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Annie Finch, Poet
Finch was born in the New York area in 1956,
earned her B.A. at Yale, her M.A. degree in Creative Writing at Houston,
and her doctorate at Stanford University. She is now teaching on the
creative writing faculty at Miami University in Ohio,
where she maintains a homepage at http://www.muohio.edu/~finchar
and can be reached at Department of English,
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio 45220, or--via e.mail--at
finchar@muohio.edu.
Finch's book of poems, Eve, appeared from Story Line Press in
Spring 1997. Her poems have appeared in Black Ice, (How)ever, The Paris
Review, The Kenyon Review, Agni, Puerto del Sol, Hudson Review, Partisan
Review, Southwest Review, and other journals. Her work is characterized by
a rigorous knowledge of formal technique, and an eclectic use of that
technique in the service of a passionate feminist vision. Eve contains
poems in forms ranging from the Amerindian chant to the villanelle to
the Celtic awdl gwyddyd, all united by an overarching structure of songs to
goddesses. Carolyn Kizer has remarked that "Finch's forms contain her
madness; I'd give a great deal to have more of that madness myself."
Finch is the editor of two anthologies. A Formal Feeling Comes:
Poems in Form by Contemporary Women (Story Line, 1994), collects poems in
forms from the blues to the sonnet to the pantoum, as well as statements on
poetics by the sixty women who contributed. After New Formalism (Story
Line, forthcoming), includes essays by poets widening the definition of
formalism. Two other anthologies are in circulation: New Formal Poetics
collects essays on the theoretical possibilities of formalism, and An
Exaltation of Forms includes entries by 44 poets, ranging from Charles
Bernstein to John Hollander to June Jordan, about a poetic form of their
choice. Finch has also written a controversial book of prosodic theory,
The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse (Michigan,
1993) and contributed essays on prosody to anthologies. In Eve, she
experiments with meters including not only iambic and free verse but also
trochaic, dactylic, and accentual.
Believing strongly in the importance of the oral aspects of poetry,
Finch has collaborated with musicians since the first performance of her
chapbook, The Encyclopedia of Scotland, with the Fiction Music Ensemble in
1982. She participated in the Poets Theater in San Francisco during the
late 1980s, and co-directed the goddess songs from Eve as a
performance with music, dance, and masks in 1993. She has also written many
participatory rituals for pagan celebrations of the seasons and other
events. She is now collaborating with composer Deborah Drattell on an
opera based on the life of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, to open in New
York in 1998.
Finch has performed her poems around the country in readings at
Chicago's Poetry Center, Cloudhouse Poetry Archive in San Francisco, Tulane
University, the College of Santa Fe, Greenwich Music School in New York,
and numerous other venues.
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