Victoria Chang in conversation with G.C. Waldrep
G.C. Waldrep: You’ve already spoken at some length in other interviews about OBIT’s distinctive form, adapted from the newspaper obituary. Stepping back from that, what distinguishes your work across your career has been your ambitious approach to lyric form: each of your books represents a radically different formal approach compared to what came before. Could you speak a little about how you approach form? Does that approach change at the beginning of a project, in the middle, at the end, or between projects?
Victoria Chang: It’s a great question. Maybe because my mind works like a broad system, I need some kind of cage to put it in so that I can write at all? I do think this is my personality too. I hate to say that I was born this way, but I think I was. I look at my father, and think back to how I am exactly like him in this way. When caged (which is necessary), then I drill down into the earth and because I am obsessive. It’s a pattern I’ve begun to notice in myself as a human and my writing. And I’m a deeply flawed human as those close to me know, but it is what it is. I think to answer your question, form approaches me. Like death.
GCW: Another aspect of your formal ambition, book to book, is your willingness to change up the form within a book or project. You did that in Barbie Chang, and you do it again, in the second part of OBIT: Is this a conscious choice for you? During composition, or in the belated act of putting a book together? What’s at stake for you in making such a formal decision? (And: did anyone try to talk you out of it?)
VC: I think that because I am also very flighty (not in an airhead kind of way), but I’m more like a dumb overly earnest dog with new things, I am always trying new things, chasing new bones, which probably just taste like the old bones. Sometimes those new things aren’t long enough to sustain my interest and then I end up jamming them in other books without a ton of thought. I do this intentionally (the not-a-lot-of-thought part) because I truly believe that as humans, we can find connections anywhere. In fact, I feel as if that is all we are here for sometimes. Finding connections. So at the end, looking around to see what else I have written and then inserting them in a manuscript, often for a breather or complication. I do whatever I want. I could care less what anyone else thinks of my work or choices. It’s the only aspect of my whole entire life (since I was born) where I’ve felt truly free. So I’d like to keep it that way.
GCW: And what about “I Am a Miner. The Light Burns Blue”? It’s radically different from everything else in the book. What were you attempting when you plunged into this piece, and what do you think including it in OBIT accomplishes for the book as a whole?
VC: These were individual “elegies” written a long time ago when I had my first child. I hated being a mother of young children. Truly. I am not made for that age bracket. I love the older age bracket, it suits me better. I’m not the diaper-changing type. I’m too big-picture for that, but I did those things, begrudgingly. Those were leftover poems from another manuscript. Some of the “Dear P.” poems made it into Barbie Chang and then I had these leftover elegies. I intentionally had dismantled that manuscript because it never felt strong enough. I took the pieces and “plunged” them into different books. In retrospect, I didn’t put a lot of thought to this, intentionally. The non-intentionality of it was an artistic choice. I was hoping, I suppose, to be off-kilter. To not force anything, but to just let things be and coexist with no explanation.
GCW: What about the interspersed tankas? How do they relate to the whole? Did you compose them before, during, or after the rest?
VC: After. I was messing around with formal poems, such as sonnets, sestinas, pantoums. I wrote every form I could just so I could say I’ve tried them all. I have no idea why. I think I was looking for more traditional formal constraints while my whole life felt/often feels very messy and lost. I happened upon tankas and wrote a whole bunch of them. Then I put them at the end of the manuscript, along with the rest of these horrible form poems. A friend told me to save the tankas and intersperse them so I did. Those were very hard to write—syllabics are so challenging. But I loved/love writing them.
GCW: I marvel that the Library of Congress has a subject heading for “Obituaries—Poetry.” Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology is there, of course, but it seems to be a catch-all category for any document that links poetry and the obituary as a form (including verse obituaries for everyone from the eighteenth-century Christian revivalist George Whitefield to Etheridge Knight). Obituaries aside, could you talk a little bit about tradition—any notional tradition you feel yourself part of, or reacting against? What do you think would be the ideal Library of Congress subject heading for your work as a poet?
VC: I’m always working against tradition because I am not a part of any tradition, have never been, and probably will never be. When you have nothing at stake, it’s actually a beautiful thing artistically. I’ve read a lot of elegies and none of them felt familiar to me. In fact, nothing I’ve read throughout my twenties, thirties, or even some of my forties has seemed familiar. I’ve loved so much of what I’ve read and have learned so much from the work I’ve read, but I knew I couldn’t write what others were writing with authenticity so why try? I suppose I tried in my first two books, and I think I failed. Why do that? “Invisible—Free,” can that be a LOC heading? Invisibility is a kind of freedom. I have come to appreciate that as I get older instead of fighting to be seen. I can’t make others see me. But I can write. That’s what I have, that is mine. And I see myself and accept myself and that is enough.
GCW: I’m interested in the possibilities inside what we might call a poetics of grief. And yet, it seems to me, for most of the last two centuries the poetics of grief has resulted in stasis, and sometimes outright paralysis: we are locked inside of something that is larger than us, and we can’t move. One sees Tennyson struggling against this in In Memoriam, or Mary Jo Bang not quite struggling against it hard enough in Elegy. But there’s also a restlessness to grief, in a different brace of motions traceable from Antigone to poems like Carl Phillips’s “As from a Quiver of Arrows.” It’s a big question, but I’m wondering how you view grief vis-a-vis lyric form, this poetic enterprise. Did your thoughts about this evolve over the course of writing OBIT?
VC: I think that prose writing, creative nonfiction and essays have done a better or more interesting job (to me at least) of navigating grief, in even articulating what grief might feel like. Even today, every time I read a “grief” poem, I end up sighing, because I’ve heard it all before. I’m so sad. Someone I love died. I feel bad. End of poem. It all feels the same. Also, many of the grief poems I read are too insular, again, in my opinion. Grief is our national language. How could it only be personal? In that way, grief is political. Why can’t it be bigger because it’s nearly as big as death. It’s the residual of it. So, yes, perhaps my impulse is always to expand while contracting, a bit like having my own hand-made instrument that is a microscope on one end and a telescope on the other.
GCW: Or if, as you suggest in the opening poem of OBIT, grief represents “the absorption of language,” then how does one enact a poetics of grieving? Does one claw it back?
VC: Well yes, we can claw all we want, which is what I tried/try to do, but it won’t listen to us and retracts like a rubber band. But what do we have left? Some powder in the form of language.
GCW: You also cue “the way waiting becomes an injury.” One could say that grief is a waiting that never ends. But one could also say (I am thinking of my colleague Harold Schweizer’s book of literary criticism, On Waiting) that literature itself is an act of waiting—that writing, or reading, is a sublimated form of waiting. (For what, we wonder?) And I know for me that composition, the act of writing, is about 80% act of waiting, either in anticipation or otherwise.
Did your attitude towards waiting change while writing OBIT? At what point does waiting become an injury? What happens on the other side of that transformation?
VC: I am forced to wait to write. I don’t, as you know, have much time. I’ve never had much time. And I sometimes wonder if I do this to myself intentionally, subconsciously, to avoid feeling? Perhaps, and certainly unhealthy, but what does tend to happen is a kind of expulsion from the body of language and feeling. There are so many times in my life where I have wanted to write anything, this feeling, but could not. So I had to wait. Wait. Wait. Then . . . a flood.
GCW: And yet one of the quiet wonders of OBIT is that amidst this interminable waiting, poem after poem provides not solace, but a way of figuring grief, a way of making if not sense of it, then images of it. This for me is the glory of the book, how it provides new tools. At one moment you note “The way the second person dies when a mother dies, reborn as third person as my mother.” At another moment, for instance, you write “When someone dies, there is a constant feeling of wanting to speak to someone, but the plane with all the words is crossing the sky”—and you’re not on that plane. You can only see it, from the ground, from a great distance, heading—somewhere.
And then, on the very next page: “We read to inherit the words, but something is always between us and the words. Until death, when comprehension and disappearance happen simultaneously.” This astonishes me. Stepping back from that final singularity: what does it mean to “inherit the words”? What is the role of inheritance in your relationship to writing, to language?
VC: Words aren’t ours, I think. Nothing is really ours. Even grief isn’t ours. I think my feeling/thinking about that is important somehow. I wonder if I feel this way because I am a guest in this country? I am a guest to its language? Because ultimately I am homeless? I was born here, but have never felt from here. And have been made not to feel from here enough times that in truth, I don’t want to be from here. So I am from somewhere else, but that somewhere else doesn’t exist. This in-betweenness or no-whereness is the blessedness of language for me.
GCW: Could you talk about the role of imagery in your work? Again and again, OBIT surprises me with images that shock me into recognition and (if I am honest) envy. For instance, figuring your father’s stroke as an artist “whose paintings were recently featured in a museum, two square canvases painted white, black scissors in the middle of each, open, pointing at each other.” This is amazing. And then, “Depression is a glove over the heart,” immediately corrected to “Depression is an image of a glove over the image of a heart.” These moments, these images, are precious gifts—certainly to the reader, I hope to the poet as well.
But I don’t recall your earlier work being quite as image-driven, Circle or Salvinia Molesta, or even Barbie Chang. Did your relationship to imagery change while writing OBIT?
VC: I think I have always admired imagery. I’m very attracted to imagistic poets: the Rick Barots of the world, not that there is anyone else as singular as Rick. I’m often surprised at how few poets I can point to that are truly masters of the image. I think when I am looking for something, such as master images, and I don’t find them, then I decide subconsciously that I want to try to do that. With imagery, I think it’s not about a singular image. Just like endings. It’s what precedes (or follows) the imagery. How does the image derive from the poem itself? Then we’re back to how to write a good poem altogether.
GCW: Is imagery something that happens (to you), or something you seek, or both? I’m interested in this moment: “And it struck me. My father’s words were an umbrella that couldn’t open. My mother held the umbrella, refused to let the wind take it. And this old woman was the wind.” There’s a dynamism in how this image exfoliates, for the reader and in the poet’s consciousness: the extension, the unfolding of the image is an act of reading, even before you, the poet, hand off the image to the reader of your book.
I suppose what I’m asking is how you conceptualize this moment when you hand off the image to the poem (or the poem hands off the image to the poet)—and then when you and the poem together hand off the image to the reader. This is amazingly complex. What happens?
VC: I have no idea. I like to “see” words while I write (these words in my mind also marry with things like trees or birds I might see in physicality in my brain too). So I will have dictionaries, other books (not just poems), everywhere on my desk, on the floor, behind the desk, under the desk, on a stool, and I might see the word umbrella, and then I just start writing the umbrella, and then the umbrella just unfolds, and morphs, and “exfoliates” as you say (which is a wonderful word!). I wish I could explain how this works but I can’t explain it. The process is very mysterious to me. A mind is also very mysterious to me. I wish I could control my mind more, but it controls me.
GCW: In my own reading and writing, I go back and forth between poetries that are performances of identity, versus poetries that are performances of the imagination. But of course that’s a flagrantly reductionist way of thinking—a good poem is generally both, simultaneously. What is the relationship between identity and the imagination, for you as a poet?
VC: The word “identity” today is rife with complications. I don’t think there are negative connotations in your asking (but there often can be from others) with this idea that one can’t write about identity in a complicated way or that identity-related poems aren’t real poetry. I know you’re not saying that, but I’ve heard many people say this in a derogatory way as if to say, identity-driven poems aren’t real poems (or worse, that poem/book only got published because it is identity-driven), but the poems I and the thousands of other white (men, often) have been writing are better because we weren’t writing about identity. Ah, but you were! Being white is an identity too. It was just the only identity for so long, people never thought about those poems as being about identity.
I also think that identity and imagination aren’t mutually exclusive. Look, I’ve been reading poems by white people my whole long life (I’m almost fifty!). I was reading about their identity and imagination. It was lovely. But I’m happy reading today about other people’s identity and imagination through poems too. I think of what we see today as an expansion, not necessarily an exclusion. There’s never been a ton of space in poetry if you believe/buy into the poetry industrial complex. But you can’t buy into it, because it will crush you. And you want to write outside of this complex. That’s where imagination is waiting. Inside is only death, bitterness, infighting, and jealousy.
I think that when people start arguing today (and there’s a lot of arguing in the poetry world), it happens when people separate identity and imagination. For me, identity and imagination are always together, working together, fighting together, but always together, like siblings. Because I write very much from a place of deep feeling and emotion, I don’t question too much while I am writing. I just write. But again, for me, one cannot live without the other.
GCW: How do loss and grief affect the constituent planes that make up an identity? Or do loss and grief become planes, aspects of identity in relation to all the others?
VC: I think identity is who or what one is. As Whitman said, I am large, I contain multitudes. Don’t we all? I think it’s these multitudes, all the bits and parts of what makes us us that combine together to make a poem too. Grief, for me at least, washes over everything. It’s always there, or perhaps, grief is the water that I am swimming in all the time. All the other things are also within that grief, that water as abalone or coral or an eel.
GCW: What, then, is the role of the imagination, in poetry or in life, for you right now? (In my own experience, there were times when grieving seemed utterly unaddressable via the imagination, and other times when it was only the imagination that enabled me to approach my losses. And I guess the same vis-a-vis poetry, faith, etc.)
VC: Imagination is everything to me right now. In truth, given the state of the world too, it feels like the only thing that I know for certain I have or I can go to, or perhaps that I can sit and it will arrive is probably more accurate. For most of my life, I’ve been so busy that the imagination almost seemed dead. But it’s good to know that it can ebb and flow because the last maybe five years have been the most imaginative of my life (perhaps since childhood). So there is a kind of returning to childhood, is what I feel right now. Maybe this has something to do with middle age for me. If there are different types of creative people, I am not the early bloomer. I am a later bloomer, if I have bloomed at all. They say one’s brain doesn’t fully form until the twenties. I think my brain wasn’t fully formed until my mother died, so in my mid forties. Something clicked then. And since then, I have been very creative.
GCW: It’s a trite question for poets interviewing poets, but you know I love to ask it: what are you reading right now, that interests you? And, is there anything you’ve not read, that you would like, someday to read? If so, why are you waiting?
VC: I haven’t read so much! I was not an English major and the last twelve to fifteen years has pretty much been a black hole with my children being small, my parents both being sick, one dying, the other still sick, and you know, life. I’m not complaining (I am not a complainer), but I haven’t read enough. I had a good education at Warren Wilson but I need/want more. I have dreams of retiring (tomorrow?) and just sitting around and reading and writing.
Your question! I am reading a lot of contemporary books due to being on juries, etc. I have enjoyed reading more prose because of being on certain committees. One area I have enjoyed is the autobiography reading. Some historical books were super interesting, spy books, etc. At the moment, I am reading E.J. Koh’s memoir, The Magical Language of Others, which is jarring, stark, and does the best work, it makes me think/wonder, and want. I think the best books do that—I want to talk to E.J., like now, while I’m reading the book. I have so many questions for E.J. I’m also reading (still!), Cathy Park Hong’s incredible book, Minor Feelings, which again, I would love to talk to Cathy while reading. The best books do this for me. They make me want to have conversations in person with the people who wrote them. I’ve also read a few books of poems I’ve enjoyed of late, Mark Bibbins’s 13th Balloon, Rick Barot’s The Galleons, Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem, I really could go on and on.
GCW: Do you ever dream about your mother? Your father? Your children? Do you ever find your mother, your father, and your children all together, in the same dream? If so, are you there with them—in the dream—or are you somewhere else? What else is inside that dream?
VC: Definitely NOT. Dreams are places for longing and imagination. Why would I litter them with my life? Litter is perhaps the wrong word. I reserve dreams as places of magic. My daily life is the farthest thing from magic possible.
GCW: After your mother died, was there a question you wanted someone to ask you, that no one ever asked?
VC: “Are you OK?” It wasn’t about me. Someone else died. I get it. But no one’s ever asked me that. Not once. In fact, when my mother died, the most jarring thing about it was that no one seemed to care. It made me begin to wonder about the asynchronous aspect of grief. In fact throughout my mother’s illness, no one else seemed to care much either. I still remember, coming from the hospital, where my mother had been and the doctor told her/us that it was time, time to go into hospice, then leaving there, and rushing to dinner with some parent friends. No one who is going out to dinner wants to sit in your grief. They want to have fun. None of this is out of malice or uncaring, ironically, but it’s just that people go in and out of grief at different times. It’s like an elevator in a building. It’s impossible to time correctly. And people deal with grief differently. Clearly, I am a griever.
GCW: Do you want the orchid or the swan swimming in the middle of the lake? Because what if you’re wrong? What if they’re just orchids, just swans, just lakes—what do we do then?
VC: The swan, the swan. It’s far away, no one can touch it but the water (and maybe a fish). I’m never wrong. Why? Because no one else is ever right either. What we do now is just write and imagine. Imagination has no right or wrong answers.
Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is OBIT, published by Copper Canyon Press. Her new middle grade novel Love, Love was published by Sterling Publishing. She lives in Los Angeles and is the program chair of Antioch’s MFA program.