The Strange Wondrous Works of Eleanor Eleanor

The Strange Wondrous Works of Eleanor Eleanor was selected for the 2025 Fence Modern Poets Series Prize.

Eleanor Eleanor came to Kathryn Cowles, who invented the poet and artist. In the wake of Eleanor Eleanor's disappearance, Cowles compiles Eleanor Eleanor's residual poetry, collages, and captions into this "fossil record," this "partial catalog." In her introduction as editor, she writes:

"Eleanor Eleanor and I were born in the same place in the same month in the same year, and though we veered apart now and then (she liked to wander, to live in the back of a bad car, to waitress somewhere for a month or work a season on a farm), we always found our way back into each other's company before long. But it has been more than a year now, and it's never been a year. She's just gone. And where? Everyone always wants to know.

When Eleanor Eleanor disappeared, at least half of the art she had made instantly disappeared, almost as if suddenly having never existed at all, evidenceless. When a tree falls in a forest, etc. When you are your own museum head and go off, so does the historical record. Some artists are compelled toward self-preservation, all acid-free and vacuum-sealed, climate-controlled and HD-scanned, archiving every last snip. Some artists are excellent executors of their own fiction. Like so many women before her, Eleanor Eleanor was not. But she did write things down. She sometimes said that her art works did not feel actually finished when she finished them.
This partial catalog, then, is an anti-chronological selection of her writings, which I found loosely shuffled on her otherwise cleared-off desk--a desk I never saw previously cleared in all the years I have known her, which is to say pretty much always. Seemed like a sign. On top was an otherwise blank notecard with my name on it."