Marilyn Monroe, Poet [by Heidi Seaborn]

Tomorrow on June 1, Marilyn Monroe would have celebrated her 95^th birthday. Even now, nearly sixty years after her death, she remains one of the world’s most iconic figures. We know that she continues to serve as muse and subject to poets, but she was also someone who had a deep relationship to poetry. The poet Heidi Seaborn’s new collection An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe arrives on Marilyn’s birthday having won the PANK Books Poetry Prize. Best American Poetry has invited Seaborn to guest edit a week devoted to Marilyn Monroe in Poetry.

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After her death, Arthur Miller said of his former wife, Marilyn Monroe, “…she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.” As a poet who has written a collection largely in the persona of Marilyn Monroe, I find Miller’s description sad, but also intriguing. Did he really see her as a poet, or was he referring to her as having a poetic soul? Having thoroughly researched Monroe for my collection, An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe (PANK Books, June 2021), it’s not clear that Arthur Miller ever read Marilyn’s poetry. But I have.

When Marilyn died in 1962, her personal possessions were bequeathed to her acting coach and friend, Lee Strasberg. Decades later, and long after Strasberg was also dead, his widow Anna Strasberg discovered two boxes of Marilyn’s letters, journals and poems. Eventually the contents of those boxes became a book, Fragments (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010, edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment). Fragments contains mostly handwritten documents reproduced and transposed into text and some letters Marilyn typed herself. What’s revealed is everything from Marilyn’s grocery list for a party to letters to psychiatrists, to her notes for an upcoming interview with Life Magazine to her inner most anxieties. And intertwined in all these remnants from her heart and mind, are poems or fragments of poems. Here from a red spiralbound ‘Livewire’ notebook that Buchthal and Comment attribute to being from the summer of 1958 when Marilyn was in LA filming Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot.

 

“I left my home of green rough wood—

a blue velvet couch I dream till now

a shiny bush just left of the door.

[illegible] down the walk clickity clack as my doll

in her carriage went over the cracks—“We’ll go far away”

The meadows are huge the earth (will be) hard

on my back. The grass surged touched

the blue and still white clouds changing from an

old man shapes to a smiling dog with ears flying

Look—

The meadows are reaching—they’re touching the sky

We’ll leave We left our outlines against/on the crushed grass.

It will die sooner because we were there—will something

else have grown?

Don’t cry my doll don’t cry

I hold you and rock you to sleep.

hush hush I’m I was only pretending now that I’m (was)

not your mother who died.

I shall feed you from the shiny dark bush

just left of the door.” [1]

Marilyn never finished this or any of the rough drafts of poems that we find in journals and sheets of hotel stationary. Inspired, I wove lines from Marilyn’s forgotten poems into my own, to create a collage of her voice and the one I created for her in my persona poems. In one, I pulled lines from a poem Marilyn had written on the stationary at the Parkside House in Surrey, England where she and her brand-new husband, Arthur Miller, stayed while she filmed The Prince and the Showgirl in 1956. In my research, I had discovered an interview given by a maid who took care of the Millers at the Parkside House. In the interview, the maid described observing Marilyn writing and quietly crying. In my poem, I combine the observer and observed:

 

What the Maid Witnessed

~with lines from a maid’s interview and a poem Marilyn Monroe wrote in 1956

 

Mrs. Miller alone at the kitchen table, writing, a cup of tea

                                She remembers—her pale chiffon dress

pink robe

                            that she wore on a windy afternoon when she walked

feathers fluttering at her wrists like cherry petals

                            where no one had ever been

fingers curl a pencil

                            her clear-eyed baby who lived to die

hair the color of her milky tea

                            The woman stares

confetti of tears

                            & stares in space[2]

 

To have gathered Marilyn’s words into my own poetry feels like an act of completion. And recognition, that I am recognizing Marilyn not just as a poetic soul, but as a poet. I came very late in life to poetry and to being known as a poet, I imagine that if Marilyn had continued living, she might have turned more deeply to poetry. And be renown not her celebrity and beauty but also for her words.

 

 

[1] Fragments by Marilyn Monroe, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010, edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment

[2] An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe by Heidi Seaborn (PANK Books, 2021)

 

Comments

[David Lehman]

Thank you for this fascinating post. Here on the BAP blog we never let June1st go by without an homage to Marilyn.

[Heidi A Seaborn]

Absolutely!

[David]

Top, thanks for post