After Susana H. Case and I gave a Lit Balm Reading in December, 2020, with Stephen Dunn (his poems read by Indran Amirthanayagam), and Maurya Simon, and after Susana and I both read poems that mentioned Marilyn Monroe, Susana asked me if I would like to work on an anthology of poems about Monroe. Although I didn’t know much about her life and work and actually thought of her as a dumb blond, as so many have, I was curious about her horrifying fate.
The Lip Blam Reading in December of 2020
https://www.facebook.com/LitBalm/videos/299413001494079
Stephen Dunn (Below Left)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Dunn
Indran Amirthanayagam (Below Middle)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/indran-amirthanayagam
Maurya Simon (Below Right)
The first publisher that we approached, Milk & Cake Press, signed onto the project; they will publish the book anthology, I Wanna Be Loved By You: Poems On Marilyn Monroe on February 14, 2022. We decided to donate any proceeds from the sale of the anthology to RAINN, the largest U.S. nonprofit that fights against sexual violence.
Click to pre-order I Wanna Be Loved By You: Poems On Marilyn Monroe from Milk & Cake Press
Marilyn Monroe singing “I Wanna Be Loved By You”
RAINN
Susana and I requested poems from poets who we knew and researched poems by famous authors such as Sylvia Plath and Gwendolyn Brooks in order to seek permission to publish their poems about Monroe. We received and discovered over ninety Monroe poems by major and up-and-coming poets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwendolyn_Brooks
Lois Banner, who initiated the women’s history movement and who authored several books on Monroe, wrote the anthology introduction.
Lois Banner Facebook Page
https://www.facebook.com/lois.banner.75
Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox by Lois Banner
On the 2022 sixtieth anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death, this Marilyn anthology—including poems by Sharon Olds, David Trinidad, David Lehman, Marilyn Chin, Delmore Schwartz, Ernesto Cardinal, Denise Duhamel, Ted Berrigan, Frank O’Hara, Ai, and Marilyn herself—is the definitive collection of poetry on this iconic figure of beauty and femininity who was the harbinger of the feminist movement.
In order to understand why so many major writers such as Norman Mailer, Gloria Steinem, Lois Banner, Carl Rollyson, and so many poets are fascinated by Marilyn Monroe, Susana and I set about researching the facts of Monroe’s life and work.
With the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique just a year after the tragic death of Marilyn Monroe, the second wave feminist women crusaders hit the pavement and the new women’s movement began.
While Monroe was alienated and displaced from everyday life due to the exploitation that she suffered as a child, she paved the way for the feminist movement through her struggles to combine sensuality with intellectual curiosity; her refusal to be silenced about the sexual abuse and harassment that she had experienced as a child; her rebellion against the dumb blond role and dull formulaic work that she was dealt; her serious study of acting and her interest in literature, pursuits which many psychologists admonished against because they believed such development would make women unsatisfied with their lot; her immediate divorce of DiMaggio after he physically abused her at a time when wife beating was considered acceptable by many; her struggle to resist male domination by directors and producers by being one of the first women to start her own film production company; and her interest in continuing her career as an older woman and reinventing herself when most female actresses after the age of forty were encouraged to retire as homemakers. Through her courageous actions, Marilyn Monroe was a pioneer of the women’s movement and helped to usher in the liberalizing of views by and about women in the decades to come.
Her relevance continues today in terms of raising questions about gender roles and their enactment, and the ways in which women attempt to negotiate the differences between their private and public personae. At a time when binary aspects of gender are challenged, this anthology, divided into four sections on persona, body, art, and death, is a literary look at a historical figure damaged by the reification of rigid gender rules.
SUSANA H. CASE has authored eight books of poetry, most recently The Damage Done, Broadstone Books, 2022. Dead Shark on the N Train, Broadstone Books, 2020 won a Pinnacle Book Award for Best Poetry Book, a NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite, and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. The first of her five chapbooks, The Scottish Café, Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press. She co-edited, with Margo Taft Stever, the anthology I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk and Cake Press, 2022. Case is a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. http://www.susanahcase.com/.
MARGO TAFT STEVER’s three full-length poetry collections are The End of Horses (Broadstone Books, 2022); Cracked Piano (CavanKerry Press, 2019) shortlisted and honorable mention for the 2021 Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize; and Frozen Spring (2002 Mid-List Press First Series Award for Poetry). Her latest of four chapbooks is Ghost Moose (Kattywompus Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in literary magazines including Verse Daily, Plant-Human Quarterly, Cincinnati Review, Rattapallax, upstreet, Salamander, West Branch, Poet Lore, Blackbird, Poem-A-Day, poets.org, Academy of American Poets, and Prairie Schooner. She is currently an adjunct assistant professor in the Bioethics Department of the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University. Stever also teaches a poetry workshop at Children’s Village, a residential school for at-risk children and adolescents. She is founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and founding and current co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. (www.margotaftstever.com)
