Annie Finch (born 1956) is an American poet. She is the author or editor of numerous books of poetry, translation, and criticism as well as opera libretti and poetic collaborations with visual art, music, theater, and dance. Finch's poetry is known for its visionary and sensual content, musicality, and use of a variety of poetic forms, sometimes simple, sometimes incantatory, and sometimes intricate. Her writings on poetry address topics including meter and prosody, postmodern form, and the place of poetry in contemporary life. She is also known for developing an aesthetic of women's poetic traditions. In the title essay of The Body of Poetry, Finch connects not only her poetry's frequent thematic focus on nature, the body, and spiritual issues, but also its attention to pattern and sound, with her earth-centered spirituality. Because of her efforts, in her poetry and criticism, to redefine the terms of discussion about poetic form, an article in The Dictionary of Literary Biography names her "one of the central figures in contemporary American poetics."
Annie Finch was born on October 31, 1956 in New Rochelle, New York. Her maternal great-aunt, Jessie Wallace Hughan, was a founder of the War Resisters League. Her mother was a poet and doll artist. Her father was a scholar of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a conscientious objector, and a professor of philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College and Hunter College. In the introduction to "The Body of Poetry," Finch claims that her parents met at a lecture by Auden, and her essay "Desks" describes the influences of her father's book collection and her mother's example as a poet.
Finch graduated from Oakwood Friends' School, a Quaker boarding school in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1973 and then studied filmmaking, art history, and poetry at Bard College at Simon's Rock before earning her B.A. in English Literature at Yale University, magna cum laude, in 1979. In 1983 she earned her M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Houston. Finch then entered the graduate program in English and American literature at Stanford University, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1990 under the supervision of literary scholar and Anne Sexton biographer Diane Middlebrook.
Finch's first book of poetry, The Encyclopedia of Scotland, was self-published in part as a chapbook in 1982 and published in full until 2005 when it was brought out by the British house Salt Publishing. Her subsequent books of poetry include Eve (1997), reissued by the Carnegie Mellon Contemporary Classics Poetry Series in 2010; Calendars (2003), for which the publisher released a 40-page, detailed online Readers Guide in 2010 and issued ia CD version read by the author in 2010, and the "narrative libretto" Among the Goddesses (2010).
Finch has maintained a lifelong interest in poetic theater. She directed and performed in productions of The Encyclopedia of Scotland in the early 1980s in the New York area, and her MA thesis consisted of three verse dramas, written under the supervision of playwright and poet Ntozake Shange. In the San Francisco area in the 1990s, she produced, directed, and acted in short poetic plays and worked with Bob Holman on Poets Theater. Her opera "Marina," based on the life of poet Marina Tsvetaeva, was produced by American Opera Projects in 2003 with music by Deborah Drattell. In 2010, with director Assunta Kent, she founded the Poets Theater of Maine Theater Company in Portland, Maine.
Finch is married to the environmental organizer Glen Brand and they have two children. In 2004 she moved to Maine, where she is currently Professor of English and Director of Stonecoast MFA Program, the low-residency MFA in creative writing at the University of Southern Maine.
In an article in Contemporary Authors, published two years before her first full-length book of poetry, Finch made a remark that anticipates the focus of her career: "To me, poetic form, with its unverbal, physical power, is radically important in reconnecting us with our human roots and rediscovering our intimacy with nature . . .. rhythmic formal poetry is of great value in celebrating, commemorating, and cementing the bonds of community." As Claire Keyes notes in the entry on Finch in Scribner's American Writers, "A strong current in her 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."
While Finch has been consistently inspired by formal poetics since the early 1990s, from the outset much in her work has differentiated her from the movement called "New Formalism." Henry Taylor wrote in a review of Eve, "while much would seem to align her with the so-called new formalists, Finch cheerfully ignores many of their stated principles" by not writing about contemporary life and forgoing a "natural" idiom. In all her books but especially in Calendars, which was reissued in 2008 with a "Readers Companion" that offers sample scansions of fifteen separate meters used in the book and a long list of formal structures, Finch exemplifies her own invented terms "metrical diversity," "an exaltation of forms," and "multiformalism." In a blog for the Poetry Foundation, to Poetry,", she writes, "A friend asked me a few months ago, as I was discussing one of the poems I had been writing, “does it ever depress you, thinking that most people won’t know what you are doing with meter?” Maybe it should depress me, but honestly, it doesn’t. Meter just gives me too much joy for me to worry too much about it. . . . Meter is like music; you can enjoy it whether or not you understand why, and you can easily enjoy poems in meter by reading aloud to yourself, even if you are only used to reading free verse. . . . Meanwhile, just in case, my publisher is busy producing an audio version of my book on CD."
Such statements, along with Poetry Foundation blog essays on such topics as "Occasioning Occasional Poetry" and "Where Are You, General Audience?," imply that one of Finch's goals is to appeal to a wider audience for poetry. Yet s good part of the critical interest attracted by Finch's poetry has also come from the avant-garde end of the poetic spectrum. Finch's first book, The Encyclopedia of Scotland, was re-published by the innovative British publisher Salt Publishing, whose website describes it as "an early experimental work . . .a performance poem for soul-voice and attendant daemons." The book carries an endorsement by exploratory poet Jennifer Moxley claiming that it anticipates Stacey Dorris, and the book's longest review appears in the avant-garde-leaning journal Jacket. Her third book of poetry, Calendars, was compared in a review by Ron Silliman to the work of Robert Duncan and Bernadette Mayer..
In an interview with New Formalist poet R.S. Gwynn, Finch has remarked, "When I teach contemporary poetry, I divide it into four tendencies: formalist, oral tradition-performance, mainstream free verse, and experimental. I feel lucky to have encountered firsthand so many influences from these four divergent kinds of poetry. In my own work, I like to think, these different approaches have united to bring me back full-circle, yet in a new way, to the poetry I loved first, and best, when I was young."
2006 Complete Poetry of Louise Labe Awarded Honorable Mention for a translation in the field of women’s studies by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women
2005 Alumni Award, University of Houston Creative Writing Program
2003 Calendars shortlisted for Foreword Poetry Book of the Year Award
1993 Nicholas Roerich Fellow, Wesleyan Writers Conference
Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams (Red Hen Press, 2010)
Shadow-Bird: From the Lost Poems. Dusie Kollektiv/Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009.
Calendars. Manchester, VT: Tupelo Press, 2003. [Shortlisted, Foreword Poetry Book of the Year Award for 2003]. Second edition with Audio CD and downloadable Readers' Companion, 2008.
Eve. Brownsville, OR: Story Line Press, 1997. [Finalist, National Poetry Series, Yale Series of Younger Poets, Brittingham Prize].
The Encyclopedia of Scotland. Caribou Press, 1982; Cambridge: Salt Publishing. 2005.
Poetics
A Poet’s Craft: The Making and Shaping of Poems. Forthcoming. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.
A Poet’s Ear: A Handbook of Meter and Form. Forthcoming. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.
The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self. Poets on Poetry Series, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Paperback edition with new preface, 2001.
Poetry Translation
The Complete Poetry and Prose of Louise Labé: A Bilingual Edition. Edited with Critical Introductions and Prose Translations by Deborah Lesko Baker and Poetry Translations by Annie Finch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Opera Libretti
Lily Among the Goddesses. Music by Deborah Drattell. Production in progress.
Marina. American Opera Projects, DR2 Theater, New York, 2003.
Anthologies
Multiformalisms: Postmodern Poetics of Form. Coeditor with Susan Schultz. WordTech Communications, 2008.
A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women. Brownsville, OR: Story Line Press, 1994. Reprinted by Wordtech Editions, 2007.
Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics. Coeditor with Maxine Kumin and Deborah Brown. University of Arkansas Press, 2005.
An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art. With Katherine Varnes. University of Michigan Press, 2002.
Carolyn Kizer: Perspectives on Her Life and Work. Coeditor with Johanna Keller and Candace McClelland. CavanKerry Press, 2000.
After New Formalism: Poets on Form, Narrative, and Tradition. Brownsville, OR: Story Line Press, 1999.
