June 2023

Caesura Presents…Chelsea Dingman

Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw, won the National Poetry Series (UGA Press, 2017). Her second book,through a small ghost, won The Georgia Poetry Prize (UGA Press, 2020). Her third collection I, Divided, is forthcoming from LSU Press in 2023. She is also the author of the chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018). She is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Alberta. Visit her website: chelseadingman.com.

Website: https://chelseadingman.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chelseahrechuk.dingman/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/chelsdingman

The Body & Its Lack

John:
Congratulations on the publication of The Georgia Poetry Prize winning Through a Small Ghost! Such fiercely tender work. So gritty yet intimate. I deeply loved your previous collection, Thaw, but something about this one, maybe because I’m now a parent, really struck me emotionally. As a parent of three beautiful children yourself, what drove you to write these potent poems of grief and trauma?

Chelsea:

I had undergone a ten-year period of infertility and miscarriage after my second son was born. I had previously had a miscarriage between my two boys as well. I had finished Thaw in addition to my MFA thesis, which was an exploration of my grandfather’s emigration from (what was then) Poland in 1924. My grandfather’s life was hard, but his life was impacted greatly by the deaths of two of his children, one who was stillborn. I began to think about the women in my life and how they’d been affected by these experiences—my grandmothers, my mother, my friends. Miscarriage and infertility were open secrets, however. They weren’t often spoken about in my experience. I had this feeling of wanting to be transparent about these experiences but cognizant of how different each experience is—of how individual grief can be, which is isolating, while also being something shared. I was also at a point where I had given up on having another child, & I needed a space to mourn that. I think I was at the point in which hope hurt worse than the alternative. I needed to look at this experience and not look away until I had narrativized it, in some Freudian sense. Or, perhaps, as Jean-Luc Nancy would say, by speaking the experiences of these poems, I was attesting to a crisis of self. While doing so, I got pregnant with my daughter who is three now. I had written this book during my final year in my MFA. When I found out I was pregnant, I emailed Jay Hopler (my mentor) to say that the act of writing these poems had brought me closer to what I hadn’t dared to articulate in the collection. Like I’d discovered magic or something. But writing isn’t magic nor is pregnancy. Both are hard. Instead, the poems became a place where I could embrace hope and hopelessness at the same time and ask unanswerable questions. If poems listen, I think they also ask the writer to listen. I was driven by a need to sit in those poems and listen.

 John:

Given how much you’ve gone through, so much of which I can empathize with given my partner and I’s infertility issues and miscarriages, how do you approach such intensely delicate subjects with so much sensitivity yet without sentimentality? It’s a delicate balancing act, exploring such themes without maudlinness, without overplaying your hand. Your work always seems so genuine and universal.

Chelsea:

Image. Sound. I think I fall back on those elements when I am in sentimental territory. I rely on them to convey feeling. In some ways, it is easier to default to an image than to directly state a feeling. I also write from the standpoint that the self in the poem is mediated, therefore all my poems are persona poems to a degree (I recently read early modern writer Frances Burney in a grad class, and she addressed her work to “Nobody” so that she had the freedom to say whatever she needed to say, whereby that nobody becomes a second self that one is writing to. It also helps to not think that the poem might ever have a reader except that other self). In that way, I am writing from this fictive self and certain realizations toward the uncertainty of self and the self’s fictions. I often think it is so much easier to be a poet (than writing non-fiction) because every detail is in service of the poem, not the poet. Not memory. Not feeling. But the experience of the poem. I need these mediations to gain emotional distance from the experiences. What I appreciate in a poem is honesty, which feels more authentic than reaching for certain “truths.” The images and sounds in my poems hold emotional “truths” that are not explicitly stated in the poems, which is what draws me to poetry. In this book, I tried to use images and sounds that I hadn’t seen before in reference to these experiences. I wanted to be explicit in that.

John:

A beautiful, rich answer; thank you. And I couldn’t agree more with the idea of “emotional truths,” which also guide my work. You mention images and sounds, but I’d love to know how you employ structures. Throughout this collection, you employ traditional alignment, white space, couplets, multiple sections, and other unique visual structures to guide our reading of each piece. How do you choose your structures, and how do you hope they effect our interpretations?

Chelsea:

Much like tonal shifts between poems in a collection, I like to keep the reader off-balance with the use of form, line breaks, and the page. In this collection, the fragmentary nature of the speaker’s emotional landscape needed to be mirrored on the page. When I employ structures such as sections, I’m attempting to construct an outer landscape that echoes the inner landscape so that one informs the other. Similarly, with white space—less like a breath or a pause in this case than the brief moment of life that a fetus might have lived or the brief months of pregnancy—I was using form to mirror content. With the use of couplets and traditional alignment, I am attempting to subvert readerly expectation, yet creating a tension between the body within the body of the poem (and the body within the body of the speaker). For the most part, I thought about the stuckness of this drawn-out period of infertility—how it was nearly impossible to psychically move past it some days. Thus, the repetition doesn’t allow a linear narrative to progress. Thus, structure was needed when the internal landscape of the speaker was dissembling. One offsets the other, but also holds the other intact. It is very important to me that the page either reflect or subvert the content of the poem. I wanted the structural shifts across pages in the collection to act as tonal shifts while also being surprising. I was told, when beginning this work, that writing about domestic life or the body in this way might mean these poems would not find readers. I realized after awhile that this was the only way I could write this and that had to be enough. I think, in that way, I couldn’t think about the reader until I assembled the manuscript. I hope now that the reader is unsettled throughout. And haunted.

John:

Speaking of how organically you approach structures, can you delve a bit deeper into your poem “A World Within a World?” In it, you employ a unique staccato rhythm with fractured lines that build a fractured narrative while also using brackets (sometimes empty) to allow the reader to directly insert their own interpretation onto the page. How did this approach come to you, and what effect do you hope it has on readers?

Chelsea:

I had realized that I kept reaching for definitions, even through image and sound, for pregnancy, motherhood, miscarriage etc. as if that would ease the attendant grief. But I could not find a resolution where there is none. I also wanted to reject the idea of cause and effect regarding child loss and infertility when there is so little that is within someone’s control but so much guilt attached to it. Hence, the brackets. I felt that the experience of miscarriage and stillbirth were somewhat like asides in a life. Sometimes, an experience can be narrativized and sometimes not. Sometimes one is listened to, sometimes not. Sometimes, the emptiness that one is left with in the wake of a loss also feels like an aside. What to do in the wake of such emptiness? How to explain that to anyone who doesn’t know that experience? The brackets signified that for me. All of the possibility and its lack. The body, & its lack. The self, & its lack. The labels of motherhood etc, & their lack. Hope & its lack. The brackets signify what cannot be signified. The fractured lines are like fractured selves strewn between these ideas of self. What might I be called if I had a child and now don’t? Can I call myself a mother? What does it even mean to be called mother? Even if the child only existed for a few weeks. I was toying with this idea of signifiers, & the lack of definition when defining something makes it final in some way. I resisted that sense of finality in this poem. Instead, I wanted the reader to meet me at the page. As a mother and pregnant person, I had been shamed numerous times for choices I made, whether by random people or health care professionals, while at the same time I’d been glorified for my reproductive potential. I wanted that tension to exist in this poem, while acknowledging what an isolating experience motherhood can be, whether one has suffered child loss or not.

John:

So very true. A parent’s world is a deeply conflicted, often fragmented one. We’re inundated with purely positive stories of parenthood, as if there’s only one possible experience to be shared by all. But the reality is much more complicated.

You also use the amazing phrase “labels of motherhood.” Throughout this and your previous collection, there’s a sense of your work pushing against such labels, that struggle to pull things out of the boxes we’ve uncomfortably placed them in.

When working on this collection, were you reading any other poets who focus on family and motherhood? And, in general, what other poets have you felt true thematic kinship with the past few years?

Chelsea: 

I very much like to push against definition in all my work, I think. Categorizing or taxonomizing things seems to be what we are asked to do in academia (& in grad school) & I am drawn to poetry precisely because it allows me to refuse definition. In so many ways, I think definitions are somewhat dangerous, particularly to identity-building. They don’t allow for possibility when the body, the work, equal possibility for me. When working on this collection, I found work with similar themes by many writers, but it was curious how different the work was if written by someone who had experienced pregnancy as opposed to a witness, though all the work was beautiful & terrifying & shattering. I had taught Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s poems from Paper Doll Fetus which I had found early on. I was also teaching Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler and some poems from Incendiary Art, so playing with persona began there. I love Kevin Young’s Book of Hours, Lucille Clifton’s Collected Poems, Geffrey Davis’ Night Angler, Nancy Reddy’s poems from Pocket Universe, The Carrying by Ada Limón, and other writers that deal with aspects of parenthood, selfhood, and its challenges in unique ways, such as Brigit Pegeen Kelly (all three books), Jennifer Chang’s Some Say the Lark, Aracelis Girmay (all three books), Li-Young Lee (all books). I was working on my thesis with Traci Brimhall, and her work hugely informed that period as well. As strange as it might sound, a book that was hugely impactful on my work toward the end of this book and into my forthcoming book was Allison Benis White’s please bury me in this. The way Allison uses the page, the juxtaposition of text with absence, of silence with sound, the ways in which one can be the burial place and the buried object at the same time, interests me. There are so many artists I could thank for the writing of each book. I could never write a book without all these voices, giving me ideas, urging me on. I can’t possibly name them all here or this answer would be never-ending!

John:

Such beautiful recommendations; thank you!

After publishing two rather big and quite impressive collections recently, both of which I know have influenced and inspired many, what are your hopes and goals for the future? Are you writing similar or rather different work these days? How are you keeping your work fresh and engaging to yourself, stretching yourself to try new things?

Chelsea:

My collection I, Divided is forthcoming from LSU Press this fall. I just saw a sneak peak of the cover and it is gorgeous and a huge departure from my previous books, which got me excited. I started that collection in 2018 and finished it during the pandemic lockdown in Canada, which stretched over a year and a half, off and on. It is an examination of various illnesses through the lens of chaos theory. I incorporated formal poems, along with forms I was experimenting with. I also attempted some more uplifting poems, which I find terribly hard to write. In writing it, I realized how much I missed researching, having taken time away from academia. I started pursuing my PhD last fall, and the theory I’m reading has been so generative in terms of my creative work. My new work incorporates various literary, trauma, and psychoanalytic theories, not as citation, but as jumping-off points and modes of thought. Language and art are evolving structures. What does that look like in the context of the poem? I recently read Susan Howe’s Depths and the second section in which the poems intersect with art and theory and literature is similar in aspect (not form or content) to what my new work is reaching toward. I’m interested in the text as artifact and its afterlife. My new work also examines memory as a site of meaning-making (or not). It equivocates. It allows for answerlessness to be the prevailing sentiment. I am doing a PhD in literature and philosophy at the University of Alberta (which has been so amazing, full of creative professors and innovative classwork). My committee supervisor, Jordan Abel, is a wonderful multi-genre, multi-textual artist whose work I am learning new things from, as well as through discussion about technique, form, etc. It is so interesting to collaborate with my peers in the program because we all come from such different research backgrounds and different parts of the world. I love it. I’ve never learned so much in such a short time, other than the year I worked intensely with Jay Hopler while I was writing Thaw. I am really excited about this new work and how different it is. I am really excited about the possibilities that engaging in this work opens for my future creative and teaching work. My hope is that this feeling of possibility and elation at learning and stretching never ebbs. My goals are to keep evolving. To keep engaging in the research and the work. I have said before that I am happiest in the midst of a project, not when it is finished and published. I need that engagement, so I’m sure I will be on to something new next year, which also fills me with hope (which is something I hold at a distance because I am suspicious of it). I’m trying to be less suspicious, more open. Which for me means taking risks that I’m afraid to take.

John:

Wow, another collection already? I look forward to reading it this fall! And thank you for your wonderful, thoughtful reply. I hope all poets are taking these kinds of risks and opening themselves up in such a way.

Finally, I’d love to ask this little two-parter: 

·      What advice do you have for poets struggling to find their voice and style in this tumultuous era?

·      What is one misconception about poetry or poets that you’ve heard that really gets to you?

 Chelsea, thank you so much for taking the time to delve so deeply into your creative process with me!

Chelsea:

My advice is to read everything—regardless of genre, of whether it is a huge departure in style or aesthetic from your own work. Read translations. Read prose. Read living poets alongside the dead. Read, read, read. I don’t know that one realizes when they have found their “voice.” I think voice evolves over time, much like everything else. Sometimes, it is very freeing to write in a voice that is nowhere near my own. In an interview with David Naimon, Dionne Brand stated that the speaker in The Blue Clerk is at least three people removed from Brand’s own voice, which allowed very surprising things to arrive at the page. I think I’m leaning into that idea more and more. I also admire how singular some voices are where you know whose work it is before you see the author’s name. Again, I think that all comes down to uniqueness and surprise. Take risks, be surprising. I also rarely think about audience or anyone reading my work until I send it out, which allows me to take risks in style and voice. In an ethical listening class I recently took, we read theorists such as Lisbeth Lipari who advocate for listening as a form of speaking and care for the other. I’ve since been writing with the idea that the poems are a form of listening as well as a refusal to turn away from what it is I don’t want to see, and the speaker might be both the self and the other. I would say: write what you need to write. But listen. I would also say: shut off devices and be in the world. I spent a lot of time outdoors and realized in the same listening class that I was seeking silence (a la John Cage) precisely because the world seems so fraught, and I needed calm. I don’t advocate turning away (from the news etc) but spending time in many facets of the world. If I spend too much time online, I cannot write. I often use the time away to process this “crisis ordinariness,” as Lauren Berlant would call it. Writing poems is time spent with the world but away from it, which I also find helpful.


One misconception about poetry that I find disappointing is that poetry is sometimes purported to be one set thing, with set rules. Thus, any deviation from the way things have always been done is a mark of the decline of poetry when I think it is a mark of the reaches of the artistic imagination which has no ceiling. I want to be surprised. I want to be awed by the work of others. I want to be inspired. I want to be changed by something I’ve read. Not that classical work does not have this capability, but I want the possibility for alternativity too. I want to believe anything is possible because in the space of the poem, regardless of the outside world, it is.

Read the Poems Chelsea is Presenting Here!