I Get Down on My Knees in the Face of Language

KARAN

Victoria, thank you for your magnificent poems over the years. Like many of our readers, I'm a big fan of your work. I'd like to begin with a discussion on "Motherhood" — the poem ends in a spiral of worry: "I worry I have children upstairs. I worry / I have no children upstairs. That I never had children / upstairs. I worry my daughter upstairs has / killed herself. Then, her quiet cough." Oh how deeply I resonate with this anxiety. The poem captures maternal dread quite perfectly. I absolutely loved Barbie Chang and you've written extensively about parenthood, from the perspective of a child as well as a parent. Can you speak about how it's been such fertile ground for you, creatively?

VICTORIA

Thank you, you are very kind. It's very difficult not to write about parenting/mothering, as so much of my time over the last several decades has been related to caretaking (both for children and parents). When so many hours are occupied caring for other people, they end up appearing in my poems.

KARAN

In "Spring," you write, "I used to think that grief was heavy. But it is actually like an edge. It weighs nothing. It / consumes itself to remain a line." Then your father's briefcase appears, holding his unlived years, growing heavier each time you move it. "Now I know that / when we die, each of us has a surplus. That / the body leaves, but the years stay." Grief, too, has been a foremost theme in your work, in the way solitude was Garcia-Marquez's. And you've managed to extract a lot of wisdom/intellectually stimulating ideas from profound loss. Is it that kind of sublimation that drove/drives you to the page?

VICTORIA

Perhaps this is a similar response to your last question in that both of my parents were ill for long periods of time and simultaneously, and then they passed away seven years apart, so I felt like I was always either pre-grieving, grieving, or post-grieving. Since making art is in parallel with my life, grief has been a significant subject in my work because caretaking has been all-consuming physically and emotionally. I'm exploring the many forms that grief can take—the act of grieving someone before they have died, the shock of immediate grief, and the many stages of post-grieving where the dead feel completely estranged, as if I never even knew my parents. Then, of course, there are many different deaths such as the death of a eucalyptus tree, a swan dying before my eyes, the sudden death of one of my beloved dachshunds, Mustard, and all the forms of grief that emerge emotionally and corporally.

KARAN

I love how deeply you've explored the form of the ekphrasis in this book. In "Red Tree, 1976," you write about hot flashes, about menopause, and then: "Joan Mitchell was 51 when / she painted Red Tree." Then there's the devastating observation: "How if she named the painting Menopause, 1976, no one would look at it." Menopause is nearly absent from mainstream art and poetry. Why do you think that is? What does it cost a woman artist to name her actual subject?

VICTORIA

Menopause is not only absent from art and poetry, but it's largely absent from conversations amongst women. Considering pre-menopause isn't just one day, that it can actually last 15 years, like it did in my case, I'm surprised at how little people talk about these things. There's also the issues of post-menopause, which people don't talk about either, which can be equally traumatic on the body and mind.

A caveat is that I'm not particularly social and very busy so this could be my own fault for not making time to have these important conversations or to build relationships that would naturally lead to these conversations. I don't think there's any shame in writing about these things, though, so in some ways I'm having these conversations about menopause with pieces of art and poetry.

KARAN

"Tree of Knowledge, No. 3" gives us Hilma af Klint making abstract art before Kandinsky, Kusama watching Warhol copy her and become famous. You write, "Dots not as fame but as form." Later, you write: "I can go beyond form then: woman, / mother, body, shrapnel." What draws you to these women artists who were erased or uncredited? Is the poem a way of restoring credit, or is it after something else?

VICTORIA

Perhaps the simplest answer is that I am a woman. I experience and have experienced so much misogyny and sexism on a daily basis, in all of my jobs, in my daily life, in the poetry world, and beyond. That sexism (along with racism) are also unfortunately just a part of my life. But that doesn't mean that I don't get upset or frustrated. I think about how women artists were treated in the past all the time and how we not only endure, but we transcend through our incredible art and our minds.

KARAN

"Ode to Joy" gives us cormorants flying with dying fish in their mouths: "The fish is grief but the bird flying back to the tree / is joy, meaning grief is inside the mouth of joy." Then your father giving the fish eyeball to an honored guest, those long dinners. "I always thought that being / looked at was the goal." Has that changed? What is the goal now?

VICTORIA

I'm not sure I ever thought that being looked at was a goal. Sometimes or perhaps even oftentimes, I will just write things that may or may not be "true" because I like how they sound or they are interesting imagistically or theoretically. I also sometimes write a first person "I" when I might be thinking about society as a whole, as in the age of social media, so this "I" isn't necessarily referring to me or even one person. I think the "I" can be deployed in this way—to create complicity or intimacy paradoxically in order to be more universal.

I relate to what Jakuta Alikavazovic wrote in Like a Sky Inside: "First we have to take photos. I hate photos. I hate having to freeze under someone else's gaze. I'm meant to be the one who looks…if I was the writer: to say yes [to being a writer] was to assert that I'm here to see, not to be seen."

I don't have any goals related to poetry but perhaps to be what I call "a serious poet" and I'm not sure what that means exactly but maybe to be a serious poet means reading seriously, widely, and deeply, thinking critically, and focusing seriously on the writing. I want to save my energy for the poems.

KARAN

That's the supreme goal for a poet. Thank you! In "Geese and Moon," sadness is a flock of geese on a patch of dirt. You walk around it, talk loudly at it, admire its indifference. By the end, "sadness flew out of the water, toward the / moon. Not one of them looked back." Personifying sadness this way lets you watch it leave. Does writing about an emotion change your relationship to it? I guess what I'm asking is if a poem can actually move sadness, or does it just document the wish?

VICTORIA

This poem documents a conversation I was having with a friend about sadness, while we were bird watching. It was such a beautiful conversation about depression and sadness and it really moved me. For me, writing a poem isn't necessarily about changing anything. A poem isn't a verb to me, but perhaps it is more of a noun. It just is. I think of a poem as a way to figure out what I'm thinking about; no outcomes or goals are necessary. Sometimes it's like walking in a circle around a garden, and then doing it again and then again. Each time, you see something different. And then you can write about perception.

KARAN

"Fig. 15" ends with a thought I'll be sitting with for a long time: "Once I am no longer a woman, the narrative poem will / finally turn into a lyric one. Maybe war is our insistence on the narrative when we are descendants of the lyric." Will you unpack this for us? What is the relationship between womanhood and narrative, between war and story?

VICTORIA

My mind tends to be very associative so I'm not sure what the relationship is between womanhood and narrative, but I can guess how the ending of this poem appeared. Perhaps I had the idea of ending one phase of my life and entering another, the late stage of my life—post parental deaths, post-menopause. Perhaps this poem reflects what happens during this shift—the shift from narrative to more of a running in place without any forward movement, like the lyric.

I think so much of a younger life might be moving forward, toward things (or fleeing things) and those movements feel more narrative to me. But as I've aged, I think less about going anywhere, and more about enjoying just walking nowhere, like the garden, or even standing still, amidst silence, within silence. The ending of this poem feels very associative to me. There's war around us all the time, as long as I've been alive, so that's how the ending came about perhaps?

KARAN

Since art is so important to this book and you/your work in general. What do paintings give you that poems can't? What happens when you write alongside a visual artist instead of a poet?

VICTORIA

I have always loved looking at art with deep pleasure and joy. Visual art is just the medium that some people choose (or it chooses them) and others are chosen by poetry. Some people are chosen by multiple mediums. I suppose I don't think of anything as being separate; rather, I think of hybridity, cross-pollination, intersectionality. Even though I'm likely categorized as a poet, I don't really think of myself as a poet; I think of myself as an artist, someone who enjoys making things, whether I'm using language or my hands to make some other piece of visual art. I feel the most "right" or at home when I'm in the mode of creation.

With ekphrastic poetry, I'm in conversation with a piece of art and that artist. If I'm not writing ekphrastic poetry, I'm in conversation with something else—a tree, a swan, my dead mother, history, memory, etc., so I don't think of it as any different.

KARAN

I've also always loved the aphorist's impulse in your poems: "We often grieve the wrong things." "At least half of our grief for others is grieving / our own deaths." "Every new life comes / out of annihilation." I could go on. These arrive with such authority, then the poems keep moving past them. How do these statements come to you? Do you trust them, or are they propositions that the poem tests?

VICTORIA

The declarative for me is just play, small detonations, miniature experiments. I think I view declaratives as ways to query when there's no answer. So, when at that one inch to the end of the finish line one can never reach when writing a poem, I can make sometimes ridiculous declaratives as a form of query because I can't really ever answer the big questions, such as: why are we here, why do we die, what is beauty, what is grief?

While I just said that I want to be a "serious poet," in practice, I don't really take myself, language, or a poem too seriously. The most interesting aphorisms to me are ones that make you nod vigorously, and then a second later make you question them. They're memorable. Just like the most interesting people and poems—they're original and memorable.

KARAN

You have a distinct voice in the way the best writers do. I can spot a Victoria Chang poem if I encounter it in the wild. Was finding this voice a goal for you? How concerned should young writers be to discover their capital-V voice? Is it even a real thing?

VICTORIA

When I was younger, I used to think that writing poetry was about sounding like other people. I think that's a form of early apprenticeship. Eventually though, if we're lucky, poems become some kind of representation of us and the things that concern us in a particular moment of time.

I feel like we spend our lives trying to be true to ourselves, to find our true selves, but I might argue that it's even harder to be anyone but yourself. I think the skilled writer has skates on—she can skate toward and away from herself, which makes the writing more flexible and interesting.

I like to experiment and play with language so I go through different phases of experimentation—so voice, for me, changes across poems and books. I think it's all the elements of craft that make up a voice, too, so it's possible to change a voice, but it can be difficult to do, as I said above.

I think "emerging" (might be a better word than "young") writers shouldn't worry about voice, but just focus on the elements of writing. The voice will come with time, and then once it's found or located, it will want to change. Everything related to art takes a tremendous amount of patience. It's important to ask such questions about voice, for example, and to ponder about it, but all the pondering in the world won't help a poet locate their voice (or diverge from that voice) until the voice, like a petulant toddler, wants to be found or lost. I think a writer can only create the conditions for anything to happen, and then we can only wait for something we won't know until we see it (if it can be seen), and whatever it is may never even come. Writing poetry is a spiritual practice in that it requires and demands faith.

KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, though the answers are always so wildly different: there's a theory that a poet's work tends toward one of four major axes—poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all? And do you feel it shifting?

VICTORIA

If I take your four axes as an assumption, I would be a poet of the mind, the soul, and of the heart. I wonder what the relationship of the soul is to the heart?

However, these axes seem to point inward and I don't think I'm solely an inward poet. I tend to look out into the world, into the sky, into history, the metaphysical, memory, community, the future, toward something larger than myself. The self in itself doesn't concern me as much and if I write about the self, it's toward seeking for a larger understanding of the self in the world. So the self is a vehicle toward inquiry and the great search.

My friend, who just read Tree of Knowledge, wrote me that the book reminded him of Paul Klee saying about himself as a painter, "One eye sees, the other eye feels," but that in my case, he would add one more eye: "One eye sees, the other eye feels, and another eye thinks." That feels quite accurate to me and, frankly, beautiful.

KARAN

Victoria, you're deeply beloved by people across age groups, ethnicities, borders, tastes. All your books have been critically & commercially acclaimed. You've won many awards. And this is a question you've answered many times. But what would you offer to young poets trying to make a mark — by way of advice or caveats?

VICTORIA

You are very kind to say that. I think it's quite easy for artists to have a chip on our shoulders, to think no one likes our work or even us as people. As I've gotten older, I've tried to give myself grace and allow my work to be appreciated and, more importantly, to allow myself to be appreciated. It takes a lot of grace for a person like me to accept the gifts of other people's appreciation. I tend to focus on the one negative thing someone wrote about my work or the one person who doesn't seem to like me. I've gotten so much better at swatting those feelings away and focusing on all the generosity that comes my way on a daily basis.

I'm not one to give wide advice and am better at tailoring advice to an individual, honestly. First, perhaps I would use "emerging" poets again versus "younger" poets, and the piece of advice I would give them is not to try to make a mark.

I understand that we all want our poems to be read by someone, but sometimes our level of ambition might need to be recalibrated for mental health. When we cross a certain threshold of wanting, it can overwhelm everything and eat away at the poet and, even worse, at the poetry itself. We're not put on this world as poets to be famous and/or to be admired or to last. We're here to experience the joys of making art and exchanging art and ideas with other people who are alive at the same time as us. What an incredible gift to have an artist's mind, soul, and heart, to go back to your axes.

I've said this before, but for me, poetry is a practice. I write alongside my life to make sense of my life and the world around me. It's my greatest loyal companion who may disappear on occasion, but always returns if I call it. Sometimes it even calls me. Making a mark is antithetical to poetry as my spiritual practice. Also, making a mark isn't something that is even controllable. I think it might be something that just happens to people or doesn't happen to people. I've never had an interest in making a mark. I've always had a very close relationship with humility. I am small. I get down on my knees in the face of language every single day.

KARAN

Would you offer our readers a poetry prompt—something simple, strange, or rigorous—to help them begin a new poem?

VICTORIA

I think it's pretty hard to give a true poetry prompt, one that is not facile, in such a small space. My writing exercises are usually 8-12 pages long. My pedagogy is to conceptually discuss something, then read poems as examples, discuss them, and then finally offer a prompt. The reasoning is that the imagination has been prodded and poked at that point and hopefully the imagination is readied.

KARAN

Please recommend a piece of art (a film, a painting, a song, anything other than a poem) that's sustained you lately or that you wish everyone could experience.

VICTORIA

It may appear that I am being difficult, but I really don't like to prescribe spiritual experiences. I feel like we're struck by different artistic pieces at different times. What I might find illuminating might not be what you find illuminating. Perhaps the way I'll answer this is to think about recency and point to some art I just saw at my now favorite museum, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.

There were two Vermeers there that are just stunning—The Glass of Wine and Woman with Pearl Necklace. I told my friend who was with me that Vermeer's paintings are like "sonnets," with similar formal elements throughout, such as a window on the left side (sometimes open, sometimes not, sometimes stained sometimes not), a wall in the back (sometimes with a map or art, sometimes bare), a table (usually with carefully placed items on it, like a still life), a girl, a man (sometimes), an external landscape, sharp natural light coming in from the window, and more. We talked about how these formal elements were like the formal elements in a sonnet and how the framed domestic interior was like the 14-line poem, allowing a kind of intense, yet quiet domestic wildness to occur within the paintings, in the same way a sonnet might expand with energy while being bound. While there, I also saw a stunning small panel by Jan van Eyck called The Madonna in the Church, probably my favorite picture in the museum. The piece is so miniature, yet if you look closely, the picture has stunningly precise details, including bright areas and blocks of light.

KARAN

And finally, Victoria, since we believe in studying masters' masters, who are the poets, artists, or thinkers who've most shaped your sense of what's possible in language?

VICTORIA

There are so many incredible people who have come before us in all fields and perhaps I don't think of them as "Masters" because that implies a hierarchical relationship and certainly I don't perceive myself as a "Master" of anything, as it implies there is an endpoint of artistic achievement, which I absolutely do not believe in. Perhaps I think about correspondences or conversations across time and space with people who cared about the same things that I do—art, language, beauty, grief, mortality, God, the unsayable, and always nature and animals.

I always find questions like this really difficult to answer because I read very widely in all different fields from art criticism to philosophy to poetry criticism and scholarly writing. I do like a particular kind of uncategorizable book though, perhaps books like Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida or Invisible Cities by Calvino or Book of Disquiet by Pessoa—incidentally, these three books were all recommended to me by one of my friends—I think he understands my taste very well. I have my favorite poets too. I always love Bishop, Tranströmer, Charles Wright, Plath of course, Levis, Brooks, Glück, Eliot, Rilke always. I could go on of course, but I'll stop here.

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