‘I don’t go to poetry to feel better’: An Interview with Victoria Chang
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Victoria Chang is one of the leading American poets at work today. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Chowdhury Prize in Literature, Chang’s most recent book of poems, With My Back to the World, received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection in 2024. Her forthcoming collection, Tree of Knowledge, will be published this month.
It is now all but obligatory to bill a new collection from an established poet as a decisive break with their earlier style, if not a reinvention of the form itself, as if offering anything less would somehow shortchange the reader. Tree of Knowledge displays no such attention deficiency. These poems, aesthetically satisfying and engaging throughout, succeed by refining rather than foregoing Chang’s favoured strategies, particularly a penchant for ekphrasis, paradox and syntactic randomness. While there is a playfulness, even a slipperiness, to some of these poems, the collection as a whole develops a distinct outlook on tragedy and grieving, one which seeks to bind individual and collective sorrows together in new and disconcerting ways.
We met for this interview in the café of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, where she had been visiting a ‘fog sculpture’ by Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya. The walls of the café were decorated with red, green and gold tile panels. We couldn’t tell whether these tiles were two- or three- dimensional, painted or sculpted, until we reached out to touch them.
I’m curious about the way certain image-motifs are threaded through your collections. I’m thinking about the eucalyptus tree in Tree of Knowledge, of course, but also fishing and fish in this book and horses in The Trees Witness Everything. How do these motifs come into a collection, and what do they allow you to do?
A lot of the things you’ve mentioned are natural images. Tree of Knowledge has a tree as a central image, another collection I’ve finished, a swan, and a collection I’m working on currently centres around eagles. I think I gravitate towards nature as a figure for human experience. My brain tends to be obsessive, so images recur, refract and transform. I wouldn’t ever write about something that doesn’t keep coming back to me.
I also think that sometimes these central images become a trunk in the middle of something I’m working on. Tree of Knowledge is based on this process of watching a massive tree being chopped down across the street, day by day. It became a figure for violence, and then I started noticing trees everywhere, including in all these paintings I had been looking at.
It is difficult, for me at least, to write political poems that speak about the present. It feels too close.
And I was already thinking about the expulsion of Chinese people from Eureka, California, but hadn’t connected the two until I visited Eureka again, for the first time as an older adult, and went to visit the massive redwood trees there.
I think these image systems allow interesting connections to happen among seemingly disparate things.
Has writing so many ekphrastic poems changed the way you look at art?
Definitely. Before, I used to look at art as a consumer – I have to see this piece or know this artist because I’m supposed to like this famous piece of art. Now I just let myself be drawn to what I’m drawn to. I never expected I’d be able to travel as much as I am able to as a poet. I’m in Berlin now, I was in Rotterdam a few years ago, I’ve been to the UK a few times, Shanghai and soon Italy. It was never an aspiration to travel so much, but as a Sagittarius, I have lived up to my natural wanderlust. I spend my spare time in cities hoofing around museums. Looking at art that other people made is very inspiring to me as a poet.
Could you tell me more about the artwork in Tree of Knowledge, which I know you created yourself. How did they come to be, and how do they interact with the poems?
The longer poem ‘Eureka’ in Tree of Knowledge was inspired by the expulsion of Chinese people from Eureka, California and many other cities on the west coast in the late 1800s. While conducting research, I came across many photos of Chinese people during that time and I had an impulse to have a conversation with them, so I began to do that by making art. In some cases, I used a razor blade to cut out people and placed them within my own photos of the redwood trees, then I stitched red thread on and through the people and landscapes. Perhaps the red thread is its own form of speech. I also wrote miniature persona poems using language from the Chinese Exclusion Act and newspapers at the time.
When did you first start making visual art?
I think when I was younger, I started drawing first. My mother identified affinities in her children and gently nudged us towards them. She noticed I was interested in drawing, and I remember her enrolling me in many art classes. I was constantly sitting in studios drawing eggs or apples. I also started writing poetry very young, which she also encouraged. She even taught me how to write some poems in Chinese when I was a child and sent them into newspapers in Taiwan whenever there was a contest. She was very encouraging of the arts in general – visual art, poetry and music.
Do you think writing poetry in another language when you were younger fed into your later work as a poet?
I speak Mandarin okay, I watch a lot of Chinese shows and still try and study Chinese when I can. I think a lot about the language, particularly the different rhythms of Chinese. It’s very syllabic, in a different way to English. Chinese is one character after another after another, and each one is also its own beautiful piece of art. I learned calligraphy when I was young and it would be a dream to return to that as an adult. All of which to say, another language is always with me.
I wanted to ask you about some of the visual artists who are recurring characters in this collection. Maybe we could start with Joan Mitchell.
I saw this massive exhibition of her work in San Francisco, and the curators had included a film that showed her talking and painting, which I loved. I’m so inspired by women painters of that time, by the vision they had and by the things that they had to deal with. Certain pieces where there were little clumps of colour concentration really struck me.
There are also a couple of poems in Tree of Knowledge and With My Back to the World where I looked up Mitchell’s age – and some of the other women painters whose work I responded to as well – because I had a hunch that they were painted around middle age. So that’s why there are so many women painters in the collection, whereas with Picasso, I was frustrated with how often his work dismantles a woman’s body in the name of cubism.
I was going to ask about Picasso actually. Why was it important to respond to some of his work in Tree of Knowledge?
I was looking at a lot of his paintings, particularly those focused on trees. But a lot of his work is obsessed with a woman’s body and taking it apart, as I said. It felt violent to me, especially compared with the other work I was looking at by women artists such as Joan Mitchell or Hilma af Klint; that is, the work of the kind of people he was objectifying at a time when women artists were just starting to emerge – Helen Frankenthaler, or even Agnes Martin – who were just underneath the surface, doing the work and in some cases supporting men artists like Jackson Pollock. Maybe that’s why Picasso appeared in the collection a lot. Once you’ve seen something it’s hard to unsee it. I can’t really look at a Picasso in the same way, especially when there’s a woman’s body involved.
Turning back to ‘Eureka’, I was struck by how different it was from the other poems here. It’s much longer, as you mentioned, but it’s also quite formally austere – there are no stanza breaks, no punctuation – and even setting aside any formal choices, it feels central to the collection. How was ‘Eureka’ composed, and how does it relate to the rest of these poems?
Once I learned about the various expulsions in relation to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, it loomed in the back of my mind for a long time. I first wrote a children’s book on the subject, perhaps a decade ago, which just came out this year, and much more recently, wrote the longer poem after I visited Eureka to conduct some archival research.
How do you write silence? How do you write death before you’ve experienced it? That’s what I’m trying to do.
In terms of how this poem relates to the rest of the poems, I wasn’t sure initially, and I’m still not quite sure, except there’s the common thread of trees and violence. I suppose one could say that the ekphrastic poems tend to be more personal and ‘Eureka’, the smaller red persona poems, as well as the artwork, is more historical and political, creating some kind of intersection between the personal and the historical.
The expulsion in Eureka, which was a reaction to the (seemingly accidental) killing of a white official by Chinese immigrants in the town, seems bleakly consonant with politics on both sides of the Atlantic; the express desire to expel immigrant populations, the belief that harm done to the dominant ethnic group can justify practically anything in retribution. Has that context inflected your engagement with Eureka, artistically or otherwise?
Absolutely. I was an East Asian studies major in college and have a master’s in East Asian studies, so I think I’ve always been interested in history – my own, my parents’ history, of course, but also how history continues to parallel the present.
It is difficult, for me at least, to write political poems that speak about the present. It feels too close. I need a little distance to be able to write poetry on current events. Others might be able to do that, but I feel uncomfortable because I always feel like I’m telling people what they already know, what they are currently experiencing. How does one do that in art, in a poignant or original way, that doesn’t feel tedious? I also love to do research and am interested in the archive, whether personal or historical, and I think historical poetry lends itself to my interests in those ways.
You said in a previous interview that your poems are never purely personal, even when you’re writing in the first person. I was thinking about that as I read the ekphrastic poems, and often wondered while reading whether the ‘I’ here is always a personal, autopoetic ‘I’, or whether the ‘I’ sometimes belongs to someone else, or changes in some other way?
The first person is often just a vehicle in which to explore the world, my perception of the world. In some ways, my first person is a mechanism to explore new thinking, new images, new ideas, new ways of perception. The ‘I’ is like a little jumping bean that goes from thought to thought as possibility. Sometimes it might represent what I’m thinking, but sometimes it’s more like a ‘what if’ statement.
I’ve heard some poets express some scepticism about ‘theory’, or at least a degree of tentativeness towards it, whereas you seem to find philosophical work really enabling – Tree of Knowledge references Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida among others – what is your relationship with philosophy and ‘theory’?
I’m not a philosopher by any means, but I love reading contemporary philosophy, as well as trying to learn about historical philosophy. I think a lot of the things they think about are the same things I’m thinking about. My brain can be micro-focused towards a tiny image, but I also feel like my brain tends towards larger abstract ideas, so I feel connected to philosophers and critics, who are thinking of something larger and then home in on text as a way of relating it to the whole of human existence. I’m sure it can be off-putting – people already don’t like poetry that employs allusion, as it can jettison people out of a poem. That’s why I think it’s important to reference the quote, so as not to assume that people know what Wittgenstein was talking about.
I think that’s true of visual art too. When I wrote about Agnes Martin, I knew she was known by people who enjoy art, who are familiar with modernism, minimalism, all these movements she was associated with (whether she would have liked to have been or not). But if you’re not someone who spends a lot of time with visual art, you might not know who she was. So, I knew I’d done something difficult, that it would be off-putting to some people, but that’s not why I write. I write because something draws me in.
I had a couple of questions about specific poems. ‘Black in Deep Red’ is partly responding to this quote from Mark Rothko – ‘silence is so accurate’. One of the ways you respond in the poems is to say, ‘Maybe language is accurate / after all. Maybe the opposite of language is seeing.’ I was really interested in this idea – the question I had was something like, ‘how does the opposition between language and seeing inform your work?’, but really this is just an occasion to think about that quote.
I did an event here where the interviewer homed in on my use of the declarative, and it gave me a chance to make an argument for the declarative. The way I think about a declarative is that it is a form of playfulness, a kind of joke, a way of making assertions that can be untrue. I do this all the time in poems. I like to play around with aphorism – language is this, language is that, these juxtapositions – because I’m trying to compare things that may not sit together. Also sometimes, things are undefinable, and thus trying to define them a hundred ways is a way to try and get at the unsayable, the unknowable. So maybe that’s a helpful backdrop for your question.
I don’t write to avoid feeling the negative things, because I don’t think the negative things are all that negative
I thought about that Rothko quote again and again. Here we are as poets, writing, talking all day. How do you write silence? That’s what I’m trying to do. How do you write death before you’ve experienced it? That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m not sure anything I write is ‘true’ or makes that much ‘sense’ in the end, as provocative as it can be at times.
I remember Rachel Cusk, who’s also very interested in writing about visual art, said something in an interview to the effect that: I just want everyone to shut up, including myself.
It can be frustrating to be a writer. Language is always ricocheting in your head. One thing I thought of earlier – which I wanted to return to – is that my brain is more like a visual artist’s than a writer’s. ‘Maybe the opposite of language is seeing.’
Coming back to the Cusk quote, there’s so much joy in quiet, in walking through the galleries alone. Language is exhausting, and if you are a writer it’s all we have to make our art. I don’t know that it’s the only thing I’m interested in. Seeing is a form of language for me too, perhaps one I’d like to use more than language.
I have another quote, this one from ‘Red and Pink on Pink’: ‘Each of us / has two lives. Most of us are wandering around / in the wrong one’. Clearly that’s a line that can be taken lots of different ways, but what it made me think of was the unconscious and the idea that poetry has some kind of therapeutic purpose.
I think a lot of poets must write. For better or for worse, language allows me to figure out what I’m thinking and feeling. I don’t go to poetry to feel better. I’m very happy in the darker spaces of my life, and I want to live through those feelings. I don’t write to avoid feeling the negative things, because I don’t think the negative things are all that negative – sadness, anger, grief, these are beautiful things. But I love the mind and I love to work through it in language.
For me poetry is a place I get to wonder and wander, like a beautiful open space, and nobody can tell you, ‘don’t say this, don’t think this, don’t go there’. I love the movement of a mind and, it’s strange to say, but I love my own mind, the way it leaps and moves, the associations it draws.
I feel very satisfied after writing, as if I’ve tried to work out the mind, the heart, the soul. If I don’t write, I can feel this sense of agitation. If I can’t write for a very long time, I feel as if I’m wasting my life, or not being true to myself.
Is the revising process normally quite similar, or does it change from project to project?
It changes. For books like OBIT, because the space was so contained, there was a lot of revising, but at a micro-level. Whereas the poems I’m writing now are very discursive, they’re almost like essays, and I’m cutting out large blocks and deleting chunks as I go. So different poems require a different form of revising. It never gets old. I think if you really love art for the making of it, rather than the product or accolades, the process of realising that what I’m writing requires a whole new set of skills which I currently do not have, skills which I will be acquiring as I’m writing and revising, can be extremely rewarding and joyful.
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Victoria Chang‘s forthcoming book of poems, Tree of Knowledge, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US and Corsair/Little Brown in the UK in July 2026. Her most recent book poems, With My Back to the World, received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection. Her other books include The Trees Witness Everything, OBIT and Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech.
Luke Dunne is a poet and critic. His work has appeared in The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, The Stinging Fly, Boston Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in Berlin.
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