Kim Bridgford’s ‘A Crown for the Divorcee’

Kim Bridgford

“Divorce is/the sign of knowledge in our time,” William Carlos Williams writes in Paterson, exclaiming, “divorce! divorce!” These oddly exultant lines suggest the excitement of discovery a divorced spouse may suddenly find herself seized with: a strange new sense of being the liberated half of a prior whole.

Painful, even tragic, though many divorces are, they can offer each of the parties the time and elbow room to unearth long-dormant or new truths about themselves—or even, perhaps, to beget an entirely new self.

For the subject of “A Crown for the Divorce at Fifty-Nine,” Kim Bridgford’s late masterpiece, however, the initial effect of divorce seems to be self-cancellation.

“You never thought the absence would be you,” the sequence starts. On the surface, that line could mean merely that the divorcee never thought she’d be divorced. Darker, though, is another possible meaning: As a result of the breakup, she herself has become a ghostly “absence.” Her real life, her living self, may be elsewhere—suspended in the past in her now non-existent marriage, perhaps.

Yet over the course of the intricate repetitions required by the form Bridgford chose, the divorcee assesses her current situation, and, by the end, arrives at a possible source of hope. The poet had already composed many sonnet crowns, becoming a master of these sequences interwoven with repeating first and last lines. The form enabled Bridgford to go back and forth from sonnet to echoing sonnet, accreting meaning as she went along.

But the word “crown” carries other meanings too. One is sadly comical: Despite her lengthy toil as a wife, the speaker in the poem has been “crowned” with the dubious distinction of being a 59-year-old divorced woman. Apparently written near the end of her life, this piece can also be seen as a crowning poetic achievement for Bridgford, who died at the age of 60 on June 28, 2020.

Published in the Valparaiso Poetry Review about a year before her death, the poem represents the culmination of a career comprising 13 books of verse, most of them published in the final two decades of her life. Restless—sometimes whimsical—in her choice of subjects, Bridgford wrote books centering on themes as idiosyncratic as fortune cookies, Hitchcock films, and world records. Most of her poems were sonnets, and she produced a passionate and visionary book of them, Epiphanies, as well as A Crown for Ted and Sylvia, i.e. Hughes and Plath, which also came out in 2019.

On many levels, however,  “A Crown for the Divorcee at Fifty-Nine” marked a sharp departure for Bridgford. For one thing, it’s written in a confessional style largely unprecedented in her poetry and seemingly at odds with the reticence she exhibited about her personal life in her other work.

True, a fascination with the life of Sylvia Plath inspired many of Kim’s poems. Yet her approach to Plath was not one of identifying with the famously self-destructive poet or imitating her style, but of investigating the mysteries surrounding her suicide. In “A Crown for the Divorcee at Fifty-Nine,” however, Bridgford reveals a sustained interest in the psyche that she had rarely shown before, and it seemed to carry news about her life.

“Seemed,” though, is the operative word here, and we should hesitate to read this poem in a narrowly autobiographical way. The speaker in the poem addresses a “you” that is not quite the poet. Suffice it to say that the crown dramatizes, with great sensitivity and in impressive depth, a sensibility experiencing a specific set of circumstances that may resemble that of its author. I think it’s more productive to see Bridgford, through the character of the divorcee, attempting to embrace the beloved buried part of a poet’s self that Wallace Stevens referred to as an “interior paramour.”

Unlike anything else she had done, Bridgford was here devoting sustained attention to the way the inner self can divide like a cell into “[all] your previous selves,” as the divorcee says, pondering what her future might be. Her “old identity,” the character thinks, could be “[r]edone in vintage.” Envisioning a different life, she imagines herself decked out in “sparkly sneakers and Chanel,” a wry patchwork of the new and old.

Another, related, leap forward that Bridgford makes in this poem is to open her verse to resonances with Eliot, Yeats, and other leading Modernists, in addition to Stevens. Newly evident are the high literary ambitions and elaborately detailed characters of such writers, along with their echoes of past masters. Indeed, the crown can be seen as a belated entry in the 20th Century tradition of the “portrait of a lady” that includes the Henry James novel and T.S. Eliot poem, which are both titled with that phrase, and Ezra Pound’s “Portrait d’une Femme.” Some of Bridgford’s repeating lines strikingly echo the haunting ending of the Pound poem:

  No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
  Nothing that's quite your own.
Yet this is you.

While Bridgford’s quiet, measured poetic voice had always been attuned to emotional nuance, here she had for the first time fully recreated the subtle drift of a mind as it moves from despair to hope. Near the end of the poem, in the last sonnet, both the poet and her subject come to a stirring realization:

It’s not that everything has died:
It’s been reborn. Your fingers steeple God,
And you think, just now, of what you can become.