-
Preface
- Red Hen Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
9 Preface This book began in the late 1980s, as the women’s spirituality movement was shifting the foundations of my psyche and with them, my poetics. It was conceived as an epic, spiralling out from the “Isis” chant. Though I completed most of the poem before I had an abortion in 1999, abortion was the climax of the plot from the beginning, as Demeter, Kali, and Inanna provide different perspectives that help Marie take responsibility for the implications of her choice in a spiritual context. The theme of abortion had long seemed to me an epic one, focusing a terrain of crucial energies and reclaiming the spiritual implications of women’s inherent power over life and death. I had written the series of goddess poems in my first book, Eve, and the epic, which I called “Marie Moving,” was a natural next step. The poem’s structure honored nine as the number of the goddess, with nine books of nine stanzas of nine lines each (the ninth book was omitted later). I chose the dactylic meter, which I had not written in before at length, not because it was the meter of ancient tales, but to evoke the rhythm of ocean waves and the depths of female power. This book is “Marie Moving’s” final version, interlacing the epic with a dramatic version of the same story written for composer Deborah Drattell in 2002. The libretto fused poetry, music, and dance to enact Lily’s descent and archetypal encounters. In the process, the epic poem found the additional layers I had sought, and regained its ending. When Lily, part of a community at last, holds her baby up to the moon, the forces that have brought her to that place of peace and triumph have been articulated in music and silence as much as in language. Among the Goddesses is printed in two typefaces so it can be read in three different ways. The blocky typeface on the far left yields the original epic narrative poem, “Marie Moving.” The righthand typeface provides the libretto adaptation, “Lily Among the Goddesses”—a script for musical or 10 dramatic performance. Reading the book straight through, as is my intention for the general reader, offers the reader the complete “epic libretto” that spirals between the narrative and dramatic layers of the story. Annie Finch Portland, Maine April 2009 *Queen Anne’s Lace seeds were a widespread and effective method of birth control among Native Americans, but, as I learned from herbalist Susun Weed many years after finishing Book 8, they are not an abortifacent. Black cohosh would have been an effective herbal abortifacent, but would have required longer to work than the three days described in the poem. I have exercised poetic license in keeping the story of the abortion the way it was when the poem was finished. ...