Annie Finch, Calendars (Tupelo Press)

Jack Foley

The word rhythm ("flow") is applied to all the arts and to nature; meter ("measure") is a more specific term applied only to poetry. Aristotle said, "Meter is sections of rhythm." Meter, like "time" in music, is exact rhythm.

The meter of a poem is determined by the kind of metrical "foot" and by the number of feet in a line. A metrical foot is a unit of measure made up of accented and unaccented syllables. --Jotted down in my childhood

						*

Trochee trips from long to short.
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow spondee stalks; strong foot! Yet ill able
Ever to come up with dactyl trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long--
With a leap and a bound the swift anapaests throng.
	Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Metrical Feet: Lesson for a Boy"

Recently, poet Annie Finch put out a call for "poems in any non-iambic meters--anapests, sapphics, trochees, cretics, dactyls, amphibrachs, alcaics, or others." Only a short time ago, such a call would have been greeted with bewildered questions about what exactly anapests, sapphics, trochees, cretics, dactyls, amphibrachs (my favorite), and alcaics were. At this point, I'm sure Finch has received a flood of submissions. Her classic book, The Ghost of Meter (1993), is no doubt partly responsible for this situation.

Annie Finch's work on metrics is so interesting, illuminating and complex that it threatens to eclipse her considerable accomplishments as a poet. On the other hand, it is scarcely possible to talk about her poetry without talking about her poetics, which functions as a matrix out of which the poems emerge. In another poet, a poem like "Caribou Kitchen" might pass as somewhat rhythmical free verse--especially since Finch provides us with no end rhymes to guide our understanding of the rhythm:

		Most things have vanished
		while we were talking
		(the dents in a pitcher
		gleam by the gas lamp),
		but nothing is lost
		(cups in far corners).
		Arms still lean
		over the table
		(shadows on the oilcloth).

Yet notice the number of dactylic feet (stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables) which occur in the poem: "Most things have," "gleam by the," "cups in far," "over the." The poem, like many others in Calendars, is structured around two "voices": 1/ one of the voices remarks in a somewhat abstract way, "Most things have vanished / while we were talking / but nothing is lost"; the other voice, in parentheses, notices only particulars ("dents in a pitcher," "the gas lamp," "cups in far corners"). The tension between these voices is to some degree resolved when the abstract voice illustrates its point by noting a particular--"Arms still lean / over the table"--while the other voice notes the "shadows" of those arms "on the oilcloth." Thesis/antithesis/synthesis.

The poem's title probably refers to a kitchen in the Cariboo Mountains, a part of the Rocky Mountains in southwest Canada. Yet "caribou"(reindeer) is by etymology "pawer," "scratcher," by virtue of the animal's digging in the snow to find food. We might dig a little as well.

In The Ghost of Meter Finch associates dactyls with "a feminized alternate system...something quieter, less established, more authentic"; with a "direct spirituality that is so quiet it is almost inaccessible"; with the "beautiful but inaccessible"; with "vagueness, night and the unspeakable"; with "the archetypal feminine rhythm of the sea" (this last, though prose, is a line that might be scanned). Finch opposes dactyls or triple rhythms to "iambic pentameter," the English heroic line--the meter of Shakespeare's plays. An "iamb" is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, a "rising" rhythm; "pentameter" indicates five of these per line. Iambic pentameter, she argues, connotes "traditional literary sanctity," "traditional patriarchal conventions," "the normal conventional human supports." She even goes so far as to refer to "the fatal stupefaction" of iambic pentameter. Finch's own work involves the search for "a [non-iambic] countermeter that is more oriented toward human experience." With this in mind, look at the poem again.

The first two lines are made up of a dactyl followed by a trochee (stressed syllable followed by unstressed)--a "falling" rhythm. The next line is similar, especially since "the" can be read as an "extra" syllable, and "gleam by the gas lamp" brings us back to a strict dactyl/trochee combination. The phase "but nothing is lost" concludes the thought and, appropriately, ends on a stressed syllable. (The "rising" rhythm here is qualified by the falling rhythm of the next line.) The surprise of the poem, the moment when it "turns," is in the next line, which barely resembles any other line in the poem. "Arms still lean" is made up of three stressed syllables--and, for a moment, from the point of view of rhythm, we have absolutely no idea where the poem may go.

Where it goes is back to beginning: "over the table" echoes the dactyl/trochee combination of the opening lines. The poem then ends with a perfectly regular trochaic tetrameter (four stresses). The "meaning" of the poem, the interplay between the two voices and its resolution, is reasonably straightforward. Yet, throughout the poem, the insistent play of the rhythm suggests something more. What are those dactyls, hinting of "vagueness, night and the unspeakable," doing there? What world beyond the safety of the kitchen do they suggest? Is it a world in which things are lost--as opposed to the kitchen? Is it a place in which wild animals like caribou forage for food? What does the word "shadows" have to do with the word "gleam"--or with the word "vanished"? Indeed, the concluding line, which I read as a perfectly regular trochaic tetrameter, might be read as still another dacytl/trochee combination if we observe the old-fashioned verse practice of eliding the "e" in "the" with the vowel which follows it. The line would then be "shadows on th'oilcloth"--clumsy perhaps but regular. Even without the elision--and despite the fact that it seems to be regular--the line oddly, and disturbingly, echoes the lines preceding it. The specific action of the poem and its meaning are one thing; but there is another area, equally meaningful but hidden, problematical, "dark"--one might call it "rhythm"--and this latter is perhaps the environing circumstance out of which the poem's specific oppositions arise. In the world of rhythm a line like "Most things have vanished" and a line like "cups in far corners" echo one another, though in the world of explicit meaning they tend towards opposition. One might say that Finch's poem simultaneously generates oppositions, attempts to resolve them--and attempts as well to move beyond them. *

A "calendar" marks time--indeed, it measures time and so has a "metrical" function--and Finch carefully dates the poems in Calendars. "Caribou Kitchen," written in 1970, is the earliest. "Watching the Oregon Whale" (2000), quoted here in full, is the most recent:

		A hard gray wave, her fin, walks out on the water
		that thickens to open and then parts open, around her.

		Measured by her delved water, I follow her fill
		into and out of green light in the depth she has spun

		through the twenty-six fathoms of her silent orison,
		then sink with her till she rises, lulled with the krill.

		Beads of salt spray stop me, like metal crying.
		Her cupped face breathes its spouts, like a jewel-wet prong.

		In a cormorant's barnacle path, I trail her, spun
		down through my life in the making of her difference,

		fixing my mouth, with the offerings of silence,
		on her dark whale-road where all green partings run,

		where ocean's hidden bodies twist fathoms around her,
		making her green-fed hunger grow fertile as water.

I don't know whether Finch has read D.H. Lawrence's famous poem, "Whales Weep Not!," but it's interesting to compare Lawrence's poem to "Watching the Oregon Whale." Not surprisingly, Lawrence focuses on mating, "dark rainbow bliss in the sea." These are some lines from "Whales Weep Not!":

		And they rock and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
		on the depths of the seven seas,
		and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
		nd in the tropics tremble they with love
		and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
		Then the great bull lies up against his bride
		in the blue deep of the sea
		as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life;
		and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of whale blood
		the long tip reaches strong, intense, like a maelstrom-tip, and comes to rest
		in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale's fathomless body.

		And over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking the wonder of whales
		the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and forth,
		keep passing archangels of bliss
		rom him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim....

Lawrence's poem is deeply phallic--"over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking the wonder of whales"--but its phallocentrism does not represent the male member as a weapon, which is the way the phallus is commonly represented in our culture: "This is my rifle / This is my gun / This is for fighting / This is for fun." (Ironically, these are strict dactylic/trochaic lines--very similar to Finch's.) In Lawrence, the phallus--if we disregard the opening word, it is imaged here in nearly exact dactylic heptameter (seven stresses)--is understood as a "bridge," a "rainbow," and it stands at the center of a communal vision. "Whales Weep Not!" is an image of an ancient community of whales, not of a single whale or even of a couple: "And they rock and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages."

Now, iambic pentameter has a powerful association not only with phallocentricity--with patriarchy--but with war. Unrhymed iambic pentameter--blank verse--was invented by the 16th- century poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, for the specific purpose of translating the Aeneid, a poem which begins with one of the most famous dactyls in Western poetry: Arma virumque cano ("Arms and the man I sing")--hardly the kind of dactyl Finch has in mind. Iambic pentameter was designed to be the English equivalent toVirgil's dactylic hexameters (themselves the equivalents to Homer's dactylic hexameters). It is part of a tradition of Western poetry which, again and again, is a profound celebration of war. The line I have just quoted from "Whales Weep Not" is strictly pentameter--fives stresses--but it is not iambic. Very likely influenced by Whitman's dactyls (as in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"), Lawrence is producing a perfectly regular pentameter line full of triple rhythms--in this case, anapests (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable). As Coleridge accurately points out in "Metrical Feet," you can "march" to iambic pentameter--even to a relatively peaceful version of it: "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day." Triple rhythms give us something closer to a dance--again as Coleridge suggests: "With a leap and a bound the swift anapests throng." (In The Ghost of Meter Finch describes the anapest as a "bridge" between the iamb and the dactyl: "anapestic rhythm" is "a rising rhythm like the iamb but a triple rhythm like the dactyl" and so "has a bridging function.")

Lawrence's rhythms are an attempt to convey the dance-like movements of the whales as he imagines them under the water. The line lengths vary ("in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale's fathomless body" is anapestic hexameter) but triple rhythms clearly predominate. Lawrence is imagining a patriarchy--but it is a patriarchy which makes love, not war. (There is a moment when the whales are threatened: then the "bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves in a ring...and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat"--but there is never any question of imperial conquest. Melville's Moby Dick is an obvious influence on Lawrence's poem--Lawrence wrote a book on Classic American Literature--but these whales are at some distance from Melville's "killer.")

Finch's poem begins with something she can see--she is "whale watching" in Oregon:

		A hard gray wave, her fin, walks out on the water
		that thickens to open and then parts open, around her.

The whale is definitely female, but there is just a hint of an androgynous phallic power in that "fin" ("a hard gray wave")--especially since "the water...thickens to open and then parts open." The theme of fertility--hinted at in "Caribou Kitchen"--is an important one here: the word "green" repeats ("green light," "green partings," "green-fed hunger") and the poem concludes with the phrase "fertile as water." For a poet as concerned with metrics as Finch is, the word "measured" is important as well. Finch herself is "measured" by the whale's "delved water"--the "depths" to which the creature is capable of descending--and suddenly finds herself following, led on by the beckoning of a "green light":

					I follow her fill
		into and out of green light in the depth she has spun

		through the twenty-six fathoms of her silent orison,
		then sink with her till she rises....

The whale's descent into the depths is understood as a "silent" prayer--an "orison." (Inevitably, one thinks of Hamlet's line to Ophelia: "Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered": in Shakespeare too, the word is associated with a female figure.) Suddenly the poet's revery is interrupted by "beads of salt spray," which awaken her to her separateness from the whale. In the very next moment, however, she becomes "a cormorant" and follows the whale in that form:

					I trail her, spun
		down through my life in the making of her difference,

		fixing my mouth, with the offerings of silence,
		on her dark whale-road....

Though Finch is acutely aware of her "difference" from the whale, she is nonetheless "spun / down through" her own life--and, interestingly, it is not her eyes but her "mouth" which is fixed "on [the] dark whale-road." The phrase "offerings of silence" deliberately echoes the phrase "silent orison": the poet's words--still not formed, still "silent"--and the whale's action of diving into the depths are both "offerings," "prayers." The poem closes with a vision of the depths of the sea,

		where ocean's hidden bodies twist fathoms around her,
		making her green-fed hunger grow fertile as water.

One thinks, as both parallel and contrast, "Full fathom five thy father lies...."

The whale's falling and rising, rising and falling is not unlike the spirals and repetitions of triple feet in a poet's line. It is not in the least like a "march." The poem's lines, however, are nonetheless pentameter--five stresses in each. Furthermore, the poem is--surprisingly--a sonnet, though it is arranged in couplets and oddly rhymed: aa bc cb dd ce ed aa--returning in a circular way to its beginning at the conclusion. In her introduction to A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women, Finch writes, "A number of contributors, sensitive to the gender implications of form, write in historically powerful poetic forms in order to transform them and claim some of their strength. Rita Dove, for example, describes her chosen form (the sonnet) as 'stultifying,' but hears voices in it that are 'sing[ing] in their chains.'" It is such a "transformed" sonnet that Finch has produced here--fourteen rhyming pentameter lines.

The "traditional" sonnet is a poem about love. Written by a man, it often addresses an idealized woman, sometimes referred to as a "goddess." In Finch's poem we are aware that the speaker is a woman--presumably Finch herself--and, if it is a love poem, it is only a love poem in a sense. In "Coherent Decentering: Towards a New Model of the Poetic Self" (published in Beyond Confession, ed. David Graham and Kate Sontag), Finch writes, "As a woman, I knew too much about how it feels to be something--nightingale, urn, woman--that is an object in other people's eyes." As a woman, Finch might well be the object of a male sonnet. Here, she is turning the tables--but only to a degree. Unlike Elizabeth Barrett Browning--who wrote sonnets to her husband--Finch is writing a sonnet to a creature. Moreover, the creature is not seen--as it is in Lawrence's poem--as part of a community but as an isolated figure, not unlike the "solitary" bird to which Whitman addresses "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." The poet and the object the poet sees become the poles of the poem, and the poem is entirely about their interaction and their problematical similarity/dissimilarity. What does the whale, brilliantly alive in "the archetypal feminine rhythm of the sea," signify?

In "Poetry and the Goddess," a fascinating, still unpublished paper, Finch writes that "In Goddess-oriented spirituality, the attitude towards the body is the opposite to that in mainstream Judeo-Christianity: dirt, blood, sex, soul, earth, death, animal are not to be transcended but are direct embodiments of the immanent Goddess":

In a poetics of thea-logy as opposed to theology, connections of shape and identity within and between poems are not accidental or annoying, but crucial. For one thing, a strong skeleton of pattern and coherence, from this perspective, gives more freedom for the self to lose its egoistic identity.

It is precisely in the area of form that "the self" loses "its egoistic identity" and becomes, as Finch puts it in "Coherent Decentering," a "decentered self." On the level of content, "Watching the Oregon Whale" deliberately maintains the distance between the poet and the whale. We never lose the sense of the pronoun "I"--which remains separate from the "she/her" of the whale. But as mythologized entity--as "embodiment of the immanent Goddess"--the whale-as-deity includes the poet, who, looking to find the "goddess within," finds it "without," in a whale. An "orison"--a prayer--is something which is repeated over and over again for centuries in the same form and often in the same place. So too a formal poem recognizes the fact that others have spoken in this particular way. Though the poet's eyes keep her at a distance from the whale, her mouth "fixes" itself on the "dark whale-road." In the speaking of a "traditional" form the poet merges with others. (Interestingly, the poem ends with an "oral" image: "her green-fed hunger." 3/ Finch often writes of the poem's "body": here we have "where ocean's hidden bodies twist fathoms around her." It is the only moment in the poem where we are given a sense of the whale's community.)

Annie Finch is rightly associated with formalism. But she insists on an enormous amount of freedom within her formalism: her lines are rarely exactly the same. The opening line of "Watching the Oregon Whale" begins with three iambics--"A hard gray wave, her fin." That is followed by a single stress ("walks") and then a dactyl ("out on the") and a trochee ("water"). The line can also be read as four iambics and an anapest, with an extra unstressed syllable, but Finch's emphasis on dactyls gives them a special character in her work, and anapests have a tendency to turn into their opposite: dactyls. Certainly the poem is filled with triple rhythms ("In a cormorant's barnacle path, I trail her, spun," "then sink with her till she rises, lulled with the krill"). Whatever the interplay of the various feet--Finch favors "metrical diversity" not only among poems but within them 2/--the poem is definitely "non-iambic," and the concluding line settles into a predominantly dactylic form: dactyl, trochee, dactyl, dactyl, trochee. "Meter," Finch writes in A Formal Feeling Comes,

led me into--and out of--my own labyrinths [one thinks of the whale and the ocean depths in "Watching the Oregon Whale"] when I could no longer "think of anything to say" in free verse. I was raised to feel that form was illicit, and experiments in form still feel to me like forays into the outlawed wilderness. Because of the excitement this generates, and because of the absorbing challenges of formal poetic craft, communion with form can distract me, so that the poem comes out by itself.

Indeed, if on the one hand Finch insists upon "dactylic rhythm as an alternative to [iambic] pentameter," on the other hand she recognizes "the persistent power of the pentameter to order experience." In her important essay on T.S. Eliot in The Ghost of Meter she offers a "reconciliation" between dactyls and iambics. Finch is a formalist who has been through the experience of free verse and who is trying to redefine "traditional" forms in a way which will allow her to function in what amounts to an unprecedented fashion. Her mind has a strong "oppositional" cast--a very "Western," even "patriarchal" trait--which leads her to think in terms of antitheses or "opposing forces," as she says in the paradoxically-titled "Coherent Decentering": iamb vs. dactyl, male vs. female forms, self vs. no-self. At the same time, however, she writes in that same essay of her fervent belief in "the falseness and unnecessariness of the subject-object distinction," a distinction which in fact she affirms as much as she denies. In "Coherent Decentering," the poet's father tells her,

That idea you have of being separate from the world is a habit. It's just an illusion! It's a way you have of thinking about experience, and it gets in the way of true experience. It's not necessary for the self to be separate. 4/

Finch comments, "Already I knew he was right, because of my quiet hours in nature I had felt the consciousness of a rock, a berry, a leaf just as I felt my own consciousness...The more I thought about these themes, the more I found myself writing poems that turn object into subject...and poems that turn subject into object...." Both subject and object may be transcended in the realm of "rhythm" and metrics--rhythm and metrics can be seen as the primary materia out of which various subjects and objects emerge--but Finch has a tendency to identify her rhythm and metrics with "a feminized alternate system...something quieter, less established, more authentic" (my italics), so rhythm and metrics become part of a polarization, an attempt to avoid iambic pentameter. At other times, of course, rhythm is understood, like the ocean itself, as the "mother" of everything, including iambic pentameter. "The Goddess is not simply present in everything," Finch writes in "Poetry and the Goddess," The Goddess is everything." It is out of such fruitful tensions, such "opposing forces"--"fertile as water"--that her poems arise.

Indeed, the poems can be seen, like the whale's appearance and disappearance, as extraordinarily complex balancing acts. Finch writes that "dactylic passages...carry compelling connotations of the unconscious, the body, female energy, and the power of nature" ("Dactylic Meter: A Many-Sounding Sea," An Exaltation of Forms--again associating the dactyl with the ocean), but she also writes of "the irrationality and loss of control traditionally associated with triple meters" (The Ghost of Meter). Finch is not only using meter, she is mythologizing it. The words "dactyl" and "Goddess" are more or less interchangeable ways of naming a power which seems to reside at the very center of this poet's consciousness, and her essay, "Coherent Decentering" is an attempt to deal with both the positive and negative aspects of that power. The essay is haunted by "the incoherent worldview that is a sine qua non of much contemporary avant-garde poetics." Through "syntactic coherence," Finch hopes to achieve a "counterpoise of energies that incorporates, as all balance does, opposing forces: center and circumference (to use Dickinson's terms), coherence and incoherence, boundary and core." In this passage Finch has managed to neutralize the charged word "incoherence" by placing it in a list which also includes a generalizing statement about "balance," the words "coherence," "boundary," and "core," and a literary reference to a revered precursor. But fears are not to be quelled so easily, and "silence" is one of the most frequently repeated words in Calendars. The penultimate poem of the book concludes (in free verse),

       		Something's waiting to run out on us.
      		The mist
      		and creak
       		of wines is due
       		when we run out of dusk.

If Finch is heir to the modernist perception of multiplicity-- "the multiplicity of patterned and formal structures," "the complex fertility and multiply-detailed generosity of the Earth" ("Poetry and the Goddess")--she is also heir to modernist anxieties (explicit in both Pound and Eliot) that the work fails to "cohere," that it is a disunity, a madness expressing "irrationality and loss of control." Behind such fears is the fear that the poet's self, like the work, also fails to "cohere." "The 'I' is not unified," she writes in "Coherent Decentering."

Finch insists in "Poetry and the Goddess" that "my...motivation for writing in form...is a positive force," but her conception of form clearly has a considerable dark side. The issue is complicated by the poet's own strong tendency to see things in "oppositional" rather than "multiple" terms. Though her essay on "T.S. Eliot and the Metrical Crisis of the Early Twentieth Century" is an attempt to show the ultimate compatibility of iambic pentameter and "dactylic rhythm," she is acutely aware that "the harmony of coexisting meters and voices pulls apart," and the overall impression left by The Ghost of Meter is not one of harmony but of opposition. Indeed, the book postulates a history in which one poetic foot, the dactyl, is constantly at war with another foot, the iamb (particularly in its pentameter form). Where is "the multiplicity of patterned and formal structures" in this scheme? I am not saying that Finch is being in any way hypocritical or even self-deceiving. It is precisely her powerful desire to remain open to her own consciousness that involves her in so much complexity, contradiction, and richness of perception. *

Annie Finch suggests, accurately and often brilliantly, that triple rhythms are associated with "the feminine," and her perception brings her to a number of very interesting readings of male poets. Nowhere does she mention, however, that triple rhythm is also explicitly (and widely) associated with comic verse. It isn't difficult to find examples:

      	 	When you're lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose 
			is taboo'd by anxiety,
       		I conceive you may use any language you choose to 	indulge 
       			in, without impropriety;
      	 	For your brain is on fire--the bedclothes conspire of usual 	slumber 
       		to plunder you:
       		First your counterpane goes, and uncovers your toes, and your
       			sheet slips demurely from under you.
				--W.S. Gilbert, "Nightmare"

       					*

       		"What do you paint, when you paint a wall?"
				Said John D.'s grandson Nelson.
       		"Do you paint just anything there at all?
       		"Will there be any doves, or a tree in fall?
       		"Or a hunting scene, like an English hall?"
			"I paint what I see," said Rivera.
				E.B. White, "I Paint What I See"

       					*

       		Oh to be Machiavellian, oh to be unscrupulous, oh, to be glib!
       		Oh to be ever prepared with a plausible fib!
				Ogden Nash, "Golly, How Truth Will Out"


       		Even
       		When I was a windy boy and a bit
       		And the black spit of the chapel fold,
       		(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),
       		I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,
       		The rude owl cried like a telltale tit,
       		I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled
       		Ninepin down on the donkeys' common,
       		And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed
       		Whoever I would with my wicked eyes....
				Dylan Thomas, "Lament"--

       		Never and never, my girl riding far and near
       		In the land of the hearthstone tales, and spelled asleep,
       		Fear or believe that the wolf in a sheepwhite hood
       		Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap,
							My dear, my dear,
       		Out of a lair in the flocked leaves in the dew dipped 	year
       		To eat your heart in the house in the rosy wood.
				("In Country Sleep")

Annie Finch is her own person, but her work reminds me a little of the work of Adelaide Crapsey, an American poet who died of tuberculosis in 1914 at the age of thirty-six. At her death, Crapsey had completed two-thirds of her Analysis of English Metrics, described by Jean Webster in the 1915 Vassar Miscellany as "an exhaustive scientific thesis relating to accent...which, years before, she had planned to accomplish as her serious life work":

Though her mind was intensely preoccupied with the technical and analytical aspects of prosody, still the creative, artistic side of her nature was so spontaneously alive, that she accomplished a very considerable volume of original poetry--almost as a by-product of her study in metrics.

Finch's poetry is no "by-product of her study in metrics," but one senses in her work the spirit of such half-forgotten, fiercely non-modernist writers as Crapsey or Sara Teasdale. These lines, by Crapsey--the inventor of the cinquain--sound eerily like Finch:

       		GRAIN FIELD

       		Scarlet the poppies
       		Blue the corn-flowers,
       		Golden the wheat.
       		Gold for The Eternal:
       		Blue for Our Lady:
       		Red for the five
       		Wounds of her Son.

Jesus the "Son" is present here, but God the Father--except for a vague reference to "The Eternal," an elided phrase--is not, and the "Lady" of Crapsey's imagination is deeply connected, like Finch's Goddess, to the earth: poppies, cornflowers, wheat. "The Goddess," writes Finch, "is not simply present in everything. The Goddess is everything...she is the world." (Finch speaks, amusingly if extravagantly, of "free verse monotheism.") Like Finch's, Crapsey's poem is full of dactyls, triple rhythms, feminine endings, with each of the concluding lines resolving itself in a single stressed syllable. Like Finch, Crapsey is Goddess-based and decidedly non-iambic.

Annie Finch is perhaps the revenge of writers like Adelaide Crapsey. One hears them both with fascination and renewed interest. "The decentered self is like the head of Medusa," writes Finch in "Coherent Decentering": "If you try to look at it directly, you will turn to stone and be thrown right back into the egotistical Self. By contrast, coherent decentering uses language's common syntactic capacities to create the experience of the decentered self for the reader, rather than depicting it."

Filled with "opposing forces"--and coherently incoherent--Annie Finch's poetry seduces and changes.

1. In "Coherent Decentering: Towards a New Model of the Poetic Self," Finch writes that "if we look closely we are not likely to perceive our selves as discrete entities. I am aware that my own selfhood, let alone the self voicing my poems, is not a clear and simple unit separate from everything else in the world. Our 'Selves,' insofar as they seem to exist at all, are more likely to come to our awareness as a shifting progression of moods and thoughts, contingent on circumstance, culture, and context, open to many interpretations." Further on, she writes of being "bewildered by the apparent need to act as a coherent central lyric Self to write poems" and comments that "the 'I' is not unified." "[T]he decentered, multiple point of view...can thrive in the 'mechanisms' of syntactic coherence," however:

The coherent methods of decentering the lyric Self that I have explored include syntactic density and innuendo; lexical and metaphorical subtext; and the questioning of "objects" and use of multiple speakers. Most of all I have found my tools in the defamiliarizing repetition of conspicuous word and sound patters, or "form." When I began to write in patterns, I found a nonverbal vocabulary of coherent decentering and vatic containment that could channel the balance of energy and form, chaos and pattern I felt in nature and in language...As a poet, I find syntactic coherence a key element of the beauty and strength of the language. And as a postmodern woman, I want to honor the core of my experience as a self that I know is not a self....Much more precious to me than aleatory dynamics or primary process, now, is the counterpoise of energies that incorporates, as all balance does, opposing forces: center and circumference (to use Dickinson's terms), coherence and incoherence, boundary and core.

2. "Metrical Diversity: A Defense of the Non-Iambic Meters" is the title of an essay Finch published in a book she edited, After New Formalism: Poets on Form, Narrative, and Tradition. In the essay she writes, "The long hegemony of free verse has finally cleared our ears of the stifling and artificial associations that haunted metrical verse, particularly non-iambic verse, at the beginning of our century. The field is, in a sense, clearer for metrical verse, especially non- iambic verse, than it has been for many generations." For all her interest in form--indeed, because of it--Finch takes to heart Pound's famous advice (quoted in The Ghost of Meter) "to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome." She asserts that "The tension between conflicting meters, a source of beauty and excitement, would disappear without metrical diversity."

3. Cf. "You reach through your mouth to find me" in "Over Dark Arches," "Here is his open mouth" in "Elegy For My Father," and "Now the worshipping savage cathedral our mouths make will lace / death and its food" in "Wild Yeast." The words "seed" and "dark" haunt the book, as does the idea of water; there are also many suggestions of the womb--caverns ("Meeting Mammoth Cave"), for example. The ocean--often present--is also a womb . "Over Dark Arches" is a dialogue between a mother and her breast-feeding child. Such clusters suggest an attempt to invoke the archetypal mother--particularly the mother as goddess. Persephone appears explicitly in the title poem, but "seed," "dark," and womb all suggest her presence.

4. Finch's "Elegy For My Father" is one of the most beautiful poems in Calendars--a rich, gorgeous meditation on death:

       Here is his open mouth. Silence is here
       like one more new question that he will not answer.

Jack Foley