As a child, I savored popular poems such as "The Owl and the Pussycat" and "The Night Before Christmas," read aloud to me by my family. As a teenager, I fell in love with more moody, passionate poems including "Luke Havergal," "Tithonus," "The Listeners," and "I died for Beauty," along with the songs of Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan.
Would you say your childhood and teenage experience of poetry has had a distinct influence on how you write poetry now, and why?
Yes, absolutely. The rhythms and passions that first flowed through language for me in those years created channels that my rhythms and passions still tend to follow.
Who is another poet whose poetry you admire and why?
William Butler Yeats. His work, in many genres of poetry, creates a world that feels complete in itself yet is profoundly engaged with the outside world in complex and challenging ways.
How would you summarise one of your poems in one paragraph?
"Landing Under Water, I See Roots," the first poem in my book Calendars, addresses how suffering passed down through generations can threaten to stifle us yet how we can rise above it. In two four-line stanzas, the poem describes forests that grow from under water and threaten, yet fail, to overtake what we consciously create through love.
How would you describe the appeal of this poem to readers?
The poem challenges readers to read it in two different ways--one reading where the forests appear to overtake our consciousness, and the other where our consciousness rises above the forests. Readers at different stages of life have found it a hypnotic and often inspiring exercise to contemplate these simultaneous possibilities. The poem has been set to music by composer Stefania deKenessey and sung by a soprano whose soaring version of the final word "love" left no doubt as to the composer's triumphant interpretation of the poem.
Could you share a stanza or small section of this poem?
And they might have gone on growing
and they might now breathe above
How would you describe the contribution this stanza or small section makes to the poem?
This is the hinge of the poem. Based on how we choose to read the word "might," we decide whether we want to believe that the "love" invoked at the end of the poem's last line does or does not transcend the burden of the past.
Would you describe your poetry primarily as narrative, thematic, character portrait, or how would you describe your poetry?
I make a clear distinction between narrative, lyric, and dramatic poetry, and I write in all three genres. I've written narrative poems that tell stories, such as "The Last Mermother" and the epic poem that is the backbone of my book Among the Goddesses. My dramatic poems are conversations between different voices, whether a short poem such as the two-stanza "Conversation," the book-length poem The Encyclopedia of Scotland, or something in between, such as the title poem of Calendars--a five-page poetic play with four characters from the myth of Persephone. But most of my poems, like "Landing Under Water, I See Roots," are lyrics. Lyrics are at once the easiest and the hardest for me to write. I am sometimes afraid to open myself to the lyric voice within, but I love to capture the feeling of a moment, in language that feels as if it came through me, not from me.
Do you read your poetry aloud to people? If so, how would you describe the size and response of your listening audiences?
I often read my poetry aloud to people. So far, I have read to audiences ranging in size from one person to over a thousand. The response has always felt satisfying and authentic.
Do you write groups of poems to form collections? If so, how were the poems connected in your most recent collection?
Yes; my first two books of poetry are structured around such collections. Eve is structured by a collection of poems written about goddesses, and Calendars is structured by a collection of poems written for the solstices, equinoxes, and the days between them. The most recently published such collection was a group of five poems about Tarot cards.
Author website: www.anniefinch.com
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