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Annie Finch:  Much of what I want to do as a poet is to track new imaginative territory for the self.  Myths, especially unfamiliar myths, inspire me because they give us fresh ways to be human.  One of the new projects I am excited about is a series of narrative poems re-telling unfamiliar myths for children and adults; I guess one reason this appeals to me so much is that I have basically a spiritual sensibility, but one that has never felt entirely at home within Judeo-Christian religious structures.  Myths offer powerful stories that provide new ways of organizing the world.  As such, they provide a way that poetry can indeed "make something happen."  Isn't that why myths have always appealed to certain poets, whether Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Yeats, Eliot, Plath, Sexton, or Crane?

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.        Also, since I am using the myths in part to help build new ways of conceiving the self, I am interested not in deconstructing them as much as in constructing them.  Yes, myths offer contemporary women poets many new uses, whether it is telling an old story from a new perspective or telling again a story that has long lain fallow. Carolyn Kizer's "Semele Recycled," Alice Notley's Descent of Alette, numerous of A.E. Stallings' poems, are a few examples.  Myths seem especially suited to the self-mapping that many women poets are now engaged in. In my new book, the reply to Keats "Lamia" and the long title poem "Calendars," centered on Persephone, among others, are mythic in framework.

To go back to the poems in Eve, obviously the poems about goddesses are mythic in inception, but the mythological framework is subtler and broader also: the strange fusion of the minds of two strangers in "Encounter," or of the mother and unborn child in "My Raptor," take place outside of normal time and space and evoke the resonance of myth. Mythic impulses (or perhaps shamanistic is a better word) drive many other of poems, including "Diving Past Violets," a journey down into the roots of a plant, and "Inside the Violet," where the speaker remembers taking on the perspective of a flower.

R. S. Gwynn:   I think of "The Last Mermother" (recalling Prufrock's mermaids) in this regard, and it increasingly seems to have been some kind of breakthrough poem for you.  Would you comment on it?