The Brooklyn Rail

In a 2002 interview with Leon d’Avigdor for Between the Lines, painter Agnes Martin noted, “If the painting has perfect scale, it moves you. And you have different scale to show different emotions. It's the space between the lines that counts.” One can say the same about poetry, where line, position, and emotions shift and shape words to connote, and create the space for others to find their own meanings. Also akin to visual art, one can repeatedly approach a poem from distinct angles at different times, finding both the immediate pleasure of beauty, and often also a mirror to our own changing hearts and souls.

Victoria Chang’s multiple-award-winning literary work is diverse in form and focus, but there are some beautiful constancies, such as a deeply sensitive ear and eye for the many flavors of human emotions, especially the ones that are so difficult to express eloquently: loss, depression, the soul weariness that affects us all, especially now. It’s this same fearless excavation of human fragility that also serves as the source of joy and beauty of living, encouraging us to understand the gift of our singularly brief time on Earth.

In her new collection, With My Back to the World, Chang uses the work of Agnes Martin, the eminent Abstract Expressionist, as prompts for remarkably precise poems, which are a reflection of the source material, but stand powerfully on their own. Chang’s renderings explode quietly, through a variety of fonts, erasures, and shadings, with words that are as sharp as Martin’s famed geometric markings, such as these opening and closing lines from “Falling Blue, 1963:”

The echoes of such memories are woven throughout this intimate collection, along with “everything instead of it,” illuminating the bleaker parts of our souls with an extraordinary candor, and unforgettably capturing the accumulations of our days that ultimately become our lives.

Mandana Chaffa (Rail): The first time I really immersed myself into Agnes Martin’s work was at the 2016–2017 retrospective at the Guggenheim, which I went to twice (and I thought the circular structure of the museum was an especially generative frame for her expanse of work). I know you’ve always been interested in visual art; when did your interest in Martin begin? Have you always connected with Abstract Expressionism, or was it this particular artist and her ethos that spoke to you for this collection?

Victoria Chang: I actually came to Agnes Martin’s work through her book Writings. I read that a long time ago and looked loosely at her artwork, but her art didn’t resonate with me as much as the writing did. It wasn’t until the MoMA asked me to write a poem about any piece in their collection and I ended up selecting a Martin piece, that I began to realize my connection with her writing had changed because I had changed.

Rail: Which Martin piece did you select, and why do you think that became the gateway image into this collection? Were you able to see all of the pieces referenced in this collection physically? I would think that being “with them” would have more of an impact on your work.

Chang: I selected On a Clear Day (1973), one of the many pieces within this series. I think I selected one that felt like it had just the “right” amount of grids. I did eventually get to see some of the pieces in this series at the SFMoMA later but I just looked online at the photo.

Rail: In a 1976 ArtNews interview, reprinted in 2015, Martin commented: “the funny thing is that at one time, I had the image, and I tried to paint it for months and months. But there really was no image. There was no image, no feeling, no inspiration, no nothing! It meant I had come to the end. I never stop painting until I come to the end. I don’t know about other painters. They have a continuous flow. But I do come to the end.” Do you have a similar process with your writing, whether or not it’s poetry? 

Chang: Definitely! I just write and write and revise and revise, and rework, and rethink, until one day, I don’t. It’s all gone. I’m “finished,” not that the work itself is finished, but I am finished. And then my relationship with whatever it is I’m working on is in the past tense.

Rail: You’re nowhere near ready for a retrospective, of course. And yet, even as this is a stand-alone collection, I also thought about it in the lineage of OBIT, Dear Memory, The Trees Witness Everything, and now With My Back to The World. They are each specific in content and form, but there’s a strong throughline of memory and our ghosts. When reading this collection, given my stage of life, I also wondered if I am a ghost walking through my own life. 

Chang: In a new manuscript of poems, there’s a poem where I write “The distance between my life and myself had become too far. Because of my desire to find a way out of my life.” I have never quite felt connected to my own life, to echo what you are saying. I think the closer we can get to our own lives, the better off we’ll be, somehow. 

Rail: A tactical question: how did you organize this collection? The variations seem as endless as the canvases they represent, and there’s a strong curatorial hand, perhaps the way one pulls an art retrospective together. I know you’ve spent quite a lot of time with Martin’s work, and I wonder how much the practice of art figured into the practice of poetry? (Speaking of which, are you still drawing and painting?)

Chang: I feel like I ordered the collection roughly in the order that the poems were written, give or take. And then adjusted a bit here and there. I know at some point, I wanted to end on “Friendship” and I wanted to begin with “On a Clear Day” and everything else in between was just based on intuition. I’m constantly working with my hands. It’s just another way to get at something that I can’t seem to get at. Writing is only one of the many things I like to do. I’ve done a lot of things since this book, as I had a very prolific and rich period recently. That seems to have waned a bit, since I am absurdly busy right now and have a lot of what I call trash in my life, but I see a big bright light at the end of a trashy tunnel!

Rail: I’m a word nerd, but also a math nerd, and I was taken with the impact of numbers in Martin’s work, and also your poetry. How you take a general statement and insert a personal specificity that’s breathtaking, such as in “Untitled IX, 1982:”

In your words and her paintings, I was taken with geometry lines and lines of poetry; how numbers and edges and forms are ways to survive the unmanageable.

Chang: Yes, totally. I think Agnes’s grids just begged me to count them. So I did. I also love numbers. I always think about numbers. My mother was a math teacher and my father an engineer. I was always pretty good at math and love doing mental math so this was such a perfect match for my natural counting sensibilities.

Rail: So, do you mean if poetry hadn’t issued its clarion call, you might have become an accountant? Or a venture capitalist?

Chang: Ha! Well, you know that I did go to business school in my twenties. I always think that I could have done many things (and did), but poetry was the little red thread that runs through my life. Most of us don’t spend the whole day writing poems (I think that would be too emotionally challenging), so I actually spend my days working in regular jobs (which, like everyone else, is a lot of answering emails and dealing with people).

Rail: Our current lives feel like a massive depression supercollider, and especially, I think, when it comes to expression. How were you able to capture this kind of bravura linguistic feat, as in “Untitled, 1960:”

Maybe these aren’t semicircles.
Maybe they are one long string, made into small even humps. If I pull one
end, my depression will flatten, but my words will also disappear.

I’m also interested in how often depression (or other mental illness) appears to be related to the creative process (if not causation, maybe correlation?). Perhaps put another way, if one can write about it as eloquently as you have here, is one within it? Or does the experience—whether it’s depression, grief, loss, anger—have to be slightly in our rear-view mirror in order to allow the art to happen?

Chang: I think the reason that Martin’s work resonated with me so much at the time in which it did was because I was going through a particularly difficult time and was just really really sad. So sad that I didn’t even know I was sad, if that makes sense. When I wrote that first poem for the MoMA, and read it aloud at a conference, I remember sitting down in that chair after my reading and knowing that I wasn’t finished corresponding with Martin and her work. I am not afraid of all the harder emotions or mental health things that we can experience. I just think of myself as being a human being that has constant challenges, and as I go through my life, I am trying to figure these things out. I forced myself to just write the word, “depression” because I knew that if I didn’t just write it, I would be lying to myself. Once I wrote it once, I just kept on writing it because I think I had liberated my own fears of shame and embarrassment.

Rail: One of the characteristics of much of Martin’s work are the pastel or muted colors, which in my mind set up an emotional tone throughout her oeuvre (and make the pieces that don’t use such colors especially stand out). Color is certainly both a poetic tool as well as an artistic one. How do you think that Martin’s color palette—and its accumulations—impacted your linguistic output?

Chang: I love how Martin’s work changed over the course of her life. Those late paintings were more pastelish. Her work absolutely changed my poem responses to her work. I love how she used color to evoke tone and mood. Her colors shaped how I felt when writing poems. Maybe her color choices were so subtle because she was grappling with the big abstract emotions such as sadness, joy, beauty, innocence, etc.

Rail: I’d love to talk about the second section of the collection, which shifts the momentum and focus of the writer’s—and readers’—gaze. The numbering of days, which is directional; the combination of handwriting and print, even the decision to erase some aspects, yet leave them visible elsewhere. 

I have to ask: can language ever truly capture our cognitive experience? Temporally speaking, our minds are in multiple places at once; and as you say elsewhere in the collection: “Language isn’t actually inside us as I had thought. We / are tenants of language. We are leaving while writing.”

Chang: Language definitely cannot fully and truly capture our cognitive experiences. And I don’t expect it to. Once I let that idea go, I am so free! I am free to make things up, to use my imagination, to be capacious in the ways in which I think about things and express things any which way I want to. That’s also why I like doing other things with my hands, whatever that may be—just another way to express our experiences, and the ineffable.

Rail: Do you already have your next project in mind? Or do you focus on other creative activities until a new poetic endeavor strikes you?

Chang: I wait to be struck! I’ve actually already completed a poetry manuscript called The Tree of Knowledge, and now I’m making some art that goes along with that manuscript. I also completed a prose thing that incidentally is also in conversation with an artist, a sculptor. I’ve had a rich few years of writing and feel so lucky. I’m sure at some point, I won’t feel this creative anymore, but in the meantime, I will just keep writing.