The above link will also take you to an audio of Annie Finch reading "Meeting Mammoth Cave, Eight Months Pregnant."

Annie Finch's home page

R.S. Gwynn interviews Annie Finch

Myths provide good "raw material" for my poetry because they address the same part of myself from which poems come. Meditating on a mythic story wakes up the poetry part of my mind and relaxes the line between music and meaning, so that words well up naturally from that newly stimulated part of my imagination. Myth and music work together in me to create new worlds.

How do I use myths differently from Pound and Eliot ? Well, for one thing, the myths that inspire me are generally not mainstream myths. I can't rely on a reader knowing the myth of Rhiannon or Inanna the same way that Eliot could rely on a reader knowing the myth of the Grail. There aren't even easily locatable sources to research many of the myths I want to allude to. So I have to refer to the myths differently, perhaps more clearly and coherently.

Tad Richards on Annie Finch (from The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry

Poet, translator, essayist, librettist and anthologist, Annie Finch has made her mark in late 20th century poetry as an advocate for the cause of formal poetry, and for her own power within form. Equally important, she has identified and articulated a new concept of women’s poetry which is separate from, though not at all antithetical to, feminism.

Tad Richards reviews Calendars in Jacket

Have song and poetry completely diverged? Have the songwriters from Porter to Dylan to DeFranco laid total claim to that area of emotional truth that poets have wandered off from? Annie Finch, in Calendars, suggests otherwise. Known for her formal development, Finch shows here that meter can sing as well as count.

Seven poems

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