So begins this Victorian poem which offers us an ambiguous ‘witch’ as its (initial) speaker: she appears to be some sort of outcast, making a journey to visit a man, perhaps her beloved. Is she a depiction of the much-shunned Victorian ‘fallen woman’? She has the power to make the fire die in the grate, so she seems to possess some otherworldly power or aura. Coleridge was the great-grand-niece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Calendars(2003), Among the Goddesses(2010), Spells: New and Selected Poems(2013), Choice Words: Writers on Abortion(2020) Tip: you don’t have to write about an obvious animal, like a cat, bat, or frog. You could go for something more unusual. How about a spell-squawking parrot? Or a monkey that becomes magical by the light of the moon?! The word “witch” has many interpretations. Traditionally, it is used to describe a woman who practices magic, specifically an evil magic. History shows us witches as perilous beings—devil worshipers—that must be punished by means of interrogation, torture, and execution. This notion is rooted in a patriarchal society where educated women are persecuted. Today, the perception has evolved, although there are still misconceptions.

of disconnected pleasure still it has worked out something intimate about your weak dark inside region Finch started a blog called American Witch in 2010 [30] and has published several articles about earth-centered spirituality in The Huffington Post. A Poet's Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Shaping Your Poems. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Eve. Story Line Press. 1997. [Finalist, National Poetry Series, Yale Series of Younger Poets, Brittingham Prize]. Reissued by Carnegie Mellon University Press, Classic Contemporaries Poetry Series, 2010.Showalter, Elaine. "Feminist Poetics." In Alex Preminger et al., eds. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton U. Press, 1993) p. 406 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” The Sentimental Poetess in the World: Metaphor and Subjectivity in Lydia Sigourney's Nature Poetry, Legacy Vol. 5, No. 2 (Fall 1988), pp. 3-18 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. I felt drawn to them because I felt that they hadn’t quite been done justice in literature before. They have been ‘covered’, but somehow it didn’t seem angry enough. When Miller wrote The Crucible (1953), that was angry. But I felt there was nothing said about the Pendle Witches in the UK that was comparable.’– Camille Ralphs in conversation with Shoshana Kessler for the London Magazine

Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters. With Alexandra Oliver. Random House: Everymans Library, 2015. Finch's translation from French of the poetry of Louise Labé was published by University of Chicago Press, honored by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, and represented in the Norton Anthology of World Literature. Spells includes translations from Anglo-Saxon, Classical Greek, and Russian. In the preface to Spells and in The Body of Poetry, Finch explains that the physical qualities of the original poem, including meter and rhyme, are central to her translation process. A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women. Brownsville, OR: Story Line Press, 1994. Reprinted, Textos Books, 2007. Finch's feminism is also evident in her prose writing, editing, and literary organizing. Her first anthology A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women (1993) collected poems and essays by contemporary women poets. The "metrical code," the central theory of her book of literary criticism The Ghost of Meter (1994), is cited in the article on "feminist poetics" by Elaine Showalter in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. [20] [21] [22] Her essay collection The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self (2005) includes writings on women poets including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Carolyn Kizer, Maxine Kumin, Audre Lorde, Lydia Sigourney, Sara Teasdale, and Phillis Wheatley, many based in feminist theory. In 1997, Finch founded the international listserv Discussion of Women Poets ( Wom-Po). She facilitated the listserv until 2004 when she passed ownership of the list to Amy King. Finch's dedication to writing in meter and her role as a scholar, editor, and critic of poetic form led some reviewers of her first books to classify her poetry within the movement known as New Formalism. Dictionary of Literary Biography named her "one of the central figures in contemporary American poetry" for her role in the reclamation of poetic form. [12] But reviewers soon noticed key differences between Finch's poetry and that of other new formalist poets. Henry Taylor, for example, claimed that Finch was not a typical new formalist because she did not focus on the realities of contemporary life, [13] and C.L. Rawlins emphasized the incantatory use of form in Eve, writing, "Finch is a poet in her bones . . . . What she proves in Eve is that rhyme-and-meter isn't just a formerly fashionable sort of bondage, but a bioacoustic key to memory and emotion." [14] Cindy Williams Gutierrez made a similar point in a review of a later book: “Finch is more shaman than formalist. She is keenly aware of the shape and sound of her poems. Whether in a chant, sonnet, ghazal, or even Billy Collins’ contrived paradelle, her skill is effortless: Form is merely the skin that allows her poems to breathe with ease.” [15]A witch is a woman who has too much power. Or, to quote the novelist Madeline Miller, a woman with “more power than men have felt comfortable with”. History teaches us that witches are dangerous and must be brought down, punished and silenced. Their wisdom and their force must be neutralised through interrogation, torture and execution. Yet these attitudes aren’t merely historical; women continue to be persecuted for witchcraft in the world today. There has been a perennial literary fascination with witches; they are, as Marion Gibson, professor of Renaissance and magical literatures at Exeter University says, “a shorthand symbol for persecution and resistance – misogyny and feminism in particular”. In a #MeToo world, where Donald Trump – a fan of the term “witch-hunt” – is US president, it is really no surprise that female writers are examining the role of the witch in new ways. Reviewing Calendars, poet and Goddess scholar Patricia Monaghan was one of the first critics to articulate the intersection of formal poetics and spirituality in Finch's work, writing, "Annie Finch is a traditionalist. Not in the way the word is commonly used . . . but in a strange experimental way. An oracle, an ecstatic maenad: that is the kind of traditional poet Annie Finch is." Betcher's crown of sonnets ​is an alchemical transmutation where his ordeal becomes a no-holds-barred odyssey that’s profound, funny, terrifying, and utterly dazzling.