Review: Heidi Seaborn
On An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe by Heidi Seaborn
by Tyler Truman Julian
Heidi Seaborn’s An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe is a fever dream of deeply sensual and human detail. The collection is at once poetic and historic: a probing exploration into and extrapolation onto the life of Monroe. By juxtaposing persona and confessional poems, ekphrastic and lyric moments, Seaborn creates a complete and beautiful collection that moves well beyond mere biography or simple ode. This is a complex look at a woman who we all think we know, placed beside the life of a speaker, who, in many ways, could be any of us, alone in the night.
Personally, I am fascinated and troubled by persona poems. At their best, they give voice to historical and fictional characters and (through research and care) add layers to their stories. At their worst, they might feel like a rip-off or even an appropriation. An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe takes on an immense challenge in channeling the voice of Norma Jeane Baker, but the complicated dance of poet, persona, Seaborn, Monroe is choreographed beautifully. The bantering voices, the word play, the use of historically accurate detail all work in Seaborn’s collection to give voice to a woman that so many people (often men) have spoken for throughout the years and to also shape a narrative that helps a speaker, the Insomniac, find her own peace.
At the beginning of the collection, Marilyn is presented through the speaker’s sleepless gaze and in ekphrasis. “She arrives,” the Insomniac, unable to sleep, announces, and describes her as “a gardenia in a cellophane box” (“Marilyn”). The following poem makes clear this nocturnal visit, if new, is not unusual; the speaker is not simply a fan. There’s an otherworldly connection between the women. The Insomniac sees Marilyn everywhere:
On the wall of the cowboy bar in Wyoming
a photo of Marilyn in a potato sack. Naked
legs like a chorus girl. IDAHO spanning
her breasts, POTATOES cinching her waist,
100 LBS. NET marking her pubis, marking her
as a bag of produce, to be slit open, dumped
into a bin, priced and purchased. To be
someone’s mash, soup fries rolled in tin
& baked until she steams when sliced
with a knife from end to end, butter seeping.
(“I see her everywhere—”)
In this way, Seaborn highlights how hungry eyes look at women, especially women like Marilyn Monroe, remembered (often solely) for the roles they play. From here, Seaborn offers the first poem in Marilyn’s voice. This shift, immediately following “I see her everywhere—” and the introduction of the Insomniac, creates a believable arc, in which Marilyn has an opportunity to respond to what has already been presented:
It used to bother me
when people I didn’t know touched
me they haven’t
loved me no not really
…
I turn & smile blow a kiss
that is really nothing
a transaction of air
(“What I Give of Myself”)
Because Marilyn’s character is developed alongside (and even after) the speaker in these poems, the persona also reaches back to Seaborn’s speaker. Marilyn becomes not only a historically accurate representation of herself, but she also becomes what the Insomniac needs in order to make sense of the chaotic world around her and her relationship to a partner who sleeps through this quasi-dark night of the soul. Thus, Marilyn, as presented in the collection, is a more true-to-life rendition of herself than we often see in popular culture. Likewise, she is a looking glass in which the Insomniac can compare her life and seek meaning, even if at times the mirror is the warped glass of a funhouse. In “Snapping a Selfie,” for example, it’s hard to tell who exactly is speaking, Marilyn or the Insomniac, when Seaborn writes, “All that glimmers is what / keeps me up at night. But last night was a blur. / Isn’t it always that way when you wake up and look / in the mirror at who you were yesterday? / Some days, it’s best to stay in bed way past / when the robins have gone.” In this poem, it does not matter who is speaking, instead the focus is on the connection between the two lives, setting the stage for the type of reflection that comes from looking at the life of another and pulling back a façade, created by years in the public eye.
Beyond the moments where the voices blur together, Marilyn’s voice is distinct, historically accurate, and she speaks back to the Insomniac. In perhaps the most poignant moment of the collection, the Insomniac and Marilyn go back and forth, line for line, as Marilyn recounts her death. The warning of the collection comes out in these lines: “there is so much grief / in glamour” (“take that bow then slag off”). Marilyn, regardless of whether the image presented is the whole truth and nothing but the truth, becomes what the speaker needs. For the speaker (and perhaps the poet herself), coming to know Marilyn (perhaps more aptly Norma Jeane) beyond what is presented on camera has given her permission to be herself, to accept herself. From the penultimate “bow,” the speaker finally is able to sleep. She tells us,
I slept in, slept through the night.
I slept without Ambien’s dark
fist pressing my pillow. Slept all night.
…
In the stacked white boxes
up the hill, the honeybees doze.
(“Then I Slept”)
The speaker has found the peace Marilyn was unable to during her life. Marilyn is able to play a good fairy, guardian angel role for the speaker, and the conceit of the insomnia, the dreamy set-up of the collection, coupled with Seaborn’s obvious research elevates these poems to a place of emotional and historical merit for the reader.
Marilyn Monroe is real on these pages, far more real than Bert Stern’s eroticized account of her “Last Sitting.” The Insomniac is real and relatable. This is a collection to learn from, to teach from. Like “the heavy perfume / of daphne drift[ing] through an open window” this collection lingers, Marilyn Monroe lingers, our fascination with celebrity lingers, and Heidi Seaborn has created a work of art that is alive and different, something large enough for the characters in it.