Annie Finch

Annie Finch (born October 31, 1956) is an American poet, critic, editor, translator, playwright, and performer. Her poetry is known for its often incantatory use of rhythm, meter, and poetic form and for its themes of feminism and earth-based spirituality. Her books includeSpells: New and Selected Poems, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, A Poet's Craft, Calendars, and Among the Goddesses.

Annie Ridley Crane Finch was born in New Rochelle, New York, on October 31, 1956. Her mother was poet and doll artist Margaret Rockwell Finch and her father, Henry Leroy Finch Jr., was a pacifist leader and a scholar of philosophy whose works include three books on Ludwig Wittgenstein. Her great-aunt was the economist, politician, pacifist, and writer Jessie Wallace Hughan. Finch began writing poetry as a child. She was educated in public schools, then for two years at Oakwood Friends School and one year at Simon's Rock Early College, where she studied filmmaking and art history. At Yale University she studied poetry, anthropology, the history of the English language with Marie Borroff, and Versification with Penelope Laurans, graduating magna cum laude in 1979. After traveling in Africa with painter Alix Bacon, in the early eighties she settled in New York's East Village, where she worked at Natural History Magazine and self-published and performed the rhythmical experimental longpoemThe Encyclopedia of Scotland. In 1984, Finch encountered the work of Ntozake Shange in a bookstore and "recognized in her a soul-mother, someone else for whom poetry was performative, sacred, curative, indispensable, physical." She immediately applied to the University of Houston, where Shange was teaching, and earned her M.A. in creative writing there in 1985 with a thesis in Verse Drama directed by Shange. Finch earned a Ph.D in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1990, studying feminist theory with Adrienne Rich and pursuing a self-designed concentration in Versification under the supervision of Diane Middlebrook.

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. 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.; 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.

Finch's poems are collected in anthologies including the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Penguin Book of The Sonnet, Norton Anthology of World Poetry, and Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Her poems for public occasions include a Phi Beta Kappa poem for Yale University and the memorial poem for the September 11 attacks installed in New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine (accompanying the commemorative sculpture by Meredith Bergmann). She has written that she believes it is part of her calling as a poet to compose occasional poetry on topics of personal and cultural importance.

Finch's dedication to writing in meter and her role as a scholar, editor, and critic of poetic form led some reviewers of her first books to classify her poetry within the movement known as New Formalism. Dictionary of Literary Biography named her "one of the central figures in contemporary American poetry" for her role in the reclamation of poetic form. But reviewers soon noticed key differences between Finch's poetry and that of other new formalist poets. Henry Taylor, for example, claimed that Finch was not a typical new formalist because she did not focus on the realities of contemporary life, and C.L. Rawlins emphasized the incantatory use of form in Eve, writing, "Finch is a poet in her bones . . . . What she proves in Eve is that rhyme-and-meter isn't just a formerly fashionable sort of bondage, but a bioacoustic key to memory and emotion." Cindy Williams Gutierrez made a similar point in a review of a later book: “Finch is more shaman than formalist. She is keenly aware of the shape and sound of her poems. Whether in a chant, sonnet, ghazal, or even Billy Collins’ contrived paradelle, her skill is effortless: Form is merely the skin that allows her poems to breathe with ease.”

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." 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."

Reviewing Calendars, poet and Goddess scholar Patricia Monaghan was one of the first critics to articulate the intersection of formal poetics and spirituality in Finch's work, writing, "Annie Finch is a traditionalist. Not in the way the word is commonly used . . . but in a strange experimental way. An oracle, an ecstatic maenad: that is the kind of traditional poet Annie Finch is."

Finch's literary archive was purchased by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in 2016.