A goddess poetics

Not fair to cherry pick an author’s words out of context so I implore you to exert yourselves in finding the whole of this essay by Annie Finch, “The Body of Poetry,” which I found in her collected essays The Body of Poetry. Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self (Univ Michigan, 2005):

In what I have come to name a Goddess-oriented spirituality, the attitude toward the body is opposite to that in the mainstream Judeo-Christian tradition. Dirt, blood, sex, soul, earth, death, animal are not destined to be transcended; as direct embodiments of the immanent sacred, they by extension are sacred. The traditions of Christianity, Buddhism, and other religions may tell us mystically that God is present in everything (“I draw water, I carry wood; that is my prayer,” says the monk in one of my earliest favorite stories), but the notion of the Goddess actually constitutes a physical presence. Not only is the Goddess of the world; the world is her manifestation. Though the transcendent god and the immanent goddess are complementary sides of the same human spiritual coin, their resonances are fundamentally different.

In a poetics of thealogy as opposed to theology, connections of shape and identity within and between poems are not accidental embarrassments, but crucial kinships. For one thin, the skeleton of pattern that creates coherence gives the ability for the self to let go of a single, ego-oriented identity within the larger identity of a patterned shape. Transcendence is not the only way out of the self; there are several ways to skin a soul. . . .

The poetics of immanent spirituality are more concerned with sustainability (which by nature—in the literal, organic sense of the term—suggests endurance) than with contemporary notions of progress. As I will define it, “goddess poetics” celebrate and are made of the playful and physical; I am led to linger in rhyme and repetition, to glory in the surprising artifices of poetry’s body. These artifices of form provide a source of spiritual power in and of themselves.

As I find myself becoming more and more a neo-formalist, I also find myself becoming more and more what I was taught to call a pantheist. This essay goes some way toward showing why the two concepts are linked.