Victoria Chang: California Poets Part 11, Five Poems

Victoria Chang (photo by Jay L. Clendenin)

October 20th, 2026

California Poets: Part XI

Victoria Chang

Five Poems

Language

Language—died, brilliant and beautiful

on August 1, 2009 at 2:46 p.m. Lover

of raising his hand, language lived

a full life of questioning. His favorite

was twisting what others said. His

favorite was to write the world in black

and white and then watch people try

and read the words in color. Letters

used to skim my father’s brain before

they let go. Now his words are blind.

Are pleated. Are the dispatcher, the

dispatches, and the receiver. When

my mother was dying, I made everyone

stand around the bed for what would

be the last group photo. Some of us

even smiled. Because dying lasts

forever until it stops. Someone said,

Take a few. Someone said, Say

cheese. Someone said, Thank you.

Language fails us. In the way that

breaking an arm means an arm’s bone

can break but the arm itself can’t break

off unless sawed or cut. My mother

couldn’t speak but her eyes were the

only ones that were wide open.

Previously published in Obit, 2020, Copper Canyon Press

Gift

Is silence a gift?

I can’t hear my bones shrinking,

the lemon turning yellow.

The flag is louder

than my memories. How I

wish time were a wooden wheel.

Previously published in The Trees Witness Everything, 2022, Copper Canyon Press

How Alone Barbie Chang’s Mother

How alone Barbie Chang’s mother

must have felt doing

nothing but dying her mother actually

stopped dying her hair

in January stopped being an actuary

for her money she

must have known her time was limited

did the diseased birch

tree know they were going to cut it down

how quickly the air

around it filled in the space it does no

good to know a mother’s

face who would have known that a

mother’s face could

be erased too at some point we are all

eliminated from this

earth at some point most of us give birth

at some point we lose

a mother at some point we are all

disappointments who

can’t possibly care for others when

our mothers die we

are all lost and there are no words for

it some want to

name us as grieving others wrongly

name us heroes

Previously published in Barbie Chang, 2017, Copper Canyon Press

Central Park

The moon in the painting came through the branches

like applause. The tree trunks looked just like the

stones, the stairs, and the people. I, too, had nowhere to

move. I was anxious about the threshold. That if I went

too close to the hole in the ground, the search would

end. Alice Neel said, When you’re an artist, you’re

searching for freedom . . . in fact, art can be called the

search. I want to ask Neel if something can be called a

search if the object isn’t reachable? What if language is

glass blown but not made of glass. How do we live as

artists without dislocating language? Without viewing

the present as an errand of death? Maybe the search

Neel refers to is just seeing. The painting is what has

outlived seeing. Maybe the seeing itself is freedom, for

the looker and the object. No matter how divided. After

fifty years of separation, I now try to see everything

together, in the present—all the white hotel sheets of

the foreground, the dead people in the background,

the birds flying in airports in the middleground. This way, seeing

and salvation stop rejecting each other.

This way, everything is a dome versus a line. And everything

gets recognition at once.

Previously published in the Spring Issue (2024) of the Washington Square Review

On a Clear Day

—after Agnes Martin’s Untitled from On a Clear Day (1973)

On a clear day, the horses disappeared.

All that was left were the apples they had been fed.

The apples were strewn across the field and

had become rectangles.

When people found them, they still gathered

and ate them.

The people who hunched over their

apples were far away, over there.

But the sounds of their chewing were

over here.

On a clear day, all the sounds fit into the boxes.

On any clear day, all my thinking fits

into boxes that can’t be opened.

What if our thinking was never meant to

come out?

What if our thinking only remains thinking

within boxes?

When out, they become weapons, take

on different shapes with sharp points.

Today, there is no shortage of thinking but

all the thinking is divided into portions.

Today, I am hungry but all the portions are gone,

there are only forty eight.

On some clear days, there are only forty eight birds

and forty eight people and forty eight houses.

And forty eight wars. And forty eight apples.

I keep counting grids. But no matter how I try,

I still get six dead Asian women who fit into

forty eight boxes.

All night, my thoughts are shaped

like birds.

In the morning, I lean in closer to the mirror and

someone has drawn lines across my face.

I realize failure consists of both the outline and

the outlin

I realize the lines have not abandoned us,

but just our emptiness inside.

Previously published in With My Back to the World, 2024, Corsair

Interview

October 20th

California Poets Interview Series:

Victoria Chang, Poet, Writer, Editor, Professor

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: I’d like to start with your connection to the Golden State, where you had and continue to have great success as a poet—a California Book Award for The Boss in 2014, and being a finalist for the same prize in 2025, for With My Back to the World. Yet it’s also here that you decided to pursue an MBA at Stanford, before receiving an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Could you speak a bit about how California influenced your writing and to what extent the transition to the MFA changed the way you’d been working so far?

VC: I’ve spent most of my life in two states: Michigan and California. I also think that those two landscapes influence my writing the most. Most of my recent poetry takes place in California. A lot of my children’s books take place in Michigan.

I don’t really think of the MFA as a transition, so much as just part of the larger journey as a creative person. It was nice to study poetry for two years very seriously. But I studied a lot of poetry in high school and college as well.

DG: Teaching has been an important part of your career and you currently serve as the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech. How would you describe your teaching approach, the challenges and rewards that come with them, and how do these influence your own creativity?

VC: Teaching right now is the “career.” Not poetry or writing. That’s not a career for me and I actually never use that word to describe poetry writing for me at least.

Teaching is very difficult and I work very hard at it and pedagogy in general, staying on top of new ways of thinking and instruction. My pedagogical approach borrows from community organizers, yoga practices, wellness practices, and social justice practices. I’m always learning how to be a better teacher of poetry of course, but also thinking of new ways to engage the students. In the age of AI, I’m totally revamping my syllabus this semester.

DG: It’s been your great fortune to have incredible success. I’m always curious to know how poets view their first book in relation to their latest one. Do you see a grand trajectory connecting them both or has each collection been a sort of microcosm of what you felt at the time?

VC: To be a bit repetitive, I don’t think of my writing life as a career or in terms of typical measurements of “success.” It’s an art and a way of living for me, a practice. I’m also not thinking about my own trajectory as a writer. I just enjoy the process so I sit down and begin, spending a lot of my spare time, probably almost all of it, writing. Whatever I’m thinking about at the moment and when I happen to be sitting—that's what I write toward. Naturally, if I’m writing, that work might reflect my life at that time.

DG: You have a fairly good command of Mandarin. Each language is its own microcosm, given the number of words that are either so difficult to translate or entirely untranslatable. Given that Chinese is a tonal language and English is not, how much of an impact does your knowledge of the former have on the way you approach the composition of a poem from a structural point of view?

VC: Mandarin was my first language in the home, but the minute I started attending school, English became dominant. That said, my mother never really spoke English to me and I also loved/love studying Mandarin so I think I’m decent at speaking, meaning I can get by, but I understand a lot more. I don’t really know how the two relate to each other, but I don’t really think about it. Both languages are in my head all day long, as are both cultures.

DG: In 2021, you published Dear Memory, a memoir in the form of letters. Identity, memory, and trauma are all part of the work and they reverberate across generations. Poetry can be autobiographical, but its universal nature tends to place a distance between the poet and her work. Did you choose to write the memoir to liberate yourself, in some ways, from the I of the poem’s speaker in relation to your own story?

VC: I’m not sure we choose what to write, or at least I don’t. I think the subject often chooses me. Everything I write tends to be organic. I just go where I am called.

DG: I love the juxtaposition of the title With My Back to the World in relation to the themes contained within. The collection is based around the artwork of Agnes Martin. When looking at a piece of art, we naturally face it, and in that sense, by doing so, turn away from the world—yet only insofar as to try and give it meaning. Could you talk a bit about the writing process for this particular collection and how, if at all, your relationship to art changed as a result?

VC: This collection started from a commission from the MoMA. I had trouble selecting a piece from their vast collection, so I switched my thinking, focusing on an artist I didn’t understand very well, and that was Agnes Martin. Once I wrote one poem, I felt called to write another and then another. Suddenly, I had a whole collection of poems.

I’ve always enjoyed looking at art so I’m not sure this experience was much different than looking at art all the time, which I do. I’ve also written many ekphrastic poems in the past, but this was the first time I engaged with an artist for so long and so extensively.

DG: Has your revision process changed over the years as you gained greater confidence in your writing?

VC: I think every manuscript I’m working on requires new and different demands in terms of revision. Of course, I have gained skills as a writer and in terms of revision, but hopefully, every new thing is just that, new. I enjoy challenging myself in new ways so every manuscript feels challenging and fun.

DG: All of your work has brought in personal elements to some extent but it’s Tree of Knowledge that really most takes on the topic of the body. As you stated in another interview: “I’m struck by how hard it is to find the word menopause in a poem.” At the same time, there’s a long piece called “Eureka” that deals with the banishment of Chinese-Americans from the city in the 19th-century. I immediately made the connection between the aging of the body and the so-called aging of history that often leads to outright forgetting. Would it be right to say that this collection was an attempt to reclaim in time what has so far been denied—both to women and to Chinese-Americans?

VC: I’m not sure Tree of Knowledge is trying to “reclaim” anything. That word feels far too active to me in terms of composing poetry. I think this effort itself is a matter of bringing your voice from the inside to the outside, which is a form of agency, of course. But I don’t really try to do anything while I’m writing. I actually try to avoid thinking about active verbs as I’m in the crafting process. This might sound strange and it actually feels hard to explain, but for me, the creative act of putting pen to paper is the exact opposite of reclaiming. It’s actually letting go so that the ego disappears entirely, so that (hopefully), I am lifted and taken along by some kind of spirit.

DG: What book have you recently read that inspired you?

VC: I’ve been writing poems on Caspar David Friedrich and an artist friend recommended this amazing book to me called Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape by Joseph Leo Koerner. It’s so good, but I’m also really interested in Friedrich and also love reading books like that. It’s probably not everyone’s cup of tea as it can be academic.

DG: What are you working on at the moment?

VC: A new manuscript of poems. I don’t usually say much about what I’m working on since it’s still relatively new and I’m still in the process of listening to its shape.

Author Bio:

Victoria Chang (she/her) is the author of With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024), The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022); the nonfiction book, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief (Milkweed Editions, 2021); and Obit (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury Prize in Literature. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and the Director of Poetry@Tech.