Poetry Witchery Community
"Witchcraft has not a pedigree, 'Tis early as our breath." Emily Dickinson
Welcome to Poetry Witchery Community
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Meter, Magic, Craft, and Rhythm
Poetry Witchery Community brings together women & gender-nonconforming poets, poetry lovers, and spiritual seekers from around the world to practice poetry, meter, and magic. While learning the magical craft of meter, we weave webs of connection and empowerment, exploring the rhythmic languages of poetry and life so we can learn to craft our lives and words in more joyfully powerful ways.
—Annie Finch (she/e/they)
Poet, Writer, Founder of Poetry Witchery Community
Poetry Witchery is . . .
- A passionate space where liberation, creativity, diversity, and truth are paramount and the First Law of Witchcraft is honored: “if it harms none, do as you will”
- A learning community where women and gender nonconforming people can join Meter Magic Spiral to gain amazing tools for poetry, meter, scansion--and the powers of ritual and self-transformation they carry!
- A grounding, strengthening, gifting space where we help, teach, and share with each other throughout the five directions of Will, Mind, Body, Heart, and Spirit
- An accepting space for all who identify as women or gender-nonconforming, and a kind, re-membering space where truthful, challenging conversations safely hark to the Second Law of Witchcraft: “always assume the other person is doing their best”
- A magical space where Craft is honored as sacred, where Grammar dis-covers our Glamour, where skill and attention become the roots of art and action, and Webs of wise new Ways spin stronger . . .
Poets, Witches & other Magical Beings who Heed this call are invited to weave your voice and vision into our cannily cunning, rhythmically inspired, wildly wise community!
WELCOME TO POETRY WITCHERY!
Poetry Witchery is a private international online community offered free of charge to all women and gender nonconforming people who love magic and/or poetry. Community members have access to a beautiful community of magical women and gender nonconformng people, and are eligible to join our central learning space, the Meter Magic Spiral.
ABOUT METER MAGIC SPIRAL
In Meter Magic Spiral, poets, witches, and everyone in between enchant and enrich our lives and words through practicing the art and craft of poetic Meter. The Spiral evokes matriarchal community through our exclusively women and gender-nonconforming membership; it focuses on Metrical Diversity rather than privileging one meter; and it teaches holistically through a cyclical dance combining creative writing and scansion. The Spiral is non-hierarchical and each gathering is open to all. Founder Annie Finch and all the Spiralers are available in the Spiral Discussion or in our private Chat to answer questions or offer guidance. You are warmly, joyfully invited to join the Magic! Come learn Meter as it is meant to be learned!
To join PWC, if you are a woman or gender-nonconforming, click "Request to Join" above.
Once you have joined, you will see the link to join Meter Magic Spiral in the menu at left.
Hope to Spiral with you soon!
Love,
Annie
Note to Other Genders:
While Poetry Witch Community is open only to women and gender nonconforming people, visitors of all genders are invited to subscribe to my Poetry Witchery Spellsletter; to shop at Poetry Witch Bookshop and Poetry Witch Press; to explore my books and videos, and to watch my performances through Poetry Witch Ritual Theater. I would love to meet you there!
ABOUT ANNIE
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).
Since then, Annie has published six books of metrically diverse poetry including Eve (finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets), Calendars (finalist for the National Poetry Series, shortlisted for the Foreword Book of the Year Award), Among the Goddesses (awarded the Sarasvati Award for Poetry), Spells: New and Selected Poems, and The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Paris Review, and The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Her musical collaborations, verse dramas, ritual poetry performances, and opera libretto have been produced at venues including Mayo Street Arts, Spoleto Arts Festival, 4th U Artivists, Carnegie Hall, and American Opera Projects; she has performed her poetry at Deepak Chopra’s Homespace in NY, the American Embassy in Prague, Jaipur Literary Festival in India, and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.
Annie has taught meter and scansion to poets and poetry-lovers of a wide range of backgrounds, ages, and levels of education and poetic experience from kindergarten to post-graduate school, offered workshops at community centers, meditation centers, art schools, and women’s gatherings, taught at writing conferences including Wesleyan Writers Conference, Poetry by the Sea, and West Chester Poetry Conference, and lectured on meter and poetry at universities including University of Toronto, Notre Dame, U.C. Berkeley, Harvard, and Oxford, . Passionately committed to building empowering communities, she launched WOM-PO: Discussion of Women’s Poetry listserv in 1997, taught for a decade on the graduate faculty of Miami University of Ohio, served as Director of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing from 2004 to 2013, and founded the Women, Poetry, and Spirituality retreats at Garrison Institute in 2015 with Rozanne Gold and Marianela Medrano.
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.
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.
Whether you are a omen or gender-nonconforming poet, witch, or magical bering in between, you are invited to learn more about Annie's work and teaching on Poetry Witchery, meter, magic, and women-centered spirituality in Poetry Witch Community. We look forward to meeting you in the Five Directions and maybe in the Poets' Cafe!
To join Poetry Witchery, click "Request to Join" above.
Poetry Witchery Community is open only to women and gender nonconforming people, visitors of all genders are invited to subscribe to my Poetry Witchery Blog on Substack, to shop at Poetry Witch Bookshop; to explore my books and videos, and to watch my performances through Poetry Witch Ritual Theater. I would love to meet you those way as well!
