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Kathrine's and my new anthology, An Exaltation of Forms, has a much wider aim: to understand from a formal perspective the full range of contemporary American poetics. The book includes sections devoted to very traditional forms, from rhyme royal to couplets to ghazals to alcaics to hendecasyllabics , but also to many forms you wouldn't see in a typical book of forms, such as rap and procedural poetry. By, among other things, understanding free verse as language structured by the repetition of the line break, we were able to see all poetry as defined by repetition. The definitions used in editing the two anthologies, in the end, comprise a bigger definition: "Poetry is structured by the repetition of any language element. Insofar as the language elements structuring the poem are physically perceptible (conspicuous), the poem is formal." For now, I am comfortable with this definition because it expresses the unique focus on shaping language that I sense in common among all poems of any aesthetic. I don't know how well this definition will hold up in others' eyes, but it was useful in helping me conceive of these two books, and it still helps me to comprehend the connections among different kinds of poetry.

R. S. Gwynn:  At the end of your critical book The Ghost of Meter, you speak of how "the pressure on nineteenth-century free verse poets to write in meter led to the encoding of powerful and often negative emotions within traditional metrical patterns." For free verse poets today, who largely constitute the status quo, you add that "meter can take on the lure of the forbidden." Did you find examples of "metrical encoding" among the experimental poets you've just mentioned? How do you approach teaching meter to young poets who have grown up with free verse to the extent that they think (as you quote Robert Bly saying) that they have "no choice but to write in free verse"?

Annie Finch:  Many people think that The Ghost of Meter claims that all free verse engages with meter, but that is not true. I haven't seen a lot of metrical encoding in experimental poetry. Experimental poets tend to be hyper-conscious of the physical identity of words and phrases apart from their referential meaning-which is a major reason I enjoy reading this type of poetry. I would therefore imagine they are somewhat less likely to slip unwittingly into meter.

Those student free-verse poets who slip into meter unawares often do so because meter is already deeply meaningful to them, and their accidental metrical lines are charged with meaning. Once they become aware of the metrical code and see that meter is playing a key role in their free verse, they are motivated to begin to recognize meter enough to avoid it if that is their choice, or to use it consciously.

In teaching, I aim to present meter as a physical entity, not just an intellectual one, and I teach a range of meters. Generally I find that when young poets learn meter they are excited by the new knowledge and the permission to write in meter.

R. S. Gwynn:  In your first full-length collection, Eve, you include several pages of notes, most of them explaining your references to myths from many different cultures.  How do myths provide you with "raw material" for your own poetry, and how do you use myths in ways that differ from the methods of early modernists like Pound and Eliot?  Have women poets discovered new uses for these ancient stories?