It's Amphibrach Season: Annie Finch's Calendars
Annie Finch. Calendars. Dorset, VT: Tupelo Press, 2003. 80 pp. 422.95 Cloth/$14.95 paper.
Published in Blue Mesa Review, spring, 2005. Used with permission.
Annie Finch's multiple gifts as poet, editor, scholar, critic, teacher, and translator
have, over the past decade, enabled her to contribute deftly and generously to various communities in contemporary American poetics. One of her edited anthologies, A Formal Feeling Comes (1994), draws much-needed attention to the contemporary women formalists, and her critical study, The Ghost of Meter (1993, 2001), has transformed the way many of us read not only Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman but also twentieth-century free-verse poetry. A scholar and writer of metrical and other varieties of formal poetry, she found herself "uncomfortable" with the "reactionary" aura that surrounded the rise of "new formalism" in the 1990s, and her critical anthology After New Formalism refreshed the movementÂ's goals and expanded its scope (xi). A feminist, she has lately extended research in American womenÂ's poetic traditions to examine and defend some of the nineteenth and twentieth century popular poets and "poetesses," long-despised for sentimentality by most literary feminists and patriarchs alike ("The Poetess Tradition").
Finch's second major poetry book, Calendars, showcases primarily her innovative work from the late 1990s, although the collection also includes older poems from the 1980s and one from 1970. In the back of the book, Finch meticulously lists when each poem was "substantially completed," and the list itself is somewhat like a poem, reflecting on the book's genesis. This is a book of life seasons, organized loosely around the Celtic or Wiccan calendar. Poems celebrating Winter Solstice, Imbolc, Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice, and Lammas serve as keystones for each section; together they establish a theme of cyclical time. Within this framework, the poems vary in theme and style. Many participate in feminist poetic and critical conversations concerning women's creative and procreative authority. In Calendars, a woman's cycles, her lovers, her pregnancies, her losses, her relationship with her own parents, and her muses are interrelated. Some poems are set in the domain of myth; others, like "Elegy for My Father" or "Epithalamium," appear to be written for or inspired by contemporary occasions. All of the poems, however, can be classified as "formal." For the reader, the challenge to determine what forms, and how they work, is one of the book's many charms.
Calendars opens with a splash. The first poem, "Landing under water, I see roots," with its compressed, short lines, grammatical ambiguity, and signature dashes, initially recalls Emily Dickinson. Yet when the poem is read (preferably aloud), its trochaic movement throws Dickinson into reverse. Or, as the poem's imagery suggests, the rhythm conjures a shimmering mirror image of Dickinson's ballad stanza:
All the things we hide in water
hoping we won't see them go
(forests growing under water
press against the ones we know)
The imagery and cryptic potential energy reflect other foremothers like Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, matriarchs of contemporary women poets' collective unconscious.
The trochees, however, add some surprising company to the usual feminist suspects. The poem concludes:
and they might have gone on growing
and they might now breathe above
everything I speak of sowing
(everything I try to love).
After first reading this poem and carrying it around with me for a little while, I found another matriarch, riding up the trochees from my own childhood depths:
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Can Longfellow's sentimental presentation of a Native American woman be reconciled with the political awareness of Rich and Lorde, and the tensions of Dickinson? No. But the body remembers: no matter how old-fashioned Longfellow's themes may be, his trochees and dactyls were read aloud, recited, parodied, carried in the blood, carried for a lifetime, by generations of American poetry lovers. Metrical poetry's capacity to lodge itself deep in the memory in the body of the mind is partly what formalists seek to restore to contemporary literature. I haven't just read "Landing under water," I know it. How often can we recite, from memory, poems from contemporary collections?
Many poems in Calendars illustrate Finch's recent poetic and scholarly explorations of what she calls "non-iambic meters," which include trochees, anapests, dactyls, and falling rhythm, as well as less-familiar feet like amphibrachs. Trying to scan the triple meters, I often felt like the bumpkin at a fancy dinner party, surrounded by unfamiliar cutlery and not sure which implement to use. For instance, I read "A Carol for Carolyn" as anapestic: the first line, "I dreamed of a poet who gave me a whale," sounds to me like "The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow." Then I discovered, from one of Finch's interviews, that she had used amphibrachs ("Giving Back to the World"). Chagrined, I discovered three amphibrachs standing at each stanza's closing:
I dream of a poet who gave me a whale
that shadowed clear pools through the kelp-making shade.
When beached sea-foam dried on the rocks, it would sail
down currents that gathered to pool and cascade
with turbulent order.
She brims with transparent water
as mother and poet and daughter.
The first poems in Calendars announce what appear to be experiments with parentheses similar to those of Ann Lauterbach's in "Nest." Finch's experiments weave through the entire collection. Some parentheses enclose; others release; still others support the poem's theme graphically, as in "Moon":
Then are you the dense everywhere that moves,
the dark matter they haven't yet walked through?
(No, I'm not. I'm just the shining sun,
sometimes covered up by the darkness).
Although Finch's work with triple and other non-iambic meters should benefit all contemporary poets, it has important implications for feminist formalists. One of Finch's contributions in The Ghost of Meter is her theory of the "metrical code." For Finch, a metrical pattern can "function like a language" in a poem, and its meaning can extend beyond the line, beyond the poem, and even beyond the poet to the culture in which he or she writes (12). Finch argues that in the work of Emily Dickinson, iambic pentameter functions as a metrical code for poetic and cultural conventions we now recognize as "patriarchal." Dickinson typically resists those conventions through her use of ballad stanzas; when she does use iambic pentameter, it signals a struggle with religious or other forms of patriarchal authority (22).
Finch's interest in "non-iambic meters" aligns with those of other feminist writers who are exploring an alternative, woman-centered poetic through Sapphic stanzas, which carry a metrical code of poetic authority for a female lyric voice. Lately, women's poetry seems to have an overflow of clamoring Sapphic stanzas. As if in response, Finch's variations on trochaic rhythms and triple meters in Calendars enrich the non-iambic repertoire.
One of Finch's epigraphs comes from Louise Bogan: "No woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart." The heart of this book, the title poem, "Calendars," is a chant for four voices: Demeter, Persephone, Hades, and a chorus. Unlike other contemporary re-workings of the myth by (among others) Rita Dove, Kathleen Raine, and Carolyn Kizer, Finch's version does not present a singular, distinctive voice from either Demeter or Persephone. Even Hades, who appeals plaintively to Persephone, is echoed by Demeter. The poem's boundaries are unclear: lines from an earlier poem echo in the chorus. If I am reading the close of the poem correctly, the voices of Demeter (left margin), Persephone (center), and Hades (right, in italics) create a braid, as the three are bound in relationship:
On damp limestone, a violet curling
my lover, when you riddle with me
the hard, the intricate dark.
Rack me with courage, spring
come kill me, flowers;
if we are shadows, come;
make me our shadows
as I reach for flowers.
Part of the chorus's chant"Now you are uncurled and cover our eyes / with the edge of winter sky, / leaning over us in icy stars"repeats lines from the poem "Winter Solstice Chant," the keystone for the section entitled "Name." This section contains poems of death, loss, grief, and barrenness and of other life seasons that, in our culture, remain nameless. In the haunting "Forest-Falling," a maternal voice mourns her unborn. The most devastating poem, "Without a Bird," uses dimeter (Demeter?) to stall the reader in negation, in the sound of no birds singing:
This is a dawn
without a sun
(that has no birds)
This is a dawn
that will not part
(that will not sing)
The cyclical time of "Calendars," however, also promises the return of fertility, which occurs in the triumphant section "Two Bodies," which includes poems of love, pregnancy, and birth. An important poem in this section is "Churching," which recalls the practice, in some Christian churches, of requiring women to stay away from church for some time after childbirth. A ceremony called the "Churching of Women" was designed to cleanse them so that they may re-enter the church. Finch's poem speaks to a larger poetic conversation on feminist spirituality and religious revision in the work of Alicia Ostriker, Lucille Clifton, and Eleanor Wilner. Finch's speaker, a woman who has just given birth to a son, angrily defies the judgment that she is unclean:
I will not go into your church
(scalloped by moons)
I stay here looking at my own blood
At the end of the poem, Finch twists and redeems the meaning of "churching":
The church is in me, the church of the tall trees.
We should rejoice that Annie Finch has given us poems to be read aloud, and often. Calendars should not be perused quietly and alone, then placed on a shelf and forgotten. Formalists and feminists will find much to provoke discussion, and plain old-fashioned poetry lovers will find much to admire. The question of how metrical code works in the poems could absorb an entire reading group or seminar; "Elegy" and "Epithalamium" can be shared by anyone who has mourned a parent or cheered a wedding couple. Meanwhile, I've got to get a grip on that amphibrach.
D'Arcy Randall
The University of Texas at Austin
D'Arcy Randall has published poetry, memoirs, and essays in Quarterly West, Nimrod, Southerly, Malahat Review, and other journals in the US and Australia. She is a founding editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and has received a number of awards, including Michener Fellowships and the Roy Crane Award for Creativity in the Arts from the University of Texas at Austin, where she now teaches.
References
Finch, Annie, ed. A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women.
(Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 1994).
__________, ed. After New Formalism. (Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 1999).
__________. The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse.
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993, 2001).
__________. "Giving Back to the World its Lost Heart." Interview with R. S. Gwynn.
Able Muse. Winter, 2002.
http://www.ablemuse.com/interview/a-finch-6.htm