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? The idea for the poem was inspired by a throwaway line in a Marlene Dietrich biography (by Alexander Walker), how on the night of the Marilyn Monroe Productions launch she saw a trace of scarlet lipstick on the collar of Marilyn’s white fur and found the sight “maddeningly erotic”.
Click on the link below to purchase LEGENDS MARLENE DIETRICH by Alexander Walker from Amazon
Looking back at my notebook, I jotted down a number of phrases and images in Marlene’s voice to evoke that “maddeningly erotic” feeling and started tracking similar sounds (mink/think/drink/clink) which lead me to land pretty quickly on the villanelle form. I mapped it out on a fresh page (A1, b A2, etc.) and started inserting the phrases and words I was collecting in the slots to fill out the patrn. Chanteuse/chartreuse was the final word sound I landed on as the b rhymes. From there it pretty much wrote itself.
Click on the link below to read about the poetic form Villanelle.
https://www.litcharts.com/literary-devices-and-terms/villanelle
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. My partner and I split our time between NYC and Montreal back in those days, so I’m hazy on exactly where I was at the time. But if it was at the apartment in Montreal, I did all my writing on the glass balcony (BELOW) which was 18 floors up off East Sherbrooke and had a view of downtown, old Montreal, and the Plateau. If it was at the Astoria apartment it would have been in a pre-war, high-ceilinged room filled with art, books, plants, and action figures.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? Sometime in June/July 2011.
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? Not that I recall; the poem pretty much wrote itself. Maybe a word change here or there, but again, nothing I can recall.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? A spirit of playfulness and eroticism. The passing of the torch from one Hollywood blonde icon to another. The importance of this night in Marilyn’s life when she resurfaced in NYC after fleeing the Hollywood studio system to take control of her career and craft. An appreciation for the villanelle form.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional for you to write and why? No part, really. I probably run on the cooler, intellectual end of the poetic spectrum and approach poetry as a vehicle for thinking about emotion, so am pretty dispassionate when I’m writing even if the occasion of the poem came from an emotional experience, in this case empathetically channeling Marlene’s same sex arousal at the sight of Marilyn.
Has this poem been published? And if so where? Yes. Originally in the Academy of American Poet’s Poem-a-Day in May of 2014. Then in my 2017 poetry collection THE MASQUE OF MARILYN. Then in the anthology I WANNA BE LOVED BY YOU: POEMS ON MARILYN MONROE
Click on the below link to read I AM NOT A MYTH from the Academy of American Poet’s website
https://poets.org/poem/i-am-not-myth
Click on. The link below to order THE MASQUE OF MARILYN from Matthew Hittinger’s website.
https://matthewhittinger.com/works/books/the-masque-of-marilyn/
Click on the link below to purchase I WANNA BE LOVED BY YOU: POEMS ON MARILYN MONORE from Milk and Cake Press.
*All proceeds will be donated to RAINN
Click on the below link to visit Matthew Hittinger’s Facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/might.threaten.wit/friends
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