"On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree.” — W.S. Merwin
  • A goddess poetics

    (0)
    Posted on May 3rd, 2009sherryPoetics, Poets

    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.

    Possibly related posts:

      Metric integration
      The shape of a poem
      Good advice for women poets and women citizens
      Donne on Sunday
      A. E. Stallings

    Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

    ,

Leave a Reply

 
RSS feed

Archives

Categories

Recent Comments

  • Helen Losse: And hope you feel better soon.
  • Helen Losse: Sherry, Thanks for the shout out. I might not have written this if I’d been able to log in and comment on nascar.com. But I...
  • Rebecca Clayton: Man, those bunnies are tough. I’m lucky my kitty is easier to please. Feel better soon!
  • Sherry: Man, you can’t ever please them rabbits. And as for Sam Pepys, if he had to keep it in his pants one day the world was probably a...
  • poppysmatus: Exactly 343 years ago Sam Pepys also was afflicted with a cold and laryngitis. Looks like he was obliged to be a good boy that day,...

Theme Switcher

What I'm Doing...

  • A great business of birds in the trees and on the grass. Spring is late and like Casey Jones they need to see those drivers roll. 8 hrs ago
  • Buzzards struggle to leave the earth, their soaring bought dear. Grackles and jays fly with working wings. Finches and chickadees levitate. 1 day ago
  • A morning loud with grackle squawk and braying jays. But southeast, as sun tops trees, a single cardinal brings the day in tune. 2 days ago
  • I step out the backdoor to gaze at the moon and tangle my feet in a begging raccoon. 3 days ago
  • More updates...

Powered by Twitter Tools

 
my 'read' shelf:
 my read shelf

Sherry's favorite quotes


"Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it."— Marcel Duchamp

Artistic Support

Sherry Chandler has received professional development funding and a Professional Assistance Award through the Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supported by state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Kentucky Arts Council Sherry has also received an Artist Enrichment grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. kfw
CURRENT MOON