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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Shadow-Bird by Annie Finch Annie Finch Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Shadow-Bird by Annie Finch Annie Finch. Annie Finch (born October 31, 1956 in New Rochelle / New York ) is an American poet, translator, librettist, editor and literary critic. Finch graduated from Yale University , earned a master's degree in creative writing from the University of Houston, and a doctorate from Stanford University . She directs the Stonecast creative writing program at the University of Southern Maine . In addition to essays and literary theoretical writings, Finch published several volumes of poetry and long poems . Dance and music events inspired by their works have been held at the Spoleto Festival , the Lawrence Conservatory , the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art . She also wrote the librettos for the operas Lily Among the Goddesses and Marina , which were composed by Deborah Drattell . She was u. a. was awarded scholarships from the Black Earth Institute and the Wesleyan Writers Conference and received the 2009 Robert Fitzgerald Award . The book of poetry Calendars was shortlisted for the Foreword Poetry Book of the Year Award in 2010 . Annie Finch. Annie Finch (born 1956) is an American poet. She is the author or editor of fifteen books of poetry, translation, and criticism, including five books of poetry and poetry in translation, as well as opera libretti and poetic collaborations with visual art, music, theater, and dance. Finch is known for her use of a variety of poetic forms, sometimes simple, sometimes incantatory, and sometimes intricate, including traditional forms, invented forms, and performance-based chants. Her writings on poetry address topics including meter and prosody, postmodern form, and the place of poetry in contemporary life. She is also known for developing an aesthetic of women's poetic traditions, publishing articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth- century "poetesses" starting with a 1987 article on Lydia Sigourney for Legacy ; editing with Laura Mandell the texts for the original online Poetess Archive at Miami University; and founding and moderating for its first decade the international listserv for discussion of women's poetry, WOM- PO. In the title essay of The Body of Poetry, Finch connects not only her poetry's frequent thematic focus on nature, the body, and spiritual issues, but also its attention to pattern and sound, with her earth-centered spiritual practice. Because of her continual efforts, primarily as a poet but also as an editor and critic, to recast the terms of conversation about the nature and role of form in contemporary poetry, an article in The Dictionary of Literary Biography names her "one of the central figures in contemporary American poetics." [ 1 ] Contents. Biography. Annie Finch was born on October 31, 1956 in New Rochelle, New York. Her family background on both sides included artists, intellectuals, and political activists, a number of whom published poetry. Her maternal great-aunt, Jessie Wallace Hughan, was a founder of the War Resisters League. Her mother, a poet and doll artist, served as president of the National Institute of American Doll Artists. Her father was a Conscientious Objector during World War II before beginning his career as a scholar of pre-Socratic philosophy and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and a professor of philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College and Hunter College. In the introduction to "The Body of Poetry," Finch claims that her parents met at a lecture by Auden, and her essay "Desks" describes the influences of her father's book collection and her mother's example as a poet. [ 2 ] Finch graduated from Oakwood Friends' School, a Quaker boarding school in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1973 and then studied filmmaking, art, and poetry at Bard College at Simon's Rock before earning her B.A. in English Literature at Yale University, magna cum laude, in 1979. Her most influential teachers at Yale included medievalists Marie Borroff and Fred Robinson, poet and prosodist John Hollander, and prosodist Penelope Laurans. In 1983 she earned her M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Houston, writing her Masters thesis — a trilogy of mythic verse dramas in meter — under the supervision of playwright Ntozake Shange. Finch then entered the graduate program in English and American literature at Stanford University, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1990 under the supervision of literary scholar and Anne Sexton biographer Diane Middlebrook. Finch self-published her first book of poetry, The Encyclopedia of Scotland , in 1982. It has since been reissued by Salt Publishing. Her subsequent books of poetry include Eve (1997), Calendars (2003), and the "narrative libretto" Among the Goddesses (2009). In 1997 she founded WOM-PO: Discussion of Women's Poetry. She is married to the environmental organizer Glen Brand and they have two children. In 2004 she moved to Maine, where she is currently Professor of English and Director of Stonecoast MFA Program, the low-residency MFA in creative writing at the University of Southern Maine. Poetic Themes and Strategies. In an article in Contemporary Authors , published two years before her first full-length book of poetry, Finch made a remark that anticipates the focus of her career: "To me, poetic form, with its unverbal, physical power, is radically important in reconnecting us with our human roots and rediscovering our intimacy with nature . .. rhythmic formal poetry is of great value in celebrating, commemorating, and cementing the bonds of community." [ 3 ] As Claire Keyes notes in the entry on Finch in Scribner's American Writers , "A strong current in her work is the decentering of the self, a theme which stems from her deep connection with the natural world and her perception of the self as part of nature." [ 4 ] While Finch has remained consistently interested in formal poetics since the early 1990s, from the outset much in her work has differentiated her from the movement called "New Formalism." Henry Taylor wrote in a review of Eve, "while much would seem to align her with the so-called new formalists, Finch cheerfully ignores many of their stated principles" by not writing about contemporary life and forgoing a "natural" idiom. [ 5 ] In all her books but especially in Calendars, which was reissued in 2008 with a "Readers Companion" that offers sample scansions of fifteen separate meters used in the book and a long list of formal structures, Finch exemplifies her own invented terms "metrical diversity," "an exaltation of forms," and "multiformalism." In a blog for the Poetry Foundation, "Listening to Poetry,", she writes, "A friend asked me a few months ago, as I was discussing one of the poems I had been writing, “does it ever depress you, thinking that most people won’t know what you are doing with meter?” Maybe it should depress me, but honestly, it doesn’t. Meter just gives me too much joy for me to worry too much about it. Meter is like music; you can enjoy it whether or not you understand why, and you can easily enjoy poems in meter by reading aloud to yourself, even if you are only used to reading free verse. Meanwhile, just in case, my publisher is busy producing an audio version of my book on CD." Such statements, along with Poetry Foundation blog essays on such topics as "Occasioning Occasional Poetry" and "Where Are You, General Audience?," imply that one of Finch's goals is to appeal to a wider audience for poetry. Yet s good part of the critical interest attracted by Finch's poetry has also come from the avant-garde end of the poetic spectrum. Finch's first book, The Encyclopedia of Scotland, was re-published by the innovative British publisher Salt Publishing, whose website describes it as "an early experimental work . .a performance poem for soul-voice and attendant daemons." The book carries an endorsement by exploratory poet Jennifer Moxley claiming that it anticipates Stacey Dorris, and the book's longest review appears in the avant-garde-leaning journal Jacket. Her third book of poetry, Calendars, was compared in a review by Ron Silliman to the work of Robert Duncan and Bernadette Mayer. [ 6 ] . Seeing Shadows Of Birds In The Dark. S o I've always been scared of the dark to. Why? Because if I keep my eyes open long enough I can see those moving shadows. We have recently moved into a new home and we've been there for a few months. And I've never had such a strong feeling that I am not alone in a home before. Anyway when I go to sleep I've been so curious lately I keep my eyes open and I see this big hovering mass above my bed and its only in the corner because I've moved my bed a few times and it stays in the corner. Also, I see the moving shadows and they're not human figures. They're big birds. Like hawks or owls I'm not sure but they're flying everywhere like vultures. For some reason I get the feeling that they're owls. A couple of years back by husband and I were driving through my dad's neighborhood and there was an owl in broad daylight standing directly in the center of the road just looking our way. We were like what the hell? So after all this time has passed I haven't thought much about it until we have moved into this house. And there is an owl hanging around our home. He perches on the corner of our house, which is a trailer. I want to say its creepy but I'm beginning to become more curious. I've been seeing shadows forever and they have been nothing but blobs until now.
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