The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells

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Poets, Witches & other Magical Beings who identify as women or gender-noncomforming and Heed this call are invited to weave your voice and vision into our cannily cunning, rhythmically inspired, wildly wise community! Finch, Annie Finch, "Stepping on the Edge of My Doubting," Thank You, Teacher: Grateful Students Tell the Stories of the Teachers Who Changed Their Lives, New World Library, 2016, p.252

With all that in mind, and with Halloween on the horizon, this month’s Get Creative feature shares poem puzzler activities that use witchy words to spark creepily creative writing. Sharp-witted, trenchant and bold, Rebecca Tamás’ WITCH constellates the characteristics of instinctual life by pulling sexuality into the realm of the archetypal, where we are challenged to face witch qualities within our own unconscious. By targeting the body, these stunning poems awaken primordial parts of our being, releasing energy that had been mobilized towards repression, so that we become free to taste the radical eroticism of volcanic God-speaking feelings. These spells and hexes reanimate historical female silence, demanding that we listen to all that had been kept latent for so long. Can we accept the witch — the female within ourselves — as she is, without trying to make her conform to our expectations? To do so, we would have to adjust our thinking instead of forcing adjustment in the Other—we would have to change ourselves. WITCH leads the way.

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Annie’s numerous books on meter and poetic form for poets, scholars, and poetry lovers include A Poet’s Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, and edited or coedited anthologies including An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets on the Diversity of Their Art, A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women, After New Formalism: Poets on Form and Narrative, Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetry, Multiformalisms: Postmodern Poetics of Form, Villanelles, and Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters. Her critical and poetic work has received the Arlt Prize for Literary Criticism, the Sarasvati Award for Poetry, and the Robert Fitzgerald Award for lifetime contribution to the art and craft of Versification. Tamás explores the figure of the witch and her relationship to gender and the state in a way that feels strikingly true to the political and personal malaises of twenty-first-century life. [...] Is it too cheesy to say that I’m spellbound? WOLFSONG ~ Live from the Mayo Street Arts center in Portland, Maine". Archived from the original on 2021-12-12 . Retrieved Oct 26, 2019– via www.youtube.com. for investigation for intersection for fence for phallus for trunk for the thing the thing the thing one solar

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. [8] 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.; [9] 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.As heretical as it is cerebral, WITCH rages ferociously through the occult to the obscene. From hexes on patriarchy to a spell for UN resolutions, Tamás upturns the world as we know it into “a small bright filthy song”. A fierce new voice, “red and pulsing”, which refuses to be silenced. I wanted to write a book of a poetry that would somehow interrogate or sound out silenced and repressed female history – the thousands of years of lived experience that we have almost no record of,” says Tamás. “For me, the witch represents all of that repressed agency … which constantly bubbles up to the surface [in] an unsettling vision of female power, female sexuality, female independence.”

Born near New York City on Halloween 1956, of Celtic and Norse lineage, Annie Finch grew up absorbing the traditions of earth-centered spirituality and poetic rhythm. As a Yale undergraduate, she studied scansion and meter with Penelope Laurans, then went on to earn an MA in creative writing-poetry (University of Houston), writing verse drama under the supervision of Ntozake Shange. In 1990 she earned a Ph.D from Stanford in English Language and Literature, the first doctoral student there with a Concentration on Meter and Versification. Her dissertation, which first set forth her ideas about meter and meaning, was published as The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse (University of Michigan Press, 1993).

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Finch, Annie. The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse (University of Michigan Press, 1994, pp. 13-30 Over the past decade, Annie has woven her lifelong experience as poet, feminist spiritual seeker, scholar, and teacher into the uniquely original system of Poetry Witchery, a self-awareness practice of rhythmical writing that is equally useful to creative writers and seekers of self-transformation. Poetry Witchery uses rhythmical journaling based in Annie's deep experience with the healing powers of meters to connect participants with hidden aspects of our wills, minds, bodies, hearts, and spirits. This method of self-exploration has proven a useful tool for women in transition, yoga practitioners, visual artists, spiritual seekers, and many others as well as, of course, poets and other creative writers. The Sentimental Poetess in the World: Metaphor and Subjectivity in Lydia Sigourney's Nature Poetry, Legacy Vol. 5, No. 2 (Fall 1988), pp. 3-18 Camille Ralphs’ Malkin is a vivid collection of poems about the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612. Illustrated with woodcut-style drawings by Emma Wright. Shortlisted for the 2016 Michael Marks Award. The Witch” reading comprehension is perfect for learning in a classroom, or from home, the conversations that are sparked from interesting literature like this are inevitable no matter where your students are learning. Other Spooky Resources