from
SILLIMAN'S BLOG
(ronsilliman.blogspot.com)

Ron Silliman
Sunday, October 13, 2002
 
On my desk is a manuscript for a book entitled Calendars by Annie Finch that Tupelo Press will be printing sometime soon. Itís a marvelous manuscript by a poet who could easily be taken for one of the New Formalists, in the Timothy Steele vein, but who is also, I would argue, a formalist in the tradition, say, of Bernadette Mayer & Lee Ann Brown. Which is to say: she gets it. Her commitment is to the language, even as the strategies she deploys are most often taken from oldest playbook there is. At times, as in the poem "Moon," her work reminds me of H.D.ís sense of timing, so very deliberate & ordered:
 
Then are you the dense everywhere that  moves,
the dark matter they havenít yet walked  through?

(No, Iím not, Iím just the shining sun,
sometimes covered up by the darkness.)

But in your beauty ­ yes, I know you see ­
There is no covering, no constant light.

That supplemental yes in the last couplet, the fact that the final syllable in each line articulates a phonemic openness, except for the last, even the use of the capital letter at the start of the final line (but not in the final line of the other stanzas), all demonstrate a control over the materials at hand that is extraordinary. That yes functions as though it were a sigh, modulating & redirecting  the timing of the work away from dialog & toward conclusion. Itís a device that Iíve often been suspicious of ­ Josephine Miles, another traditionalist whose work I take seriously, too often incorporated such asides just to even out meter or complete an end-rhyme. Finch uses it here to halt the flow of the text, to gather the language up into an expression of breath. It is no accident that every word in that aside uses exactly one syllable** or that there are no hard consonants there ­ the only moment in this six-line text where either of these conditions applies. I love it when someone can demonstrate such mastery in such a compact terrain.
 
I want to quote one other short poem here, my favorite, because of the way in which it blends an over-the-top sense of languageís lushness with a tone so soft it all but whispers. Itís called "Butterfly Lullaby."
 
My wild indigo dusky wing
my mottled, broad-wing skipper,
a sleepy, dreamy dusty wing,
flying through my night.

My northern, southern, cloudy wing,
my spring azure, my crescent pearl,
a silver-spotted, sweet question mark,
sleeping in my sky.

A tiger swallowtail, harvester,
moving through my hours,
an eyed brown in the redwing dark,
wrapped softly in my words.
 
We havenít had a poet so capable of combining control & excess since the young Robert Duncan.

** Shades again of H.D. and even of Lew Welch
 

Copyright©2006 Annie Finch