Natasha Dennerstein : Process Note #51 : Thrashing in the wind

The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Natasha Dennerstein is part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.

 

 

A process note on Caught in the Machine, Veronica Lake Poems by Natasha Dennerstein, Be About It Press, 2024.

This chapbook consists of biographical poems about 1940s film star, Veronica Lake, a misunderstood actress and bad girl who faded quickly from the limelight and then died young of alcoholism. It’s a partner chapbook from a series about misunderstood women, the first one being “Broken, a life of Aileen Wuornos in 33 poems.” A third chapbook will be forthcoming to make up a trilogy. Let’s call it “a project.”

I think this following poem is successful, a sort of contemporary sonnet in that it is 14 lines with a closing, snappy little couplet. It contains all the overarching themes of the chapbook: sleight-of-hand illusion, accidental iconography, the arbitrary nature of public success, the divide between reality and fantasy.

1936 Connie Keane, Underage Teenage Beauty Queen.

 

Entered for a lark with my sorority sisters;

paraded like a piece of meat in the cattle market.

Wanted to bump and grind like a burlesque artiste,

make a joke of it, clown around and jerk their chains.

 

On stage I felt nervous and weak at the knees

but wowed them with my transition. A black

satin gown falls quick to the floor: a stark white bathing

suit revealed like a magic trick. Third place in

 

Miss Florida and Mister Richman told

Mom I could be a star. She lit up like a dog

with a porkchop, oh I saw her.

On such serendipity a whole career can turn:

 

the weight of the satin gown; the accidental

contrast between black and white.

There is quite a lot of “form” poems in this chapbook and the following are a pair of ghazals. Sometimes the ghazal is a form that is well-suited to something with a repetitive action or something obsessive or a recurring thought. It behooves a poet well, I believe, to master (or mistress) these forms and use them, or use elements of them, when the occasion suits. As in many disciplines/arts practices, you have to know the rules in order to break them. Like the jazz musician who knows their classical chords and can read music, but then freeform it.

 

1939 Forty Little Mothers

 

I was an extra on the set of Forty Little Mothers

and my pesky, unruly hair kept falling in my eye.

 

Mr Busby Berkeley caught it in his lens and said:

Tell that little blonde to let her hair keep falling in her eye.

 

The camera noticed it and for the sake of continuity

I always had to let my hair keep falling in my eye.

 

From then on in, Paramount made it my trademark and billed me

as the sultry dame with the hair falling in her eye.

 

They even had a name for it: the peekaboo hairdo, but I was

just a seventeen year old kid with hair that kept falling in her eye.

 

In this first ghazal, I tweaked and slightly altered the phraseology and tense of the final repetition of each couplet, the “hair that kept falling in my eye.” I like these micro changes in phrasing. The conceit is that the hair kept accidentally falling in her eye, with no intention on her part. An accident that had to be repeated for the purposes of cinematic continuity, the hair had to always fall in her eye. This serendipity, Lake asserts, is how she accidentally became a star. It echoes the falling black gown in the first poem that reveals a white bathing suit. On such accidents a whole career can be formed. In real life her look and persona were perceived as being artfully constructed, but Veronica Lake said that it was all accidental. As we know, Dr Jung said there was no such thing as an accident/co-incidence, that everything is pre-ordained, that a situation was always just waiting to happen. I don’t think Lake agreed with Dr Jung on this.

The following poem is the other of the pair of ghazals in this process note.

 

1949 Slattery’s Hurricane for 20th Century.

 

We all went down to Miami, a raggle-taggle Hollywood

troupe and the Florida palm trees were thrashing in the wind.

 

Linda Darnell, Richard Widmark and me

and the Florida palm trees thrashing in the wind.

 

Airforce involvement, a love triangle, hurricane chasers

and the Florida palm trees thrashing in the wind.

 

André de Toth (aka Bandi, my husband) directing

and the Florida palm trees thrashing in the wind.

 

I was professional on set but our marriage was breaking

and the Florida palm trees were thrashing in the wind.

 

We drove separately to the set in matching Cadillacs:

locked in celluloid eternity, the Florida palm trees thrash in the wind.

 

I used the repetitive nature of the ghazal to a visual effect in this, with the idea that the visual iconography is eternal, that anything that happened on celluloid would stay that way forever. These thrashing palm trees were pleasing and tempestuous for Veronica but in this poem she is saying “I actually don’t need to be there. Once the thrashing palm trees are in place I can walk away.” She understood that she was just a prop, just a piece of visual iconography and she deliberately walked away from her movie life because it didn’t suit her. There was something self-destructive in her. She preferred to drink her days away with ordinary people of the streets and not hobnob in the rarified circles of the elite. She didn’t think she was one of them and she didn’t want to be. She took her own life into her hands in order to choose to destroy it. In this poem I have Veronica saying “Look at the thrashing palm trees that are thrashing forever. While your eyes are engaged I’m gonna step off set and into my own life. You won’t even notice I’m gone. I’ll be in a dive bar around the corner, yukking it up with some sailors. The palm trees will keep thrashing in the wind.”

 

 

 

 

 

Natasha Dennerstein was born in Melbourne, Australia. She has an MFA from San Francisco State University. Natasha has had poetry published in many journals internationally, including The North American Review and Spoon River Poetry Review. She has had several poetry collections and chapbooks published including, most recently in 2024, the collection Apps Poetica from The Los Angeles Press and the chapbook Caught in the Machine from Be About It Press in Philadelphia. She lives in Oakland, California, where she is the editor-in-chief of Cherry Pie Press, a new LGBTQ Poetry Imprint. She is a Fellow of the Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat.

Maw Shein Win's new full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and her Process Note Series features poets on their process. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at USF and is a member of The Writers Grotto. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a literary community. mawsheinwin.com