I, Divided
by Chelsea Dingman
(LSU Press, 2023, 126 pp., $22.95)
“I’m tempted to say I begin.” This is the line that ends Chelsea Dingman’s 2023 poetry collection, I, Divided. The book is her fourth (preceded by Thaw in 2017, What Bodies I Have Moved (chapbook) in 2018, and Through a Small Ghost in 2020), and as its final line about beginnings signals, there is a cyclicity to the collection. Birth, death, health, trauma, addiction, and familial relationships are considered and reconsidered through poems that attempt to weather the chaos inherent in a life and strike a balance between determination and choice.
Chaos, incidentally, is a defining characteristic of the collection. The epigraphs tell us as much, taken as they are from Christian Oestreicher’s “A History of Chaos Theory” and Edward Norton Lorenz’s theory of the Butterfly Effect. And while the paratextual material primes us to expect chaos in the collection, the poems still manage to surprise in their full embrace of instability, unpredictability, and equivocation. This chaos is not felt formally; many of the poems follow a regular pattern, often in couplets, and only one or two feel fractured on the page. Even so, it is rare to find a poem that offers a safe harbor in the eye of the storm of uncertainty and potential pain into which they have brought the reader. Instead, they ask and ask and ask again—What is a life worth? What makes it worthwhile, and who decides? And what deference do we owe that decision? Despite its insistence on these questions, however, there still is, as Dingman offers in a 2023 interview with John Sibley Williams, an “answerlessness” to the collection. It might suggest, might suppose, but it won’t answer.
But isn’t answerlessness a hallmark of a good poem after all? Language with teeth that bite, roots that clutch, demanding that you unsettle yourself to consider experience anew? The poems in I, Divided certainly prompt us to do so with their emphasis on possibility and their tension between deterministic inevitability and individual agency. This consideration of the possible governs the first and third sections of the collection, titled “I over what might have been” and “I over what can be,” respectively (echoing the division expressed in the title if we read the “over” as a verbal sign of the vinculum in a fraction). The middle section, “I over what was,” still echoes this titular division, but presents itself as more certain than the other sections with its solid simple past tense of known experience. But even this is troubled, however; what “was” is no longer and only exists warped by the fallibility of memory.
To consider Dingman’s poetry itself, then, I want to linger on “How to Live in Holy Matrimony,” the poem that begins both the section and the book itself. Amidst description of a marriage of sweat and “not yets,” of routine love and inevitable death, the poem demands that we “Consider the conditional. What aches to be other than itself?” It doesn’t answer the question directly, but the answer is no real mystery—the reader recognizes this ache, the desire to experience a different iteration of life and loneliness, and make these holy. Dingman uses this same reverence for the possible and the imagined throughout the rest of this first section as her poems take up subjects ranging from brain injury to suicide to marriage, again. She returns often to the image of a hurricane and its devastation (evocative, perhaps, of both the language of Lorenz’s epigraph and Dingman’s own experience with the natural phenomenon from the years she lived in Florida). Many of the poems circle around themselves as they push toward their conclusion, landing in non-answers of repetition that imply a weary, resigned endurance: “If, in case this doesn’t pass, the rain / is just rain is just rain is just rain” (“Principles of Chaos”); “Any god or human who condemns him as missing / Or whomever, already, we miss, & miss, & miss (“At the Brain Injury Research Institute”); “when a flicker is all & all & all” (“Litany of When”); “says he gave everything so how much can he take & take & take & take” (“Suicidology”). The rain and the missing, the flicker and the taking, continue on, leaving the reader with a sense of something unfinished in the same way the poem “Deterministic Chaos” does, with its ending line of “where the future lies, broken;”. By ending with a semicolon rather than a period, Dingman leaves the poem open to the possible, bleak and broken as it may be.
If the possible shapes the first section of I, Divided, it is memory that shapes the second, “I over what was.” The poems here acknowledge the impulse to “make holy the dead in hindsight,” as this Ginsbergian flash in “Stigmata,” the last poem of the section, asserts. Returning again and again to the topics of death, addiction, suicide, and familial pain, Dingman explores what it means to live through and beyond such intimate anguishes. A number of poems address this particular matrix, but I am often drawn back to “Marcescence” in particular. The poem begins with a statement of a question: “What if death wasn’t easy.” There is no question mark to identify this as a genuine inquiry; instead, the period here signals a speaker that is resigned to the fact that the possibility it asks after has not, and will never, be fulfilled. And yet, as the title signifies, taken as it is from the phenomenon of a deciduous tree failing to drop its leaves in the winter, there is something retained that shouldn’t be. Is it hope? Love, even in the face of a person who was difficult to love? A dream that a dying brother could still somehow “stand ungrateful” with the speaker? The poem ends with the line “I have no idea what any of this means,” and, although it refuses to grant readers some clear meaning about what is to be done with this holding on or how to make sense of it, the incomprehensibility and frustration it expresses seem fitting for an exploration of death. Making meaning from death, especially when one is not sure what, if anything, comes after (a topic in this section that “Noli Me Tangere” discusses directly, and other poems in the collection touch on obliquely) makes answering the “so what” or the “why” of suffering nearly impossible. And yet the poems in “I over what was,” do not give up in their attempt to find some clarity about death as they look to the past, to “any bankrupt thing / bearing the marks of life” (“Stigmata”).
I, Divided ends with “I over what can be,” a consideration of the future, and importantly, the future that “can be,” not the future that “might be.” I draw attention to the specific modal helping verb not (merely) for the sake of close reading pedantry, but to note that it sets up a future that seems predicated on some agency or action on the speaker’s behalf—it must be achieved. What a future it is: aging, motherhood, cancer, the loss of a mother, and death are what we have to look forward to. And are these things really possible to achieve, when so many of them come down to mere accident or the inevitable progression of time in the end? As she weighs this question, Dingman constructs a future that is elegiac in nature as it mourns and remembers the life that came before. One such poem is the seven-part sonnet sequence “It’s Possible a Mother’s Body Is Elegy.” In it, Dingman uses variations on the sonnet to create an interconnected and cyclical reflection on womanhood and the loss of a mother. The poem is wracked with grief, even as its speaker explains that she “can’t grieve.” But her abnegation and loneliness shine through regardless in the use of nature images of barrenness and winter, and in the characterization of the lost mother as “a cistern, a sense, a silence.” It too, like other poems in the collection already discussed here, never fully concludes; its final line “I stayed away until your body was—” not only ends with the unclosed em-dash but also is an exact return to the line that began the sequence. The grief and the loss are inescapable, enduring. The reading of this poems is not to imply, of course, that this future-looking final section of Dingman’s collection is entirely cynical. There are small moments of hope throughout—that the lump won’t be cancer, that the child will live safely, that things will be better. But even so, these are qualified hopes, the hopes of a speaker who almost seeks a kind of oblivion in life, who opens a window and “The sky spits. I feel, & I feel nothing. / I anoint myself with sky, & swallow.”
As a whole collection, Chelsea Dingman’s I, Divided manages to engage with the bleak, the troubling, and the painful elements of life without becoming buried by them and without losing itself to deterministic nihilism. There is a resilience, quiet as it may be, to the collection as it takes up its various subjects that keep the poems feeling new, even as they return to similar themes and subjects throughout. The strongest section by far is the first, “I over what might have been.” Dingman’s use of natural imagery and the principles of chaos theory are felt most vividly here and lend the poems a firm foundation and frame for the questions they ask. And while answerlessness may still be the prevailing feeling at the close of the collection, one reads the final poem with the sense that they still have managed to get somewhere, or learn something, or open some new door, and that, at least for Dingman, is enough.