Victoria Chang on With My Back to the World
How did you end up with such a different career path?
I think I’m just interested in a lot of things. Poetry has always been around, but so have other things. This is what ended up being a larger part of my life than maybe I had originally planned.
Like a happy accident.
Well, is it a happy accident or is it just an accident? I just accept it. Whatever path happens to me, I just take it and that mindset is why my background is so varied. I just go with the flow and sit on a little boat in this river and just go along wherever the river takes me. It truly is what brings me joy about being alive.
How did you come to those interests that have pulled you across disciplines and genres?
I’m always searching for something, for something larger where there’s no answer, no solution. No one’s even going to talk back to me. There’s no response. It’s literally the void. But I am searching. It’s metaphysical, philosophical, it’s something bigger. My parents became ill when I was in my thirties and they both had long illnesses so I became very consumed with death, even more than before. I had to do a lot of caretaking and witnessed some pretty terrible things. It opened up what was already in me, this seed of thinking about death, what happens after, what are we going to do with the time while we’re here, and what matters.
What is the universe of this search for you?
It’s about perception. When I see something, I know that that’s the thing, or the thing adjacent. If I meet someone, I know that person is in the same space that I’m in. When I meet the real thing, whatever the real thing is for me, I know. It’s like that Tadao Ando chapel, The Church of the Light in Osaka, or when I walked into the Ellsworth Kelly chapel in Austin. I know this is the thing that I’m looking for. When I meet someone who’s trying to grapple with those same big questions, I just know it: this is my person. I love reading, because reading is a way to meet the people who thought or are thinking about these questions.
It's a way to travel.
You can read a poet you love, you can feel it in your body. That’s why I also love going to museums or looking at things and just walking around because I feel this kind of awe. It’s never manufactured. It seizes you at the moment. When something seizes you, you go toward it and walk toward it. I think the job choices and the life choices I’ve made have tended to be like that. Not to say that I haven’t made mistakes or gone in the wrong direction, but I just kind of follow my instincts.
Because With My Back to the World is so much of you really looking at these paintings, drawings, and prints that Martin did, I’m curious about how you approach an object when you see it. Did you devise something particularly for this, or was it part of your everyday practice?
I started with a poem that the MoMA commissioned. The catalog was too large. And I just sat quietly and Agnes Martin came to me. I had read her writing a long time ago—Brian Teare had written this gorgeous book—I was familiar with the artwork and had read all the writings. I didn’t have this visceral reaction to the artwork back then. But then, much later, when I was writing the Agnes Martin poems, I think I was depressed. It was a combination of my mother having passed away and all the stress of caretaking for her and losing her. It was the stress of my father still being around and having so many problems.
Having my own experiences with her work too, I feel like Agnes Martin is the perfect artist to be with in that depression.
Suddenly her work resonated with me. I felt it—I felt the lines in my body. I felt everything. Now, in retrospect, when I look back at the time, I also had bodily and chemical changes due to menopause too. I think I gained thirty pounds without even realizing it. I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it and I didn’t even know. Sometimes you don’t know because the idea isn’t even in your sphere. I just didn’t understand. And the Asian American murders that occurred in Atlanta, the spa shootings, it’s very traumatic. For all of us. There’s so much of that anti-Asian hate that was just so triggering, because it’s what I had experienced while growing up in Michigan.
Proof of the thing that you've been afraid of your entire life.
Yes. And I grew up in the era of Vincent Chin in Detroit, Michigan. And I was bullied growing up. I was really afraid of all these things. It just worked its way into that first poem. After reading the poem aloud at a conference, I realized that I wasn’t done speaking to Agnes. Then I started looking at all of her pieces, reading everything I could find. And just engaging with her work and having a conversation. So the poems and doodles are a result of that. It’s just my conversation with Agnes Martin.
Martin thought of herself as an abstract expressionist, not a minimalist. I’m thinking of this with Dorothy Wang’s ideas around Asian American experimental poetry—it may not seem to be about race but has underlying links to it.
It’s funny that you mention Agnes Martin not being a minimalist because I just went over to the museum here and there was a minimalism section, and there she was. I thought that she would not be happy about that, being next to Donald Judd. The other thing I remember—I just wrote about this, I’ve been working on this weird prose thing—that I’ll mention too is that I’m actually very afraid to be seen. I hate being in public. I don’t like anyone looking at me. I’m happy to be anonymous.
The reception of my book OBIT, really surprised me. I don’t mind if people read my work. The books can do whatever they want. But I want to detach myself from the work, but it’s impossible to do so. So I’ve had to learn how to adjust. I hate having the spotlight on me. I don’t like that limelight at all. I’d never seek it. I did not ever anticipate or aspire for what happened to that book. And that actually made me have a lot of anxiety.
Given your history of having been bullied and also—
Which is also an embarrassing thing to talk about. Shame—
There’s lot of shame. But the hyper-visibility is also dangerous, right? Racially speaking, it’s like you’re standing on the corner with the lights on you, waiting.
Jane Wong and I actually talked about this in an interview with BOMB Magazine. We’re either hyper-invisible or hyper-visible, and neither thing is ideal because who wants to be invisible? You’re not even a person so why are you here? And then being hyper-visible, for me at least, is getting bullied—or getting criticized, or as you say, it’s dangerous. In my own house, growing up, if my parents were talking to me, it wasn’t to praise me.
If it’s silence, it means you’re good.
Exactly. If you’re invisible, you’re doing great. When you’re visible in your own house, it’s because I got in trouble. Or it’s because I didn’t do the things I was supposed to be doing. I was kind of lucky growing up because I was hyper-invisible for a long time because my sister had some issues that everyone was obsessing about. In school, I tried to be as physically small as possible. I didn’t say a word. Even in college classes I hardly said anything. I was really quiet all growing up. I think I didn’t understand that writing poems and putting them out in the world could actually expose you in ways that made me uncomfortable.
You also have been, at least in the last four books I can think of, you really have been moving through grief and death very publicly with very personal things. My family, for example, is like, please don’t write about us.
They don’t like it.
No, but then you also have to be, as Martin says, on your own vision. You have to be doing the work. You have to make choices about your personal relationships and the ways you exist on this plane in order to do that work.
We have to be true to ourselves and our own visions, whatever they might be or however organic they might appear. I didn’t want to write about my mother after she died. It just happened. And then my father couldn’t understand anything. His stroke was so debilitating, and his illness just kept on getting worse and worse.
That must have been really hard too.
But then it also meant I could write about him! He didn’t know.
Let’s talk about the work you’ve done for this book and in particular, depression. I saw you writing about it in different, refractory ways. The ocean shows up a lot, and water. Martin had a breakdown in New York in 1963 and did that painting Friendship for Lenore Tawney, which you wrote two poems on in the book—
When you just said that, Friendship, it gave me goosebumps. I love that piece. It’s so beautiful.
I mean, it’s gold leaf! But can you talk about the symbols in the book: the ocean, the horses, the grids?
When she had a breakdown, she just gave her paintbrushes away. I wrote about this in that I wonder who has her paintbrushes and who doesn’t know they have Agnes Martin’s blue from Night Sea underneath their paint brushes. That’s why I think I just borrowed her title With My Back to the World. It felt very appropriate for me because I had been so isolated. I just didn’t want to deal with the whole world anymore. Her action of moving and then traveling around and then having her own relationship with herself without all that noise of the art world. I connected with that so much. I’ve been hermiting myself for a long time now.
In terms of the symbols, I really found them while looking at each one of her pieces while I was writing. I acquired really nice plates that I could look at. One of the cool things has been running into Agnes Martin pieces in the world. I just ran into one here! It’s like seeing an old new friend. I think the reason why there are a lot of similar things happening between my poems and her pieces is that I was literally using her symbols and vocabulary to open up new spaces of thinking. Looking at her work really emptied my mind and refilled it. What was left were her lines. What was left were her colors. And there’s a lot of blue. A ton of blue. Light blue. Dark blue. I would say my two favorite pieces are the gold leaf one but also Night Sea that is at SFMOMA.
My phone background is Summer with the blue dots.
I love that! Night Sea, for example, is just that blue. When I’ve seen it in person, I was just in the blue. I was literally inside that blue. So these symbols of blue and water, whatever she allowed me to relate to, I just entered that space and riffed off of it. So it really is a conversation with her pieces.
Some of the poems started with just the number of lines. I was wondering if you went in and counted the lines?
I loved doing that. It was so meditative.
Like a rosary.
Yeah. And I’d screw up. I’d start wandering. I’d be like, where am I? Start over. 1, 2, 3, 4… And then other times I’d just count this way and count that way and multiply. It was like, No. Count them one by one. Do not do length by width and multiply it. Count them one by one. And then do it again. And do it again. Until you’re sure you got exactly the right number.
You were painting.
I feel like Agnes was writing.
Tell me more about that.
I feel like when people don’t like her grids, they’re actually looking at them as if they’re paintings. Like they’re the traditional idea of a painting. But when I started to feel as though I really understood her, I started thinking about her as writing. And also when I started thinking about not what was there, in the piece, but what wasn’t there. And what preceded it and what followed it. So it really gelled with my own thinking about poetry. What’s left on the page? It’s not the poem. And in thinking about Agnes Martin, I loved looking at all her math on notes and stuff. Three times twelve…She was calculating. To me, that is part of the work. The work itself is what punctures through. But it’s not the thing itself. I think a lot about how Agnes Martin’s pieces, for me, are about visibility of her process. You look closely, you can see the graphite marks, you can actually imagine her drawing. I think my poems are more about process too.
When you think about an ideal reader, or even yourself, when you return to it in ten years, how would you want to approach it?
I feel like readers are really important to the completion of a work, which is why I send my work out. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t even send it out. I wouldn’t show it to anybody. But I actually do believe that it’s not truly complete until someone’s interacted with it.
I do feel as though when you read the book while looking at the paintings, it becomes so much more of a conversation. One thing that I admire about what you’ve done is the detail with which you interacted with the work. It feels like you are engaged in your own process of painting. Both of us have probably seen that documentary where she’s painting that red line—I think that is With My Back to the World (2003).
It is. And when that film opened up and it’s her…I started sobbing. I had an explosive emotion because I had never seen her. I purposefully waited to watch that. I didn’t want to see her interviewed, I didn’t want to see her talking, I just wanted to wait. But finally when I watched that, she was painting the horizontal bands vertically, and she was painting and talking, I had such a visceral reaction. I think this was also when I was emotionally in a tough space.
Why?
All the life things we were talking about. And I think I had already had such a strong connection to her work, and seeing her embodied like that, and seeing her work and seeing how those bands were made…It was like a spiritual reaction that I had that was very moving. Did you feel that way?
I think there’s an element of seeing someone embodied and knowing that they were a part of this world, and the tactility of you were here. As in, it’s possible for you to live and be alive in this world, so I can too.
Oh, yes! She’s very inspiring. I also liked how dogmatic she was in her writing sometimes. It makes me smile because people don’t always like people who have opinions, who live upon and just follow those things. It’s easy to not like those people, but she just laid it out there in writing. I really admire that. What she represents is solitude and living almost a Buddhist life. I think I can connect with that kind of asceticism and respect for the ineffable, the unknown, silence. All those things are very important to me.
I was curious about your own spiritual inclinations or leanings, and how you connect them with Martin in her own dogmas. There’s also an interesting layer here around the influence of East Asia and East Asian philosophies on that particular group of artists, not just painters, but also poets of that time.
I enjoy reading philosophy, art history, art criticism, poetry criticism—and then looking at Martin and reading all the criticism on Martin. My mother was quiet and anxious, scared, and a bit shy. She was interested in fortune-telling and fates, so when stuff happened to people—good things, bad things—she would always be like, that was their mìng 命 [fate]. When something happened to me, she’d be like, that is your 命. A fortune teller at my birth said I would have a really bad accident and when I got into a bike accident and almost died, my mother said, see? A split second difference and I would have died. I had maybe 50 stitches and lots of pain.
Chronic pain and probably PTSD?
Yes, definitely PTSD. Brain stuff happened.
Wait, how old were you?
Thirty…mid-thirties.
So this was also around all the other death stuff you dealing with.
About to deal with.
The accident must have changed your life.
I also started believing my mom. So I started actually not caring about anything.
Martin once said, You never leave your front step. And no matter how many steps that you take, you haven't actually moved.
Isn’t that glorious and freeing?
It is. It means that it is about presence. It feels like you’re doing your own dots in the grid with this book. The experience of the book is partly observing that and watching it happen. You know, also with the On Kawara sequences where you have a line or two from a particular day, which I’m guessing you were writing on a daily basis?
I was.
It feels like we’re in the moment, we’re in the waves.
On the Today poem, inspired by On Kawara’s Today series, I wondered what it would be like to write in real time? To have language meet the experience as close as it could be? So when my father was in his final hospice, where we had to make some tough decisions, I thought he was going to pass away in few days. Instead, he lasted almost a month. I wondered if we should start feeding him again? Did we make a mistake? Did the doctors make a mistake? I didn’t realize it was going to go on for so long. I thought I’d just write because he’d be dead in three days, or something like that. But he didn’t die. So what I ended up with is a long poem. I actually continued that project and I started writing prose.
But prose didn't end up in the book, right?
No, it’s a totally different thing.
I was curious about your artistic practice too. You said that they were doodles, but it looks like you have a visual art practice. How does the visual factor in for you?
It's a different way of entering the same space. Poetry is just one thing. It's not everything. It can feel like it's everything and it means a lot to me. I have a really special relationship with poetry. But it's just one thing in this world. Visual art is when you’re feeling like letters and language don’t feel right or enough. Then I’ll just move around and try different things.
I talked to my friend Rick Barot about this last year. We were talking about how I find the book as object to be extremely limiting from my own artistic practice. I think it would be neat to rip all the pages out in my books and toss them into the air, and publishing them into the sky. Why are we so wed to this physical thing? And why is everything at the left margin?
Would you ever do some kind of installation piece? I feel like in Dear Memory you were already doing work with photos and writings next to them, already working with mixed media and somewhat documentary forms. In your new project, you’re looking at the archives of others and their families, thinking about ethics of including them. And now you’re talking about just not wanting to be limited. Would you do something bigger?
Absolutely. And I always think don’t anyone needs to read my book, OBIT in one sitting. That book is long, all in the same shape. I’m needling the same material over and over again. It’s my own obsession. I imagine them to be taped on that wall here. In another city, hanging from a string somewhere or blown up on vellum that goes all over the floor. I sort of see them separated from each other, not all together. But there’s also a sort of beauty from that relentless grief that you get from that book that makes the book as object. But I’m also not sure that they’re meant to be all together. People in poetry can sometimes denigrate the project book or the series, and I don’t mind that at all. I always refer to the visual artists like Picasso’s blue period, Matisse’s cutouts, Calder’s mobiles, Neel’s portraits, and I could go on. I feel like that’s the space I’m operating in. I feel more a kinship with those kinds of artists. Agnes’s grids, then her bands later in life.
It sounds to me that repetitions of different kinds are important to you in your practice, and—
Obsessions.
In previous interviews, you’ve talked about how you wrote OBIT in two weeks. What was it for With My Back to the World. In some poems, your speaker observes the paintings in person. Did you actually do that?
Most of the visits were accidental. I never actually flew somewhere just to see them. I was invited to do readings in places and I love going to art museums and actually prefer that quiet to socializing. I just did that here Thursday night by myself. The museum was open until 9pm and it was lovely and quiet and I accidentally ran into an Agnes Martin piece.
The writing of that book took longer because it wasn’t just me writing from the inside out. It was me writing from the outside in. I really took my time. I’m so obsessive and I’m actually just a little too fast at everything. I do things too quickly because I get very excited. I read all the books on Agnes Martin so it just took longer. It was actually very good to slow me down. But I’d say it took me months to write this book, then I revised it, so maybe eight months total, which is fast.
I feel like you take breaks.
Of course! I have a life. I have things to do. Lots of things. Lots of people who rely on me.
Martin would take a year. Here’s the painting year, here’s the off year. She did that too.
Right. For me, it’s forced off-time.
Your work in this book is not only about your engagement with Martin and the beyond which I think is always there, but also this forced bodily witnessing of you witnessing—or your speaker witnessing—and also being particularly because of gender and race. Would talk about that and the gendered conditions, and labor, of your writing?
Speaking of gendered labor, I feel a great burden, gift, and responsibility for so many people I don’t know. I don’t know why I feel this way, but when I first started writing poetry, I was just looking for people to talk to or to give me advice or to help me. I had a really hard time finding those people. I think everyone does. Everyone just wants people to take care of them and help them. I was looking for people who look like me. There were very few of us at the time. We were very scattered. There was no internet. I feel like our community can sometimes be ungenerous to each other.
Yeah. And you’re from the Midwest.
Where are you from again?
Southern Illinois.
Okay, same area. We're constellated. We're not connected. And I think the way that we navigate this country, and in this literary world is like, there can be only one, and you're anointed by the white institutions. It creates this false competition. If you buy into that system, the system will imprison you. For me, I'm interested in connection, learning from each other, collaborating, horizontal work. Agnes Martin’s horizontal line. I feel like I need to do things that I would have liked other people to do. I feel like it's important to give back.
Yeah, it's creating the thing that you wish was there.
But it's a lot of pressure too. Because amazingly and excitingly, there are a lot of BIPOC poets, younger, emerging, older, that are just starting, and they all are looking for people who look like us. But it’s a lot of work. I'm willing to do that work as much as I can, because that is really important to me. I don’t know why I’m talking about that.
Well, I asked about the relationship between being Asian American and being a woman in the workplace. I think you talking about connection and making some of that visible in these poems is part of the actual process of being available. Being vulnerable about it.
And being honest and authentic. If people would criticize me, they would say, You're too blunt. That sort of bluntness is baked into our family culture. I definitely feel like some of the themes, looking back on it, were very feminist themes. I'm dealing with a lot of feminist ideas and feeling really oppressed by society. I felt like I had a container and whatever's happening in your life, you just throw it in there, and then blend it all up and see what happens to it. For me, the personal is a way to the universal, if there is such a thing. I think there are universal human emotions like sadness and happiness, but to reach those things through the personal is so odd, but I think that's actually how you connect with people is by being yourself and being honest.
Well, it's only with actual self-awareness that you can hope to have any kind of connection with another person. I couldn't help thinking about how the low res experience actually makes the literary life available to someone who has a day job and caretaking responsibilities. This really isn’t a formed question, but I was thinking about work marked as prestigious in the literary world versus the kind of work that is made and constrained by different conditions of life.
Prestigious, that’s such an interesting word.
I don't know the answer here. I was just thinking about what is the kind of work that is lauded as genius and then what is actually possible in terms of what can be made. What I'm getting at is that I feel like you were able to create a container for yourself in order to continue writing, and still be in this process while you were dealing with what sounds like a lot. It’s not really a question.
I sometimes get those big questions such as what kind of advice would you give to a new poet or artist, and sometimes I think it is to have conviction, because it's so easy to try and mimic the work of people you admire. Or to follow the crowd. If the work calls you to go over there, go. But if the work does not call you to go over there, then maybe you shouldn’t go. I think that kind of conviction to follow your own path wherever it leads you has to be the thing. Be yourself. That's really important. It's incredibly difficult to do in this space that we're in.
I think it's also a feminist thing to do. Because of all of the expectations not only gender-wise, but also culturally.
Yes.
Being a good child.
To be compliant, to be quiet, to be deferential to the systems that oppress us? Maybe at this age, I shouldn't do that anymore.