Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? “Four Days at Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, 1961” is part of my most recent collection An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe which won the [PANK] Books Poetry Prize and was published in 2020. The book was my MFA thesis at NYU.
Click on the below link to purchase An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe from PANK Books.
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This poem was written during the fall of 2018 (September) when I had just started my MFA program. I had decided to write in the persona of Marilyn Monroe as a challenge.
My advisor that term was Robin Coste Lewis who urged me to conduct intensive research on Marilyn. Through that, I discovered a book of her poems, letters, diary entries, etc. called Fragments. I began collaging lines from these artifacts into poems to steep myself in her voice.
Click on the below link to visit the Facebook of Robin Coste Lewis
Click on the link below to purchase Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe
This poem emerged from a long letter that Marilyn had written to her psychiatrist Dr. Greenson during her four-day imposed stay at Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in 1961. I was blown away by this letter and her description of not only Payne Whitney and her treatment there, but how she was coping. I knew I had to take some of the lines from the letter and incorporate them into poetry.
Click on the link below to read Marilyn Monroe’s six-page letter to Dr. Ralph Greenson
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I was sitting at my desk in the kitchen of my house. If I looked to the to the left, I could see my garden and the maple trees up the hill in the woods turning golden. To my right, I could see out the front window to Puget Sound, sparkling on a bright fall day. Surrounded by beauty, I was nonetheless, transported to the cruel setting of a New York City mental institution in 1961.
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us? Amazingly, the poem is exactly as originally drafted. It survived four advisors, a thesis defense, and my editor. I did make some line break edits from the first draft.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? This is not a patient patient—the speaker (Marilyn) in this poem is active, as is evidenced by the verbs, she is resistant and defiant. The short lines and repetition are there to mimic the rigidity and repetitive nature of her confinement and to suggest a mind that is both alert and anxious. The repetitive line ‘hold that thought’ serves as reminder to the speaker that she must keep it together to get released, and to draw the reader’s attention to the previous lines.
In her letter, Marilyn described using her acting skills to gain attention so that she could get released. This prompted me to employ film-making language such as ‘lines’, ‘act’, ‘movie’, ‘scene’ and ‘cut’—the latter also referring to a girl Marilyn mentions who suggests cutting oneself to get attention.
The one penultimate long line is directly from her letter and is there to slow the poem down so that the reader pauses on this thought that Marilyn expressed, as it is a line that encapsulates that moment in time—science and technology fueling a space race, while any sign of mental illness could land someone, including the infamous Marilyn Monroe, in an institution with archaic medical practices. I want the reader to understand the pathos and the irony of this experience for Marilyn.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? The lines: ‘very very sick girl’ and ‘very very dark place’ break my heart because they came directly from Marilyn’s letter. By following them with the repeating ‘hold that thought’ I underscore these lines for the reader.
Click on below link to read Heidi Seaborn’s poem in the American Journal of Poetry
https://www.theamericanjournalofpoetry.com/v11-seaborn.htm
Has this poem been published? And if so where? The poem has been published in American Journal of Poetry (January, 2021), in the poetry collection An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe ([PANK] Books, 2021).
And in the anthologyI WANNA BE LOVED BY YOU: Poems on Marilyn Monroe (edited by Susana H. Case & Margo Taft Stever, Milk and Cake Press, 2022). All proceeds from I WANNA VBE LOVED BY YOU: Poems on Marilyn Monroe will be donated to RAINN.
Click on link below to purchase anthologyI WANNA BE LOVED BY YOU: Poems on Marilyn Monroe from Milk and Cake Press.
*All proceeds will be donated to RAINN
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Most of the BACKSTORY OF THE POEM links can be found at the very end of the below feature:
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/02/will-justice-drakes-intercession-is-251.html