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41-467: The Discussion of Women's Poetry List-serv, known as Wom-Po , WOM-PO or WOMPO , is an international listserv devoted to the discussion of poetry by women. Wom-Po was started in December 1997 by poet Annie Finch . After being housed at Miami University , University of Southern Maine , and Nassau Community College , the listserv is currently housed on Google Groups . The majority of members are poets from

82-554: A 2016 interview, Finch describes the founding of WOM-PO as a response to the silencing of women on other poetry listservs, Contemporary American Poetry List and POETICS list , in 1997. Finch says that "on December 18 I got so desperate that, pretty much on the spur of the moment, I got permission to use the Miami University server and started WOM-PO with an email to a few friends . . . and some women I didn’t know but had noticed trying in vain to have their intelligent comments heard on

123-481: A genre she calls "poetry ritual theater," combining multimedia poetry performance with interactive audience ritual; these including "Five Directions," premiered at Mayo Street Arts, Portland, Maine, in 2012, directed by Alzenira Quezada, and "Winter Solstice Dreams," premiered at Deepak Homebase, New York, in 2018, directed by Vera Beren. Composers who have set Finch's poems to music include Stefania de Kennessey, Matthew Harris, and Dale Trumbore. Trumbore's settings of

164-517: A graduate assistant, first at the University of Houston and then at Stanford University , where she TA'ed for Adrienne Rich 's "Introduction to Poetry" and developed an original course, "Women, Language, and Literature." She has taught on the creative writing and literature faculties of universities including New College of California, University of Northern Iowa, Miami University (Ohio), and the University of Southern Maine, where she served as Director of

205-692: A self-designed concentration in Versification under the supervision of Diane Middlebrook . Finch's first poetry collection, Eve (Story Line Press, 1997), was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets . Calendars ( Tupelo Press , 2003), finalist for the National Poetry Series and shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Book of the Year award, is structured around

246-629: A series of poems written for performance to celebrate the Wheel of the Year . Her third book, Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams ( Red Hen Press , 2010), which received the Sarasvati Award for Poetry, is a hybrid work combining narrative and dramatic structure to tell a mythic story about abortion. The Encyclopedia of Scotland was published in 2010 by Salt Publishing in

287-472: A woman poet." 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

328-579: Is a close community with distinctive longstanding traditions such as referring to members playfully as "womponies" and an annual Friday breakfast at the Associated Writers Program conference. Several volunteer-run weekly newsletters keep the list free of self-promotional and congratulatory posts so that discussion can focus on poetry. Annie Finch Annie Ridley Crane Finch was born in New Rochelle, New York, on October 31, 1956. Her mother

369-483: 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." 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

410-560: Is effortless: Form is merely the skin that allows her poems to breathe with ease.” Poet and critic Ron Silliman has situated Finch in the context of experimental poetry , writing, "Annie Finch can't be a new formalist, precisely because she's passionate both about the new and about form. She is also one of the great risk-takers in contemporary poetry, right up there with Lee Ann Brown & Bernadette Mayer in her willingness to completely shatter our expectations as readers." The experimental aspect of Finch's work became more evident with

451-584: The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 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

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492-924: The Stonecoast MFA Program from 2004 to 2012. She has facilitated poetry workshops at conferences and literary centers including Wesleyan Writers Conference, Poetry by the Sea, West Chester Poetry Conference, Ruskin Arts Center, and Poets House; and online at Yale Alumni Workshops, 24 Pearl St. and the London Poetry School. She has been a guest lecturer at universities including University of Notre Dame , Indiana University , University of California, Berkeley , University of Toronto , and Harvard University . Since 2020, she has taught poetry, scansion, meter, and ritual classes online . Henry Leroy Finch Jr. Henry Leroy Finch, Jr. (August 8, 1921 – August 22, 1997)

533-679: The Diversity of Their Art , Villanelles , and Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters . She has also authored a poetry-writing textbook, A Poet's Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry. At a time when Emily Dickinson was the only nineteenth-century woman poet receiving critical attention, Finch's 1987 article "The Sentimental Poetess in the World: Metaphor and Subjectivity in Lydia Sigourney 's Nature Poetry" approached Sigourney through postmodern theories of

574-541: The Divine (accompanying the commemorative sculpture by Meredith Bergmann ). She has written that she believes it is part of her calling as a poet to compose occasional poetry on topics of personal and cultural importance. 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

615-516: The U.K.; in the same year, Carnegie Mellon University Press reissued Eve in the Contemporary Classics Poetry Series. Spells: New and Selected Poems ( Wesleyan University Press , 2012), collects poems from each of Finch's previous books along with previously unpublished poems. The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells (2019), also from Wesleyan University Press, offers small spells of fewer than eight lines, gathered by Finch from

656-706: The United States, the U.K. Australia, and New Zealand. Discussion on the listserv has sparked numerous conference panels, poetry readings, poetic collaborations, spin-off listservs such as the Mom-Po list, journal publications such as a collaborative Crown of sonnets published in Prairie Schooner in 2007, and an anthology, Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po Listserv, published in 2008 by Red Hen Press . In

697-434: The central figures in contemporary American poetry" for her role in the reclamation of poetic form. 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, and C.L. Rawlins emphasized the incantatory use of form in Eve , writing, "Finch

738-432: The first five or six years." One early challenge was the question of whether to allow men on the listserv, which was settled, after extensive discussion, through consensus with a "yes." The listserv moved with Finch from Miami University to University of Southern Maine in 2004, and Finch asked poet Amy King to take it over in 2008. Several years later, King passed it to Christina M. Rau. The twentieth anniversary of WOM-PO

779-575: The history of the English language with Marie Borroff , and Versification with Penelope Laurans, graduating magna cum laude in 1979. After traveling in Africa with painter Alix Bacon, in the early eighties she settled in New York's East Village, where she worked at Natural History Magazine and self-published and performed the rhythmical experimental longpoem The Encyclopedia of Scotland. In 1984, Finch encountered

820-583: The importance of a diversity of world religions, far ahead of its time, encompassed Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Taoism. He founded the Seminars in World Religion at Columbia University, was active in the Gurdjieff Foundation , and organized the first conference on Buddhist thinker Dogen ever held in the United States. Author of works on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil , in 1970 he

861-541: The latter was a mental hospital. After the war, Finch worked as an editor for Alternative and Liberation. For a time he was involved with the American Forum for Socialist Education, but his primary affiliations were with the Fellowship of Reconciliation and War Resisters League. He hosted a pacifist radio show and involved in the formation of Public Radio in the United States and specifically WBAI Radio in New York. Finch

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902-431: The listserv until 2004 when she passed ownership of the list to Amy King . In October 2016, anticipating the #MeToo movement, Finch became one of the first victims of sexual assault in the literary world to name writers, editors, and teachers who had sexually assaulted her during her career. In 2019 Finch launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the publication of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion , which

943-581: The longer poems of Spells. Finch's poems are collected in anthologies including the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day , Penguin Book of The Sonnet , Norton Anthology of World Poetry , and Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry . Her poems for public occasions include a Phi Beta Kappa poem for Yale University and the memorial poem for the September 11 attacks installed in New York's Cathedral of St. John

984-402: The male-dominated listservs." Among the first few subscribers were Wendy Battin, Catherine Daly, Marilyn Hacker , Farideh Hasanzadeh, Allison Joseph, Rachel Loden, Gwyn McVay, Marilyn Nelson , Judith Roitman, Susan Schultz , Kathrine Varnes, and Elizabeth Waldner. Finch was a "very active, very hands on facilitator during the formative years of building the culture of the listserv, for probably

1025-696: The mind but in the body." Finch started a blog called American Witch in 2010 and has published several articles about earth-centered spirituality in The Huffington Post . Finch's dramatic works of poetry include The Encyclopedia of Scotland (1983), originally performed in a libretto version with live music, as well as Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams (Red Hen Press, 2010) and Wolf Song, which premiered at Portland, Maine's Mayo Street Arts in 2012. Both plays were collaborative productions incorporating music, dance, puppets, and masks. Finch has also written and performed several works in

1066-461: The natural world and her perception of the self as part of nature." In an interview Finch stated, "Some of my poems are lyric, some narrative, some dramatic, and some meditative, but all are concerned with the mystery of the embodied sacred.". Finch writes in the preface of her 2013 collection Spells: New and Selected Poems that she considers her poems and verse plays to be "spells" whose rhythm and form invite readers "to experience words not just in

1107-750: The poems have won the Yale Glee Club Emerging Composers Award, the Gregg Smith Choral Composition Contest, and other awards. Finch was invited by composer Deborah Drattell to write the libretto for the opera Marina , based on the life of poet Marina Tsvetaeva. it was produced by American Opera Projects in 2003, directed by Anne Bogart , and sung by Lauren Flanigan . Finch's 1993 book The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse uses prosody and postmodern and feminist theory to explore

1148-741: The poetic self. A subsequent essay on Sigourney was commissioned for Lydia Sigourney: Critical Essays and Cultural Views (2018), which also included Finch's elegiac poem for Sigourney. In the essay collection The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, Finch discusses her ideas about "poetess's poetics" in broader terms From 2006 to 2011, Finch served as editor of the Poets on Poetry Series at University of Michigan Press , where she solicited essay collections by poets including Meena Alexander , Reginald Shepherd , Martin Espada , Kazim Ali , and Marilyn Hacker . Finch's translation from French of

1189-704: 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. Finch began teaching as

1230-470: The preface to Spells: New and Selected Poems (2013), Finch writes, "Compiling this book has led me to appreciate how much I was inspired as a poet by coming of age during the feminist movement of the 1970s. Reading it has helped me understand the ways I struggled over the years to throw off the burden of misogyny on my spiritual, psychological, intellectual, political, and poetic identities. My themes are often female-centered . . . I am proud to define myself as

1271-402: The publication of Spells, which includes 35 of the poems composed in the 1980s that she refers to as the "lost poems." In the preface to Spells , she describes these as "metrical and experimental poems [that]. . . did not find their audience until the avant-garde's rediscovery of formal poetic strategies just a few years ago." Reviewing Calendars , poet and Goddess scholar Patricia Monaghan

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1312-533: The publisher, Haymarket Books , calls "the first major literary anthology about abortion." The Kickstarter launched two days before Alabama passed an abortion ban and reached its fundraising goal in the first week. Choice Words was published in April 2020. Claire Keyes notes in Scribner's American Writers , "A strong current in [Finch's] work is the decentering of the self, a theme which stems from her deep connection with

1353-770: The semiotics of meter in free verse poetry by Walt Whitman , Emily Dickinson , Stephen Crane , T.S. Eliot , Audre Lorde , and other poets. Building on the work of Roland Barthes and on John Hollander 's theory of "the metrical frame," Finch calls her theory of metrical meanings "the metrical code." The essay collection The Body of Poetry explores further topics in feminist poetics and poetic form including translation, "Metrical Diversity," and readings of poets including Sara Teasdale , Phillis Wheatley , Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Marilyn Hacker , and John Peck . Finch's edited or coedited anthologies of poetry and poetics include A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women , An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets on

1394-564: The work of Ntozake Shange in a bookstore and "recognized in her a soul-mother, someone else for whom poetry was performative, sacred, curative, indispensable, physical." She immediately applied to the University of Houston, where Shange was teaching, and earned her M.A. in creative writing there in 1985 with a thesis in Verse Drama directed by Shange. Finch earned a Ph.D in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1990, studying feminist theory with Adrienne Rich and pursuing

1435-573: Was Vice-Chairman of the Yale News . During World War II he registered as a conscientious objector . After the war he earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Columbia University, writing a dissertation on the pre-Socratic philosophers. Finch was a professor of philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College from 1952 to 1972 and in the Department of Philosophy at Hunter College from 1973 to 1989. His eclectic awareness of

1476-666: Was an American scholar and professor of philosophy and a pacifist organizer. Roy Finch was born in New York City the oldest child of Henry Le Roy Finch and Mary Farquhar Baker. His grandfather was Stephen Baker, President of the Bank of the Manhattan Company. He had three brothers: Charles B. Finch Jr., Stephen Baker Finch, and John Finch. He attended the Buckley School , Phillips Academy , and Yale University (B.A., 1940), where he

1517-704: Was known as Roy in pacifist circles during the 1940s-1950s. He hosted the War Resisters League Annual Dinners from 1955 to 1959. Honored guest speakers included Bayard Rustin , Martin Luther King Jr. , and A. J. Muste . Finch married poet and artist Margaret Evelyn Rockwell in 1947. Their five children are Margaret (Julie) Finch, Martha Rijn Finch, Mary Dabney Baker Finch, Annie Ridley Crane Finch ( Annie Finch ), and Henry Leroy Finch III ( Roy Finch ). Finch wrote several books including; Articles Henry L. Finch's papers on pacifism are held in

1558-1075: Was marked on May 22, 2018 with a panel at the [Poetry by the Sea] conference. Moderated by list facilitator Amy King , the panel included Barbara Crooker, Annie Finch (list founder) and Allison Joseph , with many wom-pos also in the audience. Some notable members of Wom-Po have included poets Sandra Beasley , Margo Berdeshevsky, Chana Bloch , Allison Hedge Coke , Martha Collins , Sharon Doubiago, Annie Finch , Ann Fisher-Wirth , Daisy Fried , Kate Gale , Daniela Gioseffi , Arielle Greenberg , Gabriel Gudding , R. S. Gwynn , Allison Joseph , Marilyn Hacker , Farideh Hassanzadeh, Eloise Klein Healy , Julie Kane , Amy King , Ursula K. Le Guin , Jeffrey Levine , Marilyn Nelson , Mendi Obadike , Alicia Ostriker , Katha Pollitt , Molly Peacock , Mira Rosenthal, Metta Sama, Rati Saxena, Susan M. Schultz , Peggy Shumaker, Evie Shockley , Ron Silliman , Patricia Smith , Stephanie Strickland , Lesley Wheeler , and Rachel Zucker . Wom-Po

1599-556: 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." Finch's literary archive was purchased by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in 2016. In

1640-539: Was one of the founders of the American Weil Society. Known as Roy Finch in pacifist circles, Henry Leroy Finch, Jr. was a pacifist and conscientious objector during World War II. He served in Civilian Public Service (CPS) Camp 11 (Ashburnham, Massachusetts) and Camp 37 (Coleville, California), and with CPS Unit 41 (Williamsburg, Virginia). The first two were engaged in U.S. Forest Service efforts, and

1681-562: Was poet and doll artist Margaret Rockwell Finch and her father, Henry Leroy Finch Jr. , was a pacifist leader and a scholar of philosophy whose works include three books on Ludwig Wittgenstein . Her great-aunt was the socialist organizer, politician, and writer Jessie Wallace Hughan . Finch began writing poetry as a child. She was educated in public schools, then for two years at Oakwood Friends School and one year at Simon's Rock Early College, where she studied filmmaking and art history. At Yale University she studied poetry, anthropology,

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