Autobiography of Eve by Ansel Elkins

March 2, 2015   Autobiography of Eve   Ansel Elkins

Wearing nothing but snakeskin boots, I blazed a footpath, the first radical road out of that old kingdom toward a new unknown. When I came to those great flaming gates of burning gold, I stood alone in terror at the threshold between Paradise and Earth. There I heard a mysterious echo: my own voice singing to me from across the forbidden side. I shook awake— at once alive in a blaze of green fire. Let it be known: I did not fall from grace. I leapt to freedom.            Copyright © 2015 by Ansel Elkins. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “In the summer of 2012, while following the trial of the band Pussy Riot, reading the plays of Mae West, and watching pre-Code movies filled with unrepressed seductresses like Marlene Dietrich and Clara Bow, I began writing ‘Autobiography of Eve,’ an ode to sex, desire, rebellion, and so-called fallen women. But the poem, draft after draft, eluded me until last July when, as I worked on it feverishly in a New York hotel, it occurred to me that the moment I was writing toward was not Mae West’s, it was Eve’s. I dismantled the poem and recast the lines dozens of different ways, playing with varieties of syntax and sound in an effort to locate the pulse of this pivotal moment between good girl and bad girl—a moment like Eve’s soliloquy in Book 9 of Paradise Lost as she stands before the tree of knowledge and speaks the word freedom for the first time—the moment where desire becomes transgression. I realized that Eve’s radical act of rebellion lay in her imagination, a fantasy of herself.” —Ansel Elkins   Ansel Elkins is the author of Blue Yodel (Yale University Press, 2015). She lives in Greensboro, North Carolina. Photo credit: Revell Carr Most Recent Book by Elkins   Blue Yodel (Yale University Press, 2015) "Part of Eve’s Discussion" by Marie Howe "Paradise Lost, Book IV, Lines 639–652" by John Milton "Essay on Adam" by Robert Bringhurst Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006,Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.