ELEANOR BOUDREAU, FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW
Ass Poetica
You are watching a stripper named Destiny
remove toilet paper from her labia. She pulls a lip,
then picks, pulls, then picks.
This is necessary
before she gets on stage. On stage, a vagina cannot be
for urination or reproduction—
it can only be a hole
to be filled by imaginative possibility.
This is the fantasy
we are selling.
Is biology Destiny? Simone de Beauvoir writes,
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. And she is right—
one is born a child.
You were born a child. Once, in high school, a doctor gave you a large dose
of progesterone.
You spotted for a few days, but you do not menstruate.
You are 19—going on 20—and you never had a natural period.
Period.
And you are a stripper.
You could never think biology is
Destiny.
Destiny stands facing a mirror,
but she does not use it. She bends over,
looks down. She does not seem to notice you, then
she snaps,
Sadie! What are you looking at?
Eleanor Boudreau on “Ass Poetica”:
Make it New
If I use the same process, I write the same poem. As an artist, I feel both a desire and a duty to try new things, and that means changing my process. Once I finished my first book, Earnest, Earnest? (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), I wanted to try something different.
Sculpting Poems
Sculptors have two methods—either carve small pieces individually and mold them together or start with a large block and carve the negative space around the figure. Earnest, Earnest? is the former. I wrote that book largely by using collage and I worked constantly to balance my elliptical results with my narrative impulses.
For my newer poems, however, I began by writing large prose-blocks, then I carved the negative space—the line breaks and stanza breaks—into those prose-blocks to reveal the poems. Working this way, I needed breaks urgently. Using couplets and singlets (as opposed to longer stanzas) began to feel appropriate and I relied much more on enjambment. The short, airy stanzas make these new poems less dense than my earlier work and the enjambment moves the reader more quickly through the lines.
Dialogue and Tennis
In order to prevent my prose-blocks from wandering too far into the elliptical territory of memory and history, I attempted to write almost exclusively in the present tense; and working this way, in the immediacy of the moment, led me to dialogue in poems like “Proof.” Dialogue is the moment where the pace on the page and the pace in real life are most closely aligned. In writing dialogue, I am neither speeding time up nor slowing it down, but leaving it as it is.
As I was writing these poems, I also began playing a great deal of tennis and watching a great deal of tennis. There’s something about the pop of the ball back and forth that I find incredibly fun. I wanted to simulate that in my poems. To me, dialogue is the tennis of language. It’s a game, of course, bound by rules, but also buoyed by the promise of spontaneity, play, and recreation. It’s true that love is zero in tennis, is nothing, but it’s also the starting point of every game, the moment from which everything else progresses. Dialogue is like that, too; it begins with the desire for more. Moreover, dialogue, like tennis, has its serious side. It’s possible to fault and double fault, participants experience wins and losses, and can face multiple break points.
Epic or Not
My new work is having a conversation with the epic tradition and the epic is associated with the couplet. Chaucer wrote The Legend of Good Women in heroic couplets prior to embarking on The Canterbury Tales in the same form. John Dryden translated Virgil’s Aeneid into heroic couplets and also “translated” John Milton’s Paradise Lost into couplets (Milton, of course, wrote in blank verse). My couplets and singlets are both suggestive and disruptive. I want to know if it’s possible to write an epic in the twenty-first century? And has it ever been possible to write an epic with a female hero?
Whether or not it’s an epic, the story I’m telling is certainly a bildungsroman. The speaker, a freshman in college, is attempting to become a poet and she’s simultaneously working as a stripper, and these two enterprises are not as dissimilar as she would like them to be. Even after she stops stripping, she continues to see parallels between life inside and outside the strip club. The differences, she feels, are matters of degrees, not kind. “Ass Poetica” is, of course, a play on “Ars Poetica.” In that poem, the speaker is relatively young. In “Proof,” she’s older.
This also happens to be my story. When I took my first poetry workshop as a freshman in college, I was working as a stripper, and these two activities have always been linked in my mind—in physicality and vulnerability, in nakedness and publicness, and in the fear of what will happen to my immortal soul. In poetry and in stripping, the pay is the same. Only the money is different. If my new poems work, however, I want them to work because they are poetry, not because they are nonfiction.
Second Person
The second person pronoun “you” allows the writer more distance, the reader less. I needed the second person to write these poems. I am interested in the ways work within a capitalist system both defines and obscures one’s identity. I am interested in the ways gender both defines and obscures one’s identity. I am not interested in judgement.
Eleanor Boudreau is a poet who has worked as a dry-cleaner and as a radio reporter. Her first book, Earnest, Earnest? (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) won the 2019 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, a Florida Book Award, and was a finalist for the Medal Provocateur from the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Read more at https://www.eleanorboudreau.com/home