Calendars

Annie Finch. Calendars. Tupelo Press, 2003. ISBN 978-1-932195-84-2. $16.95

Tears came into my eyes when I read Annie Finch’s poem “Elegy for my Father”.

Your mouth sucking gently, unmoved by these hours
and their vigil of salt spray, you show us how far
you are going, and how long the long minutes are,
while spiralling night watches over the room
and takes you, until you watch us in turn.

Having recently lost my mother, my memory of having sat this vigil is fresh. I have kissed this kiss:

Here is a kiss for your temple to hold you
safe through your solitude’s long steady war;
here, you can go. We will stay with you,
keeping the silence we all came here for.

Though it was my mother, not my father, though it was mid-afternoon when my mother died, Finch had me in the beautifully realized, awful moment, the moment of letting go.

It was not unitl later, when I was readling through Tupelo Press’s free downloadable Reader’s Companion [PDF] for Calendars that I realized the poem is written in dactylic tetrameter. The dactyl is one of the most scorned metric feet in English prosody.

Who among you has not sat in an English class and heard the teacher chant the first line of Longfellow’s “Evangeline” like this:

THIS is the FOR est pri ME val. The MUR mur ing PINES and the HEM locks

Who among you can quote the second line of Longfellow’s “Evangeline?”

Finch styles herself a “poetess” and has set out to reclaim not only that despised label but also to prove that iambic pentameter is not the only natural and inevitable metric foot for English poetry.

Finch is in complete control of meter. As Tad Richards points out in Jacket 26, she finds subtlety where it is not thought to exist:

Trochees come in for their fair share of attention in Calendars. So do dactyls, and neither of these meters is particularly associated with subtlety, but Finch sets out to change that. Her dactyls, particularly, take the reader by surprise — first because they’re there at all, then because they’re used in the service of a range of emotions far beyond the higgledy-piggledy light verse one associates with dactyls.

Calendars could act as a primer in the correct use of difficult meters, and in fact, when one reads it with the study guide in hand, it does just that. According to the guide, Finch uses 15 meters in the 70-page collection, including amphibrachs, cretic meter, and Sapphics. What’s more, she makes them all work.

Writing in CALYX, Cindy Williams Gutiérrez says

In Calendars, Finch is more shaman than formalist. . . .Form is merely the skin that allows her poems to breathe with ease.

True. But Finch’s use of meter (as opposed, perhaps, to form) is a deeply political act. As Patricia Monaghan explains on the Web Del Sol Review of Books, Finch uses traditional form/meter to break into the avant garde:

Confusion over the politics of form especially impacts women poets, some of whom accept Adrienne Rich’s stricture that “the master’s tools will not demolish the master’s house.” But are form and tradition necessarily opposed to expressing what has previously been excluded from culture? Must formal poetry be conservative—or worse, linked to repressive politics, following its Latin meaning of “to keep watch together,” apparently against barbarian invaders?

Finch says no to both questions. . . .Finch, at the forefront of the re-evaluation of traditional form in poetry, uses poetic structures to distract monkey mind so that wild mind sings through.

Finch does what Rich said cannot be done: uses the master’s tools not to build new rooms onto a decaying mansion, but to frame a new home for a radical, earth-honoring worldview. Or perhaps the image needs altering in Finch’s case, for she embraces convention (a word whose roots mean “coming together”), because she finds rhyme and meter rooted in the oral tradition with its pagan proletarian values. She takes back the master’s tools by remembering that they were, from the first, tools of the common folk.

So not only does Finch use “traditional” meter to push language, to “de-familiarize” it, as thoroughly as the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets do, but she does this by looking back beyond the print tradition. She pushes poetic language forwards by pushing it backwards.

Which brings us to the other informing aspect of Calendars: it’s paganism. Calendars refers to that other tradition in English verse, the nature cycle. But unlike the Romantics who sang of nature as man outside observing, Finch sings of humankind in nature as participants. Finch is Wiccan, and Calendars is organized around a series of pagan ceremonial chants. From “Winter Solstice Chant”

Vines, leaves, roots of darkness, growing,
now you are uncurled and cover our eyes
with the edge of winter sky . . .

to “Lammas Chant,” the harvest festival when a tribute of the first grain is buried in the earth

Fill the earth’s belly full.

Fill the earth’s belly full,
Bring the food, bring the grain.
There are cold months ahead
Give them peace in the ground.

the collection celebrates the series of quarter and cross-quarter days that mark the pre-Christian calendar.

A book as heavily political as Calendars would fail if the quality of the poetry lagged. But, in fact, poetic vision trumps politics here. Or perhaps the two are so thorougly melded that one can read the entire collection with no need to know that it is a manifesto. The tone is sometimes meditative, sometimes confrontational, sometimes celebratory, sometimes elegaic. Readers will find many subtleties of craft and philosophy.

There is much more that could be said about this collection. I have not mentioned Finch’s reverence for Emily Dickenson (“I take from you as you take me apart”) or her vivid commingling of Vivienne Eliot and Cassandra, her use of poems for two or more voices. But I am reaching the limits of a readable blog post, so I will leave you with one of my favorite poems, one that moves past the “Lammas Chant” with its celebration of harvest bounty and looks again toward winter, darkness, and death. It is a poem that completes the year’s circle. Perhaps it speaks to me because of my loss (not just of my mother now but also of a beloved teacher, James Baker Hall) or because of my time of life, but I find it a poem that moves way beyond the political, that re-envisions our relationship with the dark (where Jim Hall found his deep feeders).

Desire for Quiet

Silence may lead deep and make me mad.
If I say “water,” it might answer “mud.”

Th quietness might stop and make me sad,
And kill my carp, my colors’ golden blood.

Why should I dig a place for it, here where
The dark is dry grass tipped by brutal flowers?

You can read sample poems from the re-issued Calendars, purchase the book, and download the Reader’s Companion here at the Tupelo Press site.

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