the Contemporary Classics Poetry Series. Spells: New and Selected Poems ( Wesleyan University Press, 2012), collects poems from each of Finch's previous books along with previously unpublished poems. The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells (2019), also from Wesleyan University Press, offers small spells of fewer than eight lines, gathered by Finch from the longer poems of Spells. Poet and critic Ron Silliman has situated Finch in the context of experimental poetry, writing, "Annie Finch can't be a new formalist, precisely because she's passionate both about the new and about form. She is also one of the great risk-takers in contemporary poetry, right up there with Lee Ann Brown& Bernadette Mayer in her willingness to completely shatter our expectations as readers." [16] The experimental aspect of Finch's work became more evident with the publication of Spells, which includes 35 of the poems composed in the 1980s that she refers to as the "lost poems." In the preface to Spells, she describes these as "metrical and experimental poems [that]. . . did not find their audience until the avant-garde's rediscovery of formal poetic strategies just a few years ago." [17] After New Formalism: Poets on Form, Narrative, and Tradition. Brownsville, OR: Story Line Press, 1999.

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As heretical as it is cerebral, WITCH rages ferociously through the occult to the obscene. From hexes on patriarchy to a spell for UN resolutions, Tamás upturns the world as we know it into “a small bright filthy song”. A fierce new voice, “red and pulsing”, which refuses to be silenced. Annie’s numerous books on meter and poetic form for poets, scholars, and poetry lovers include A Poet’s Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, and edited or coedited anthologies including An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets on the Diversity of Their Art, A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women, After New Formalism: Poets on Form and Narrative, Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetry, Multiformalisms: Postmodern Poetics of Form, Villanelles, and Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters. Her critical and poetic work has received the Arlt Prize for Literary Criticism, the Sarasvati Award for Poetry, and the Robert Fitzgerald Award for lifetime contribution to the art and craft of Versification. Finch's feminism is also evident in her prose writing, editing, and literary organizing. Her first anthology A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women (1993) collected poems and essays by contemporary women poets. The "metrical code," the central theory of her book of literary criticism The Ghost of Meter (1994), is cited in the article on "feminist poetics" by Elaine Showalter in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. [20] [21] [22] Her essay collection The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self (2005) includes writings on women poets including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Carolyn Kizer, Maxine Kumin, Audre Lorde, Lydia Sigourney, Sara Teasdale, and Phillis Wheatley, many based in feminist theory. In 1997, Finch founded the international listserv Discussion of Women Poets ( Wom-Po). She facilitated the listserv until 2004 when she passed ownership of the list to Amy King. Tamás explores the figure of the witch and her relationship to gender and the state in a way that feels strikingly true to the political and personal malaises of twenty-first-century life. [...] Is it too cheesy to say that I’m spellbound? Write an acrostic poem about witches. An acrostic poem is a poem in which the first letter of each line spells out the word the poem is about, like this example about some creeping cats: