Welcome to Poetess Priestess

Poems, Meters, Matriarchy, Community, & Magic

Welcome, sisters, mothers, daughters, & friends, to this magical, matriarchal, poetic world!

Below is the story of the site. Or, you can just dive into the Quick Guide, then select all or any of the Five Directions on the menu for your subscription pleasure!

Love,

QUICK FIVE DIRECTIONS GUIDE

SOUTH: POEMS
South is the direction of desire, passion, sex, will, transformation, & creativity. Here I share poems, chants, some sexiness, and my experiences as a poet.

EAST: POETICS
East is the direction of the mind, clarity, perspective, intention, and insight. Here are writings on poetics, scansion, and the magic of metrical diversity.

NORTH: MATRIARCHY
North is the direction of earth, the body, abundance, and the world we live in. Here you will find teas and recipes, culture and feminism, animals and amulets.

WEST: PODCAST (COMING SOON!)
West is the direction of the heart, connection, love, healing, and community. Here, magical guests join our healing spiral in the rhythms of life and of poetry.

CENTER: MAGIC
Center is the Direction of magic, spirit, ceremony, ancestors, and intuition. Here are treasures, traces to bless us through the matrix all being shares in.

A STORY OF FIVE DIRECTIONS

Once upon a time there was a poet. Incantation surrounded her. She was a child of poets and magic-weavers going back to Celtic bards, Norse volurs, and witches imprisoned at Salem. She grew up with rhythms, with meters. The words of her family’s voices, the blowing branches of trees, the pulsing of electric powers in her hands, all rose into pattern to sing with her, dance with her.

Following this beloved path, she earned a Ph.D and spent decades as writer, performer, teacher, editor, translator, scholar, playwright, reviewer, critic, feminist activist, ritualist, mystic, and community-builder—all anchored in a passion for the profound, effective joy of the rhythms and structures of poetry.

But entering her wisdom years, she found her poetic life overwhelming. She had learned to complete a poem, channel it in an instant or labor over it for decades, whatever it took to harmonize its parts into a singing spell of transformative wholeness. But what the multifarious poetic career that shaped her waking and sleeping—the poem of her life? How could she channel its rhythms, understand its structure, complete it?

It wouldn’t be easy. It took thirteen years in ritual womencircles; thousands of pages of diagramming, journaling, and musing; tens of thousands of dollars dissolved in a business; hundreds of hours working in multiple healing modalities; and five initiatory tattoos.

But after all that transformation she did find, like the shocking perfection of a fully completed poem, a harmonious, vibrant pattern that arranged the complexity of her poetic role into a glowing whole, a simple design that a brilliant “tattoo fairy” etched onto her left forearm.

The wheel pattern of Annie Finch’s Five Directions Framework

The pattern her life demanded was based on the womencircle’s magic ring, akin to ancient sacred circles. With the Five Directions corresponding to Will, Mind, Body, Heart, and Spirit, each role found its place: poet; speaker & writer; witch; teacher; ritual performer.

As I emerge from that thirteen-year-old chrysalis with the Five Directions as a structure underlying my life and work, I am astonished and grateful. The journey has continued. The Five Directions offer a beautiful way to understand numerous other aspects of life: elements, skills, colors, visual patterns, teas, jewelry, clothing, sex, recipes, body movements, Goddesses, perfumes, ritual structures, book organization, and of course poetic meters. The Five Directions have also been shown to help people cope with decisions or any situation where clarity or balance is needed.

I am bemused that, as I enter my Wisdom Years, my work on mistressing meters has led me into a tool with broader uses than poetry itself. After a lifetime of fierce, devoted loyalty to the art and craft and spirit of poetry, it’s been challenging to get used to these much wider implications of my poetic calling. Sometimes, to find myself teeming with this new kind of thinking can feel like a betrayal, in this culture where writing poems is regarded as a fulltime “career” in itself.

But then I remember that the magical structures of meters are the rainbow of doorways that led me inevitably to this wider structure. They were gateways into the same five roles that poets in other meter-based cultures I have visited or learned about have taken on, from my Norse and Celtic ancestors to African griots to Siberian shamans to the Huichol medicine man I worked with in Mexico recently. And it all makes sense. A lifetime of work in Meters teaches us to find meaning and pattern in life, to see below surfaces, and to change energy at will, the witch Starhawk’s definition of magic. After all, that’s why peoples from the Nahuatl to the Japanese have required their political leader to be a poet, as a way to stay connected to that tradiitonal social blessing of poet. And, to be clear, it’s not the poet’s sensitivity as a human being or even their skill with image and metaphor that makes them so revered. Without the requisite metrical skill, it would mean nothing.

So I continue, spreading the message of Meter Magic to those who have ears to hear. Meditating in Meters is how I became a philosopher, witch, teacher, and ritualist in the first place, I can now accept these jobs as a natural extension of being a poet in the world.

This blog’s name encompasses two earlier names: Poetry Witchery and Five Directions — just as the energetic impact of the Poetess Priestess depends on the witchery of transformative ritual poetry, based in the matriachal wisdom of the sacred circle. Since the rhythms of life and poetry are organically connected, the implications of Five Directions are helpful also to people who aren’t thinking about poetry. You will find the Five Directions framework that I use in my writing and practice observed — for both practical and spiritual reasons — in this site’s organization. May there be something on this site that will inspire, ease, & bless you.

You can subscribe to any or all of the Five Directions separately using the Sections button in your settings.

And, you’ll find some info about me below.

Enjoy!

Love,

SOMETHING ABOUT ME…

I am, as my tattoo records, a poet, speaker/writer, enchanter, teacher, and priestess. I use my expertise in poetic craft to ensure that my poems, spells, and rituals are gifts for the ear and body, not only the mind. My work empowers women and calls up the Divine Feminine. I am also the editor of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion and a feminist helping to bring about a matriarchal rebirth for the survival of our sacred planet.

Books come to me in waves. I’ve published seven books of poetry, most recently Spells (Wesleyan U. Press) and a dozen books on poetic theory, craft, and form including Villanelles, The Body of Poetry, and the textbook A Poet's Craft. My poetry has appeared onstage at Carnegie Hall and in The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry.

The creative trajectory of my poems has always demanded, since I was a child, to be followed unstintingly; while some arrive all at once, it is not unusual for me to spend ten or twenty years finishing a poem. I trust in the Goddesses and know that my poems are designed to exist beyond time. I have a Ph.D from Stanford and have taught and performed across the world. I am currently working on a book on abortion ethics, a book on meter, and a new collection of poems. You can learn more at my website.

Love,
Annie