1.
Hollywood’s monetized male gaze created the mystery known as Marilyn Monroe. The brilliance of Heidi Seaborn’s poetry collection, An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, is the way she writes herself into it.
In an author’s note, Seaborn admits she knew little about Marilyn before writing this book, her original intent being to explore our obsession with celebrity and its relationship to “our performative culture.” What emerged was Seaborn’s “own Marilyn,” a figure grafted from the scroll of the icon, and fandom’s investment in it. Celebrity’s truth is the “reflection and projection of oneself,” Seaborn concludes. Alternating between persona poems in Marilyn’s voice and poems in the voice of the speaker, Seaborn creates a dialogic space in which one becomes Marilyn.
Insomnia is a liminal space, an intense loneliness; it is where Seaborn encounters Marilyn.
“I’ve taken Ambien every day this week,” the speaker says in the first poem, “Insomnia Diary” timed at 1:28 am. There is a man in the bed, sleeping, and there is night, the thick tunnel of sleeplessness. The next poem, “Marilyn,” frames the beginning of this obsessive relationship: “It’s all there, in the corsage of her lips,” it’s all there in how “the Internet loves her,” in the images preserved as iconography.
In “I see her everywhere,” the speaker tries to unpack her Marilyn obsession; the speaker’s mother offers “reticular activating factor” as a diagnosis. But the diagnosis does nothing to reduce the fantasy; Marilyn leaves the boudoir to appear in a soup, in random restaurants, the poet is haunted by her image.
Seaborn notes that “reticular activating factor” is misused by the poet’s mother: what is actually at play is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, or “frequency illusion,” a cognitive bias that causes us to notice something more often after noticing it for the first time. After becoming pregnant, suddenly, the world seemed full of pregnant women. All the pregnant women who had been invisible to me before, appeared, and I agreed to see them. I couldn’t unsee these women, and this tendency to see them more, to invoke them frequently, is also a form of selection bias tied to the frequency illusion. When we write persona poems, we imagine ourselves inside someone else, we take on and take in that person, blurring the line between self and other, leading to what some might call over-identification.
2.
The performative nature of celebrity is both invoked as a sort of empowerment and subverted by the loss of agency in these poems. In “Becoming Marilyn,” the speaker becomes Marilyn while describing the ways in which Marilyn becomes Marilyn: “Norma Jean arches Marilyn’s brow” in the mirror. The repetition of intonations (“Marilyn” and “Mar a lyn”) turn the name into a magic word, an invocation of the iconic woman, while emphasizing the distance between the icon and the self.
Marilyn was born Norma Jeane Mortenson; her childhood is a story of displacement. After her single mother was committed to an asylum for paranoid schizophrenia, Marilyn lived with a family where the experience of sexual abuse left her with a stutter. She lived in another foster home before being sent to the Los Angeles Orphans Home. Then she returned to the care of the “Doc” who first molested her. The poem, “What We Say For Ourselves,” has Marilyn and the poet speaking in dialogue, creating a We from the experience of sexual childhood trauma. It’s a brilliant, difficult poem; Seaborn’s decision to include an epigraph from a medical journal — stating that for one of every six American women, their first experience with sex will be rape — lets this epigraph do the work of saying the word so that speakers can represent the silence around it.
The first part is narrated by Marilyn, the orphan raised by a man who wants to be called “Daddy”; Marilyn describes ordinary details about the orphanage, ending in: “I’ve buried the memory like a bone.” Seaborn, herself, picks up this bone to narrate the second part of the poem, excerpted in full below:
Marilyn,
I remember clumps of dandelions as if colored by a child.
Above, smudged Sky Blue & Baby Powder clouds.
Blue Jean cut-offs. His skin was Lumber. I could pick him out of a Crayola box.
Even now, decades later, when sometimes
I forget what happened yesterday ——-
I could feel the bewilderment of the child, sitting at a small table in a therapist’s office, being asked to describe what happened by drawing a picture, and staring at the white page, the words for colors placing distance between the child and the man, these words that are still crisp “decades later.” Ending the poem with an elliptical “yesterday,” turning the verb “to forget” on its head, Seaborn rips the breath from the room and leaves the door open.
3.
After starting high school while living in a foster home, Marilyn was faced with returning to the orphanage. Instead, she got married at 16 to a 21-year-old neighbor. It is disturbing to admit that marriage freed Marilyn from administrative orphanhood, as referenced in the “[June 19, 1942 – Portrait of Norma Jeane on her Wedding Day to Jim Dougherty.]”
Instructions from my Aunt Grace
at the end of my high school sophomore year:
“Marriage or the orphanage, your choice
Norma Jeane.”
Marilyn’s professional and personal relationships with men tended to be transactional. If one played the part successfully (vixen, bombshell, wife, mother, muse), the reward was a certain lifestyle and its attendant canonization. In “What I Give of Myself”, Marilyn speaks about how others see her in images, and that particular “transaction of air” involved in the blown kiss.
Some poems use lines from films and documents — as in “Dear Sylvia”, an epistolary poem from Marilyn in response to an entry about Marilyn in Plath’s 1959 diary — while others reflect traces or intersections where the speaker reads herself into Marilyn (as in “10:23 pm,” a sort of mixed-dream state in Marilyn’s voice but which feels implicated in the poet’s).
4.
In the abecedarius poem, “Hey,” Seaborn lists different words which kaleidoscope around Marilyn as well as female sexuality, more generally, and part of the magic is that it’s hard to tell which of these words are personal or persona-related. Until the end:
whore, woozy, woman, womb, wet, wild thing,
x as in x-rated, x-ray, my fuckin’ ex,
you,
zero
The cruelty of these stacked, linked by commas across lines, are denied a period, a closure, the sign of an end. It is you, the zero, who must carry everything,
Selfies recur in poem titles (“Selfie On A Bad Day”) and lines as a hinge for the celebrity gaze. “Refusing to Bow” circles the persistence of the iconography, the fan accounts on social media:
She is a selfie.
Such are the physics of living
larger than life.
My husband is a selfie-skeptic, and his reluctance to normalize selfie-snapping has me considering the distance between the self and the selfie, or the expectation of the selfie, which is to say, what the selfie becomes when made public. The selfie wants to be seen: this is a fact, and what remains is the hypothetical, or, the as-if relation between the selfie being taken and how it is read by others.
Oddly, on the day I read “Reading Ulysses,” an ekphrastic poem that touches on the famous photo of Marilyn reading James Joyce’s Ulysses (presumably because she wanted to be cast as Molly), literary twitter was retweeting this photo with comments about how Marilyn was both sexy and intellectual. “Scholars call it parallax, me reading Ulysses …” Marilyn says in the poem.
5.
Marilyn’s third marriage to Arthur Miller is narrated in “There Was No Honeymoon,” the poem positions itself as marginal on the page, resembling a gesture of formal obedience:
if your third marriage is anything like mine you will call him Daddy
& discover
he has written
your dialogue
in the margin.
The poet describes two marriages, or two “holes,” in two poems (“In the hole” and “In that hole”) placed side by side, facing each other across the spine, indented at opposite margins so that the field resembles a broken butterfly form opposite ends. Given its proximity to the honeymoon poem, the use of margins to enact physical distance and separation becomes a thick gesture.
“What the Maid Witnessed” is narrated by Arthur Miller’s maid, looking at Marilyn alone at the table; words excerpted from documents and witness reports are set apart by italics: “She remembers her pale chiffon dress.” The object here is a pink robe, an exterior used to describe an interior, and we have Marilyn walking in pink:
where no one had ever been
fingers curl a pencil
her clear-eyed baby who lived to die
“Lost Angeles” is narrated by Marilyn, who says:”We made her in this bungalow.” At first, one wonders if this is a baby, but then it becomes clear who is being constructed. Miller is writing lines that seem to script a story (“The playwright writes the line”); one gets the sense of a woman being laid beneath a microscope and tweaked:
“Then I remember jam spread
on the bedsheets.”
It feels like miscarriage is being loosely referenced, but it’s unclear, given the blurring of inscapes. The next poem, “Loss,” could be Marilyn or the poet writing a sustained elegy with no punctuation — simply a chunk of unlineated text that roams through the color of loss as a connecting thread between cars, chaos, smoke, etc. Loss, including miscarriage, is thematic. “After the Miscarriages” is narrated by Art, speaking to Marilyn, admitting that he never hated her more: “the muse of you consuming me.”
6.
There is a series of ekphrastic poems from Norma Jean’s childhood photos, narrated by Marilyn, yet titled after the subject, time and location of the photo, so that Marilyn seems to speak from these various snapshots of her life.
And maybe I’m seeing things, too. Maybe months of insomnia, reading obscure, petulant French Marxists, is the reason why Henri Lebfebvre seems related. The truth about celebrity culture is that celebrities can’t live without it, as Lefebvre wrote in A Critique of Everyday Life: Vol. II, especially as cultural affinities become a form of knowledge, a thing one is expected to know: “This ‘knowledge’, if we can call it that, is spread throughout the world by means of images, and helps to create the attraction or powerful influence these celebrities exert.” Lefebvre calls celebrities “slaves to this knowledge” (queue Britney Spears’ song, “Slave”) which requires them to “submit to the demands of the public and of publicity” even if it tortures them. In our aloneness, we identify with stars who live like gods in our lux-gloss imaginations. Hollywood, sports, the socialite scene — anything that is spectacle can become spectacular, the grounds for fanning. But the phenomenon of mass intimacy isn’t just a story about Marilyn; Roger Federer would be an incredible tennis player no matter what happened, but he couldn’t be a star, a multimillionaire, without an invested audience.
Star power is money-bodies: it’s the dollar under desires, the unspoken part of our affiliatory appropriations. By bringing grandeur and sublimity to the everyday, celebrities reduce the boundaries between us. “The public becomes private and the private becomes public, but in appearance only, since power retains its properties and wealth its possibilities,” Lefebvre writes, adding:
“The humblest citizen knows his prince. He has been able to see him up close, almost as if he could touch him; but once he accepts this illusion, he has stopped being a citizen. The humblest farmhand ‘knows’ queens, princesses and film stars. But if he really believes he has attained a ‘knowledge’ of something, he is being trapped by one of modernity’s strangest and most disturbing alienations.”
Seaborn is under no illusion about this knowledge: what she knows is personal, intimate, a form of fascination that relates to constructions of femininity in American culture. It’s rare that a poetry collection asks so many questions rooted in the gaze, itself. What does it mean to “know” a celebrity? And what does it mean to be “known as” a celebrity? What does it mean to replay Marilyn’s entreaties to her physicians for medication, for help, for salvation? What does it mean to imagine ourselves inside her trauma?
The subject and object feel inseparable, as Seaborn’s poems demonstrate. We, the consumers, hold Marilyn hostage to the mythos surrounding her sexuality, her love affairs, her rags-to-riches dream, her mysterious early death. The story of Marilyn is the story of us under capitalism. I keep thinking of this amid recent media coverage of Britney Spears’ conservatorship, amid the countless voices competing to identify with the anomie-inflected life of a child star who was legally never allowed to become an adult. The injustice of her dancing alone in a mansion, cut off from the world and from autonomy, strikes us as criminal. Do we identify with her rejection of therapists (or the desire to “take it to God” and have legal courts accept that as currency)? Do we identify with the unfairness of being used by one’s family for money and fame, of having no safe space in a world of sharks?
Perhaps, in our imaginations, the distance between us and Britney is smaller than the distance between us and the single mother living with kids in a shelter down the street. We don’t want to think about the women in prison whose kids have been taken by the state, and the media doesn’t give us those stories. Instead, we live in Beverly Hills with a paid housestaff and private security and the expectation that our medical needs will be treated by doctors who come to our homes to spare us from dealing with the public. Or maybe we just want this. Maybe we want it so bad that we can’t tell the difference.
[Published by Pank Books on June 21, 2021, 84 pages, $18.00 paperback]