We are proud to reissue Annie Finch's landmark anthology of women's formal
poetry, A Formal Feeling Comes.
A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women, Edited by Annie Finch
We are proud to reissue Annie Finch's landmark anthology of women's formal
poetry, A Formal Feeling Comes.
The definition of formal poetry developed for the editing of this book--that formal poems are "structured by the conspicuous repetition of any language element"-- encompasses blues forms and sonnets, sapphics and chants, and the book includes poets from Rita Dove and Marilyn Hacker to Sonia Sanchez, May Sarton, and Anne Waldman. Each of the 60 poets introduces her poems with a brief essay on the role of form in her work.
"Halfway through the book, I drank a glass of good Oregon pinot noir, and suddenly the poems themselves began to open to me. Poems that had seemed a prison for words now became houses with doors leading in and out. I understood again how much the mind craves form. The archetypes that command the way we think and behave are not invented by the mind but are extracted by the mind from the perfect or nearly perfect forms in nature." -- Alice Evans in The Eugene Weekly
"Part of what is valuable about A Formal Feeling Comes is the way it reveals that hidden strand of formal women's poetry which persisted even while Pound, Williams, Joyce and other male modernists wanted to end the 'idea of poetry for ladies.'"--Sue Standing in The Boston Review
Contents
Annie Finch: Introduction
Elizabeth Alexander A Multiplicity of Forms
Kevin of the N.E. Crew
Ladders
Who I Think You Are
Zodiac
Nell Altizer A Different Spin
Sonnet 2 from "Love Letters Written to Her Who Lives (Alas!) Away"
Sonnet 5 from "Love Letters Written to Her Who Lives (Alas!) Away"
Julia Alvarez Housekeeping Cages
How I Learned to Sweep
Sonnet 1 from "33"
Sonnet 42 from "33"
Bilingual Sestina
Judith Barrington Scaffolding
Villanelle VI
Debra Bruce Ultrasound
Two Couples
Sonnet 2 from "The Light They Make"
Sonnet 4 from "The Light They Make"
Julia Budenz Alluring Pleasure
Poeta Fui
Melissa Cannon Essentials
The Sisters
Kelly Cherry A Flashlight or Map
History
The Raiment We Put On
The Bride of Quietness
Reading, Dreaming, Hiding
The Pines Without Peer
Sandra Cisneros Spoken Forms
Muddy Kid Comes Home
The Poet Reflects on Her Solitary Fate
Cheryl Clarke Thoughts on form and formalism and my uses of them
What Goes Around Comes Around
Tortoise and Badger
Rondeau
Rita Dove An Intact World
Persephone Underground
History
Political
"Blown apart by loss"
Suzanne J. Doyle When the Ballerina Doesn't Point Her Toes
This Shade
Some Girls
Hell to Pay
Rhina P. Espaillat Why I Like to Dance in a Box
Metrics
Julie Fay A Kind of Survival
Dear Marilyn, Think of This
Words
Annie Finch Illicit Communion
Dickinson
Chain of Women
Sapphics for Patience
A Reply From His Coy Mistress
Joan Austin Geier On Writing Formal Poetry
On Your Twenty-First Birthday
Sarah Gorham A Dancing Floor
The White Tiger Leaps
Princess Parade
The Empress Receives the Head of a Taiping Rebel
Jane Greer Art is Made
Rodin's "Gates of Hell"
Emily Grosholz Art and Science
Eden
The Last of the Courtyard
Legacies
Marilyn Hacker Meditating Formally
Eight Days in April
Ballad of Ladies Lost and Found
Dusk: July
Rachel Hadas The Skills of the Stow-away
The House Beside the Sea
The Lair
Winged Words
Josephine Jacobsen Basic Rhythms
Only Alice
The Limbo Dancer
Lenore Keeshig Tobias An Ancient Technique
I Grew Up
Mother With Child
Dolores Kendrick The Craft of Poems
Solo: the good blues
Gethsemane A.D.
We Are the Writing on the Wall
Mary Kinzie Some Thoughts on the Threshold of Form and the Level of Words
Sun and Moon
Boy
Sound Waves
Canicula
Ringing Words
Carolyn Kizer A Defense of Breathing
On a Line From Valery
from Pro Femina (Sections 2 and 3)
A Muse of Water
Phyllis Koestenbaum A Brief, Habitual Transcription
Sonnet xxxi from "Criminal Sonnets"
Maxine Kumin Paradoxical Freedom
The Nuns of Childhood: Two Views
Despair
Phillis Levin Embracing Fate
Citizens & Sky
Dark Horse
Planting Roses
Janet Lewis A Kind of Celebration
Time and Music
Vassar Miller A Worthwhile Task
Light Reading How Far?
Dirge in Jazz Time
Leslie Monsour Notes on Contemporary Formalism
Emily's Words
Sweeping
A Dream of Dying
Honor Moore The Walls of the Room
First Time: 1950
A Green Place
Molly Peacock One Green, One Blue: One Point About Formal Verse Writing and Another About Women Writing Formal Verse
ChrisEaster
Devolution
How I Had to Act
Anger Sweetened
Good Girl
The Spell
Helen Pinkerton True Recovery
On Dorothea Lange's Photograph "Migrant Mother" (1936)
On Vermeer's "Young Women With a Water Jug" (1658) in the Metropolitan Museum
Mary Jo Salter A Beautiful Surface
Chernobyl
What Do Women Want?
The Rebirth of Venus
Young Girl Peeling Apples
Sonia Sanchez Form and Responsibility
Two Haiku
Song No. 3
Song No. 2
Father and Daughter
May Sarton Where the Greatest Mystery Lies
Small Joys
The Tortured
Maureen Seaton Honoring the Sonnet
Fear of Subways
Fear of Shoplifting
Wings
Leslie Simon On "Street Bleats"
Hattie goes to Market
Nellie gives into Blanche
Bernice got next to Isis
Elizabeth Spires Some Notes on Form
The Comb and the Mirror
Apology
Interrogations of the Sparrow
Patricia Storace A Singular Presence
The Archaelogy of Divorce
Wedding Song
King Lear Bewildered
Mona Van Duyn Out-of-Body Concentration
Homework
The Vision Test
Sonnet for Minimalists
Alma Luz Villanueva The Wind and Light
Peace #3
Even the Eagles Must Gather
Anne Waldman Shifting Contexts
Baby's Pantoum
Marilyn Nelson Waniek Sense of Discovery
Diverne's Waltz
Chosen
Balance
Daughters, 1900
The Ballad of Aunt Geneva
A Canticle for Abba Jacob
Kathleene West E.B. and Me
On Track
Mildred Weston To Be Clearly Heard
Primitive Place
Departure
Carolyn Beard Whitlow Standards to Break
Book of Routh
Rockin' A Man, Stone Blind
Poem for the Children
Nancy Willard The Gift of A Poem
The Ballad of Biddy Early
The Cat's Second Song
The Speckled Hen's Morning Song to Biddy Early
Nellie Wong When Form Flowers
Ironing
Grandmothers' Song
Appendix 1: Formal Key to Poems
Appendix 2: Index of Forms
Notes on Contributors
ISBN: 978-1933456959, 332 pages, $25.00