Poem of the Week | December 09, 2024

“Villanelle” by Eleanor Boudreau is our Poem of the Week.

Eleanor Boudreau’s 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 Awards. Boudreau has worked as a dry-cleaner and as a radio reporter. Currently, she’s an Assistant Professor of English at the University of West Alabama and serves as the Alabama Poetry Delegate for Region 3: Central-West Alabama.

Villanelle

You are not an architect,                       yet you have more words for
the facades of buildings          than you do for women—

Hellenistic, Rococo, Brutalist—        These could be stripper names,
but are distinctive styles of Western architecture. You could name
many more, yet            you are not an architect.

Females say thin and fat.                                 Males say hot and not.
These are words for women.

Mies van der Rohe proclaims, Less is more. Robert Venturi retorts,
Less is a bore.                       They are not talking about women, but
buildings.            You are not an architect.

Luce Irigaray observes women                        are a commodity, thus
subject to schism—virgin, mother, and prostitute.           These are
words for women.

Venturi writes, I like elements that are hybrid rather than “pure,”
accommodating rather than excluding, inconsistent and equivocal
rather than clear. I am for messy              vitality over obvious unity.
Venturi is (and                 you are not) an architect.

You are going out with an architect. Your mother
is an architect, and he is not your mother. So, this is good,
another word for women.

But the architect complains you are hard                        to read.
He complains you are hot and you are cold. You are
not porridge or a broken shower. You are also not an architect.

You are not a virgin or a mother.                              You must be
a prostitute, unless you are not            a woman.

Author’s Note

The poem, like the body, has an architecture. Originally, I wrote this villanelle with line breaks, but I was unsatisfied with that architecture. I had read and admired a prose villanelle by Marianne Chan, so I also tried this poem in prose. Yet some of the more prosaic lines, especially the quotes from Irigaray and Venturi, lost their pleasure when placed in uninterrupted prose. Eventually, I settled on this hybrid—prose stanzas with horizontal (instead of vertical) line breaks. I had to shrink the right-hand margin of the page and use justification, tabs, and spaces to achieve it. I contemplated whether this was cheating. The architecture of this poem—a hewing to (as in adhering) and hewing of (as in cutting with heavy blows) the villanelle form—physically describes my relationship with the word “woman.”