Author: Annie Finch

Annie Finch is a poet, speaker, and performer exploring the intersections of language, magic, and matriarchy. Her books include Spells: New and Selected Poems and six other volumes of poetry, as well as verse drama, poetry translation, and opera libretto. Annie’s work on feminism and spirituality appears in essays, videos, and her groundbreaking edited volume Choice Words:Writers on Abortion. She shares her insight on the secrets of poetic magic in numerous books on poetry’s craft and the Poetry Priestess substack. Based in New York, she travels widely to speak and celebrate the seasons of our world and our lives with her ritual poetry theater performances.

Mother/Meter: Reclaiming Poetry’s Sacred Goddess Languages by Annie Finch

Those of us on the paths of the Divine Feminine can go to great lengths to approach Her. We might read and study hard-to-find books, invest time and money to visit temples and museums, and seek out Goddesses-related power spots around the world. We might acquire ceremonial jewelry and devotional artworks, attend conferences, track down Goddesses-inspired music, and apprentice with teachers from spiritual traditions that may be far removed from our own heritage. We might invest in supplies and training to craft devotional music, art, sculpture, and apparel, and create or attend performances, healings, and rituals honoring the Feminine Sacred.

Yet there is one important ritual activity that we routinely forget and ignore, one that we know was key to Goddess worship whenever we have written prayers, from Demeter to Inanna, Isis to Freyja, Hekate to Sarasvati. This time-honored practice is simple to learn, costs nothing to use, and quickly, safely, and legally creates an altered state of mind that brilliantly and efficiently connects us with our spirits, the natural world, the Divine Feminine, and each other. And furthermore, this ancient sacred craft is not limited to indigenous or ancient cultures but is already part of the familiar heritage of anyone who speaks English, so there is no danger of cultural appropriation in using it.

The Furious Sun in Her Mane: Nine Poems to Goddesses by Annie Finch

Poet’s Note: I composed this sequence of poems for performance, for chanting, and for devotion. I wanted people who would hear, read, memorize, and speak each poem to channel the original energetic patterns that the poets who best knew that Goddess used to connect with Her. So for each poem, I researched the meter and prosody of the original language in which that Goddess was first worshipped. Then I carried the exact rhythmical pulse of Her language into my poem to Her in English.

The sequence was set to music by composer Laura Manning and choreographed by Georgia Bonatis, and I directed and performed a devotional dance collaboration version of it in 1994. That archival video of this performance has just been recovered for the first time in 31 years. It is now posted on my Youtube channel.

ABORTION AS A SACRAMENT: A Poet’s Perspective Part 2 by Annie Finch

Part 1 was posted yesterday. You can read it here.

Though becoming a witch has been a lifelong, gradual process during which I have enacted and developed many rituals, if I had to choose one moment to mark the time I entered my full witchy power, this would be it. This ritual was the first time in my life that I had been thrown entirely on my own resources as a witch, to craft a ritual that was necessary for my survival and that I had no idea how to obtain in any other way. With this ritual I saved my own life, both in a spiritual sense and on a more literal level, since living with such misery and anger would surely have debilitated my physical health.

A friend who is a therapist tells me that she feels many of the women in her practice who are most troubled carry unresolved grief from abortions, and that therapy doesn’t seem to be addressing it. I used to wonder why, as a person who has successfully used many kinds of therapy, I didn’t seek out therapy after my abortion (although a fabulous book by a therapist, Peace After Abortion, truly was helpful). My sense of it now is that I was suffering, not from a wound within my separate self, but instead, from a more raw and basic need that had to be satisfied outside myself, with others: the simple hunger for the spiritual nurturing of communal ritual at one of the most profound moments of my life, the moment when I encountered not only the blood mystery of birth, not only the blood mystery of death, but both of them combined, together, at once.

ABORTION AS A SACRAMENT: A Poet’s Perspective Part 1 by Annie Finch

There is great insight in this feminist truism from the 1970s: “if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” According to Faye Wattleton’s memoir, this pithy remark was first spoken by a female cab driver as she drove Wattleton and Gloria Steinem to a feminist rally in New York City. We might think of the sacrament part of the quote as an ironic joke, an over-exaggeration for comedic effect. But I began to take the remark much more seriously after I had an abortion myself, as a 42-year old witch and a mother of two, and encountered a profound spiritual depth in the experience. It was then that I finally came to understand the complex web of will, mind, body, heart, and spirit, of family, self, and society, of future and past, that may be summoned and considered and experienced in the choice to end a pregnancy.

By the time I had the abortion, I had considered the decision deeply and—for reasons I needn’t go into here— was sure it was absolutely the right one for myself and our family. The procedure itself was smooth and painless, even beautiful. The doctor was experienced, gentle, and sensitive. The clinic was so aware of the spiritual and psychological dimensions of abortion that I was invited me to choose a lovely smooth small stone to hold during the operation and bury afterwards to create closure. It would be hard to imagine a better abortion clinic experience.