Poetry Witch Community & Meter Magic!
"Witchcraft has not a pedigree, 'Tis early as our breath." Emily Dickinson
Welcome to Poetry Witch Community
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Meter, Magic, Craft, and Rhythm
Poetry Witch Community, centered around Meter Magic Spiral, brings together women-identified & gender-nonconforming poets, poetry lovers, and spiritual seekers from around the world to practice poetry, scansion, and magic, weave webs of connection and empowerment, and explore 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 Witch Community and Meter Magic Spiral
Poetry Witch 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 learn the magic of meter . . . and participate in discussions and supportive community around poetry, meter, rhythm, scansion, and/or magic, ritual, self-transformation.
- A grounding, strengthening, gifting space where we help, teach, and share with each other throughout all 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 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!
WELCOME TO POETRY WITCH!
Poetry Witch 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 our beautiful Five Directions discussion area and are eligible to join our central learning space, Meter Magic Spiral, where our founder Annie Finch guides a transformative journey through the powers of a different poetic meter each month.
"Meter," "moon," "mother," and "magic" all come from the same root; based on Annie's lifetime of experience, Meter Magic Spiral is meter as it is meant to be learned!
To join PWC, if you are a woman or gender-nonconforming, click "Request to Join" above.
You will automatically be added to the free Five Directions discussion areas. To join Meter Magic Spiral, just click 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 Meter Magic Spiral & PWC, click "Request to Join" above.
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 those way as well!
