Victoria Chang’s new book of poems, OBIT, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Barbie Chang, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2017. The Boss (McSweeney’s, 2013) won a PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Other books are Salvinia Molesta and Circle. Her children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, was illustrated by Marla Frazee and published by Beach Lane Books/Simon & Schuster. It was named a New York Times Notable Book. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a MacDowell Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches within Antioch’s Low-Residency MFA Program.
Kristina Marie Darling: I enjoyed your latest book, Barbie Chang, and loved seeing how you used the artistic repertoire of poetry to make provocative claims about femininity, the gaze, and the experience of cultural otherness. What did poetry make possible for you as an observer of culture? What was feasible in poetry that may not have been in more formal scholarly writing?
Victoria Chang: When I began working on those poems, I was just experimenting to see if it was even possible to make “provocative claims” about femininity, the gaze, and the experience of cultural otherness. I began the process of writing personal narratives and experiences and found the poems becoming increasingly political. I think ultimately I decided I needed to balance the personal and the political so that each could ping off of the other in order for the manuscript to work and even when I had “finished” it, I wasn’t sure if what I had put together worked. But for me, art is about making and the process, so I didn’t fret too much about the end result. I wasn’t quite conscious about what I was doing at the time either. I try not to “name” what I’m doing for fearing of trying to control things too much.
KMD: The lineation in Barbie Chang is fascinating. The lines are enjambed when we least expect it, in many instance rupturing the syntactic unit, and often creating fissures and elisions within faultlessly constructed sentences. In fact, the line exists in tension with the sentence, which we tend to uphold as the primary unit of meaning in language. Most writers aren’t brave enough to question received wisdom about how lines of poetry should mean, and this is what makes Barbie Chang so interesting and compelling. Which poets taught you the most about the poetic line? What were some of your mentor texts when considering lineation, enjambment, and pacing?
VC: Good question. I think I had started to mess around with lineation in The Boss (McSweeney’s) because the editor there broke the poems into quatrains. I think I intuitively knew that the poems in Barbie Chang needed more enjambment and the poems also needed physical space (hence the couplet). Those years of being a parent in a community that was so unwelcoming to the “Other” really shattered my identity in ways that I had long forgotten about. I wanted the poems to express that shattered feeling and line breaks were the main way I opted to do so. Writing about these experiences felt shameful yet freeing at the same time. It’s strange to think people have actually read these poems.
KMD: Barbie Chang also engages popular culture in a way that is both intellectual and deeply personal. What nonliterary texts have been most formative for your thinking about your own creative practice?
VC: I read a lot. I wasn’t an English major in college and I spent most of my prior 20 years reading business-related texts so over the last 3-5 years, I have been reading more voraciously in a way, to catch up with my peers who have been reading for decades. I don’t think all the reading I have done prior is useless, though. I don’t think anything I do or have done is useless. I think all the reading I’ve done, all the other work I’ve done, has made me less invested in the literary world in ways that I’ve finally become thankful for. I never used to pay attention so the things that happen in the literary world don’t really bother me much. I’m not sure I’ve answered your question exactly, but let’s just say I’ve read a lot of nonliterary texts and also talked to a lot of seminal business thinkers and practitioners over the past few decades and just being around excellence, quality, intellectual people (even if in a different field) has really kept my mind sharp.
KMD: In addition to your work as a poet, you’ve had an accomplished career mentoring others. How does teaching, and being part of an academic community more generally, feed your creative work?
VC: I’ve never thought about myself as a mentor, but I do think I try and give back to others as much as I can because when I was new to writing, I didn’t really have access to that many mentors, but the people who did help me, helped me a lot. One thing I notice now about teaching is what a nerdy, passionate, and hungry student I myself was! I seek nerdy, passionate, and hungry students now too. So much of the writing practice and the literary world is about discipline, hard work, passion, persistence, a love of language. If you don’t have these things, there are probably a lot of other easier things to pursue.
KMD: You also joined the staff of Tupelo Quarterly as a Senior Poetry Editor, and it’s also been a pleasure to get to know your work as a critic, interviewer, and champion of emerging writers. What can creative practitioners in other genres – such as memoir, novel writing, visual art and music – learn from poets about literary citizenship?
VC: I personally can’t imagine ever not helping other people. But I also have limited time and I can’t love everyone’s work or help everyone, but honestly, I do try which makes me generally exhausted all the time. On literary citizenship, what I will say is that if you don’t give back, we can smell it. If you only care about yourself, we can sense it. If you want to claw another’s eyeballs out because you are jealous, we can sense that too. My parents taught me how to be excellent. And part of being excellent is to try and work hard and do the best you can, but the other part of being excellent is to release the self from the self and to cheer on others towards their own excellence. I try and surround myself with people who are my biggest fans and cheerleaders too. I am constantly assessing the people around me to determine who fits that bill and who doesn’t. I have a good nose for catty and jealous people. I have a good nose for people who are climbers for the sake of the self. I really enjoy being around smart, positive, encouraging, deep, loyal, nice, and mature people. And I love to lift them up. That’s literary citizenship. Lifting for no other reason but to lift.
KMD: What are you currently working on? What else can readers look forward to?
VC: I have a new book of poems coming out next April with Copper Canyon Press. It’s called OBIT. That was hard to write because it’s all about grappling with my own grief due to my mother’s passing and long illness. But I’ll be glad when that’s out. I have a middle grade verse novel that was just accepted for publication and I’m super excited to start working on that! I’m working on some other strange things that I can’t even name for fear I will ruin them by naming them but I’ve written around 100 pages of something just so I would have something to work on at MacDowell when I go there in May. I’m scared of that material, but I look forward to digging in to see what I’ve written.