Annie Finch > Quotes

“I feel the nights stretching away
thousands long behind the days
till they reach the darkness where
all of me is ancestor.”
― Annie Finch, Spells: New and Selected Poems

“Point your fire like a flower.”
― Annie Finch, Calendars

“Criticism is like politics: if you don't make your own you are by default accepting the status quo and are finally yourself responsible for whatever the status quo does to you.”
― Annie Finch, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self

“the next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern.”
― Annie Finch

“A Blessing on the Poets

Patient earth-digger, impatient fire-maker,
Hungry word-taker and roving sound-lover,
Sharer and saver, muser and acher,
You who are open to hide or uncover,
Time-keeper and –hater, wake-sleeper, sleep-waker;
May language’s language, the silence that lies
Under each word, move you over and over,
Turning you, wondering, back to surprise.”
― Annie Finch, Spells: New and Selected Poems

“After all, what is lyric but the seamless fusion of formal control and passionate conviction, in the service of the expression of personal experience?”
― Annie Finch, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self

“. . .criticism is to poetry as air is to a noise: it allows it to be heard; and even if we can't see it or feel it, it is there, shaping how we hear.”
― Annie Finch, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self

“In what I have come to name a Goddess-oriented spirituality, the attitude toward the body is opposite to that in the mainstream Judeo-Christian tradition. Dirt, blood, sex, soul, earth, death, animal are not destined to be transcended; as direct embodiments of the immanent sacred, they by extension are sacred. The traditions of Christianity, Buddhism, and other religions may tell us mystically that God is present in everything (“I draw water, I carry wood; that is my prayer,” says the monk in one of my earliest favorite stories,) but the notion of the Goddess actually constitutes a physical presence. Not only is the Goddess of the world; the world is her manifestation. Though the transcendent god and the immanent goddess are complementary sides of the same human spiritual coin, their resonances are fundamentally different.”
― Annie Finch, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self