Two Reviews of Kate Durbin’s Kept Women

Two Reviews
of Kate Durbin’s Kept Women

Kept Women
Kate Durbin

Parrot Series #15
Matthew Timmons, Ed.

Insert Blanc Press
November 2012
12pp., saddle-stapled
$9

by Lysette Simmons

 

With Kept Women — Kate Durbin’s contribution to Insert Press’ PARROT Series — the poet continues her exploration of “cinesexuality” and the public’s fascination with reality-as-entertainment. Durbin notes that her “inspiration for the voice was crime scene reportage, decorating magazines, and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, all fused.” One easily hears John Waters subbing for Robin Leach in this macabre lifestyles tour. The reader floats alongside the speaker throughout the grounds of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion in a manner similar to Gaspar Noé’s camera-ghost in Enter the Void. Indeed, the observed realm is almost as grotesque, alluring, and debauched as Noé’s Void, and one might be reminded particularly of the Love Hotel sequence. Yet, in contrast, there are no humans to be seen throughout Kept Women — only evidence of their inhabitation…where are Hef’s “kept women?”

Kept’s formal aesthetic draws from the surreal meandering of E! Entertainment’s reality television show, “The Girls Next Door.” All of the poems have exaggerated margins, forcing the language into a TV-like box, apparently without consideration for possible line breaks or stanzas. Throughout the course of the poems, readers notice that Hefner’s girlfriends have been similarly boxed. In contrast with E! Entertainment — Durbin’s previous work with reality television and star-obsessed media also on Insert Blanc Press — the poet never transcribes dialogue. And though the women themselves are never seen or heard, the degree of curation imposed on the lives of these women is observably huge. The theme of curation is central to the work, particularly through tools of control, history, façade, and preservation.

The opening poem, “Divine Destination,” features the only living creatures in Kept Women; and even then, the presence of “flamingoes, peacocks, African cranes, macaws, monkeys, rabbits, llamas, and dogs” only serves to “add a rainbow hue to the…color scheme.” The lyric’s slant rhyme between “macaws” and “dogs” has a nursery-rhyme rhythm, and what is the effect of nursery rhyme but to preserve itself in a child’s memory? In the context of the Playboy Mansion’s rooms, consider the definition of curation; to carefully select, arrange, and preserve specific objects for posterity. One might then think of Kept Women’s speaker as docent to the Playboy-Mansion-as-museum, each curated room its own poem. Further, the curation in the rooms increasingly reflects that of a set or scene. The objects and their placement — whether intentional or apparently hazardous — give hints as to the fate of absent characters.

As such, façade affects everything. This includes exterior “sloping hills, idyllic” only for their intended purpose, which is, of course, to be slid down upon by bare silicone breasts, or to delight lucky guests with sheets of artificial snow whenever Hef decides winter should grace his California Kingdom. In “Stone Sanctuary,” façade confronts “nature” in the Mansion’s infamous grotto; its interior “implanted with panels of prehistoric objects,” while human “hair in stages of blond” clogs the pool’s filters. One could write entirely on tangent about the double meaning of “stage,” here in the context of performativity and “blondeness” — the book, after all, presents readers with stages upon which these blondes must perform.

“King’s Quarters,” reveals the peculiar tapestry that is Hugh Hefner’s highly curated personal history. The very first line’s masculine, alliterative consonance in “mammoth monarch’s master” enforces a mood of domination and control. The speaker catalogues the bedroom’s carefully selected clutter, which ranges from high to low culture, vintage to contemporary, obvious to quirky. Then, the speaker starts accounting an eerie series of control mechanisms that thread the rooms and lives of Kept Women. Juxtaposed with the clutter, the closet contains “men’s Prada shirts — ten in every color — and thirty red velvet bathrobes. There is also a row of twenty pink silk women’s pajamas in various sizes, shrouded in plastic.” Hefner has clearly mastered the art of icon…yet “art” is not an insidious enough term to describe the mathematically chosen, shrunkwrapped garb available for she who can fit into it.

Even the sexual ephemera found, unsurprisingly, in every poem-room become less novel when seen placed so close to “a bottle of Viagra” in the “Roman Fountain” bathroom; “a prescription bottle of Clomid” in near photographs of previous girlfriends in the “Vintage Vanity”; “an unmarked bottle of pink pills” near the “Control Clutter Closet…(color and calendar coordinated)” in the women’s “Pink Playpen.” These women’s lives are controlled through the placement of objects around them; everything from physical appearance to sexual and reproductive organs is controlled. The speaker of Kept Women reveals that compartmentalization takes place in each room of the Mansion — she who physically resides within is not seen or described because she is not important; the Mansion’s objects and surroundings are central to the speaker-docent’s tour, for whoever resides within inevitably becomes the figure the scene has been set for.

As the reader moves from the master bedroom, through the bathroom and vanity, to the women’s bedrooms, Durbin intensifies moments of anxiety and terror that began earlier in the “Stone Sanctuary.” There, in one of Kept’s purposely rare moments of emotional register — made all the more heartbreaking for the plain reportage — readers find sea “sponges in the shower [that] were once natural, living creatures.” This elicits a crucial anxiety that heightens throughout the poems’ sequence of “events” — or rather, rooms as evidence of people and events: some degree of trauma has occurred within the observed space. The speaker catalogues objects in a tone removed of emotion, just as a medical examiner might report damage done to a cadaver. The sponge reminds the reader of a victim; something that once lived, now, as object, signifies death. The pool’s broken glass shards echo through to the “half empty bottle of Absolut Vodka under the bed” in the “Tomboy Boudoir.” The bottle’s hiding-place smacks of secret drinking, and its discovery next to a Las Vegas phone number (no name attached) evokes a sense of desperation.

This is not to say the poet intends a direct criticism of Hefner’s lifestyle; Durbin seems more concerned with the reader’s relationship to the content’s presentation — much in the way one worries less about what the daily news is than the way daily news is delivered. By the end of Kept Women, Durbin successfully changes the viewing activity of reality-as-entertainment into an active reading of trauma, or post-trauma. Readers become increasingly self-aware as the speaker’s emotional detachment from the scenes feels tensely at odds with the negated inhabitants. The women’s physical bodies are acutely absent from the poems, as if the speaker is treating a fresh crime scene like a museum tour. Again, where are Hef’s women? Durbin has called such celebrated televised bodies “ciphers for our desires we don’t want to name and claim.” Cipher, by definition, also means “zero,” or, a person who seems to have no will of his or her own. Durbin presents zero-women in Kept Women, and in the poet’s words, “the price for being a cipher, especially if you are a woman, is very high.” Kept Women is a well-crafted observation of curation, both in life and onscreen, and its effect on the viewer. Just as Hefner controls his life, image, and “girlfriends” through selection, availability, and placement of objects, Durbin, through her speaker, controls what the reader sees, and, perhaps more importantly, does not see.

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Jon Rutzmoser is an artist, writer, and educator living in Buffalo, NY. His writing has appeared in Drunken Boat, Joyland, X-TRA, Prism of Reality, and artforum.com. He is the author of shhhh! it’s poetry, forthcoming from Insert Blanc Press, and Dinner Poems, co-authored with Amanda Montei and forthcoming from Bon Aire Projects.

Lysette Simmons is from California, where she studied Creative Writing and Music History at UCLA. She has studied with Ben Lerner, Anselm Berrigan and Marjorie Welish at Brooklyn College where she recently earned an M.F.A. in poetry. Lysette Simmons’s forthcoming chapbook, Dear Robert, won the Wild and Wyrd Poetry Chapbook Contest, judged by C.A. Conrad, in 2011. Dear Robert will be released by MadHat Press in 2013.