“I’m On My Own Journey”: Interview with Victoria Chang

On October 17, 2023, Victoria Chang visited Binghamton University as part of the Distinguished Writer Series, hosted by the Binghamton Center for Writers. She read work from Dear Memory and from her then-forthcoming book of poems, With My Back to the World, and shared the poems’ connections to works of art and to the lives of artists. Before the reading, she sat down for a conversation about art, life, and poetry with PhD student AJ White.

AJ White: I’d like to start with Circle, your first book, which won the Crab Orchard Prize—the great Jon Tribble brought that book into the world. What stood out to me most from Circle was this image of the chambered heart, which is so tactile and structural. The heart itself, its physical presence and biology. Looking back into memory, what struck you about that image in that time?

Victoria Chang: One of the things that I had been reading at the time was Suji Kwock Kim’s Notes from the Divided Country, and she had this really great poem—“Monologue for an Onion”—it ends with this heart that’s beating, and that will [one day] beat you to death. I borrowed that image and phrase (that I may have forgotten to footnote). That was a central image that really fit with the historical poems that I was writing.

When I wrote Circle, I was very influenced by what I was reading. The beating heart from that poem really stayed with me. And still stays with me—I love that poem. It’s the opposite of what you think—a heart is beating you alive—so a heart “beat[ing] you to death” jolted me.

AJW: We’ll talk a lot about desire. I think in that book, and in your other books that follow, observations emerge like I am writing about desire. I cannot stop writing about desire.

VC: We’re so hungry. People are so hungry. You were saying earlier about the weather here [in Binghamton]: it’s always desiring to rain. Desire is such a large part of who we are as people. It’s both the most magical thing about us and the cause of most of our problems. War, love, infidelity, hunger for fame, for fortune: whatever it is, these desires drive us to better ourselves, to make things, but also destroy us at the same time.

AJW: We have desires as well to be understood, to be held, to be comforted, right?

VC: Yes! All those things. Desires to be loved, cherished, understood, seen: it’s all the same thing, and it centers around a desire to know why are we here, what are we doing here? And why am “I” here—how am I different than all the people before me and around me? There’s a hunger for recognition—to be seen, and to be alive—that’s interesting to me.

AJW: Absolutely. These hungers go unfulfilled. Because we have a consciousness, they drive us mad.

VC: They do. And so I spend a lot of time trying to understand those hungers, and to accept them as part of who we are, but then trying to subvert them and to re-channel that desire toward the unknown, the unspeakable, the metaphysical, perhaps. More than the concrete. I’m not all that interested, in my writing, in my art-making, in concrete desires. I’m interested in those big questions.

AJW: I have to say, this came up most explicitly for me while I was reading Dear Memory: there are all these desires that are physical and bodily and that get mentioned but then moved-on-from. Or in Circle there’s this “man in the white truck,” right? He’s there [as a concrete desire], and then you’re moving on. In Dear Memory an eating disorder is mentioned—it’s there—and then within a few pages we’re back in history and using history to look at larger questions like silencing. It seems clear to me that as a writer you use concrete desires as a launching point toward a greater question.

VC: I think that’s true. Also my brain moves all over the place, a little too much! Sometimes it’s hard to focus [on a single concrete thing], to be honest. I think you’re getting at this tendency to look internally [within the self] and then very quickly back outwardly to something larger. At the end of the day, the self, for me, is only a tool. It’s a conduit to understand much larger things.

I’m not that interested in myself, beyond using myself to understand larger things. I’m not interested in staying within myself. I’m not interested in keeping the mirror on myself: that’s narcissism. But I recognize that my experiences can help me make sense of and navigate the world and can be useful for me in my art-making process.

I’m just a body that travels along, and I’m writing about things that just kind of follow me. Oftentimes we center ourselves, and the world is around us. I actually think the world is here, and I’m just a companion to the world. And my mind is just a companion to my body. I love that word: companion. I’m just a companion to the things that are happening in the world and to the world itself. I’m not centered. I’m asking questions that have been asked since the beginning of time. The only way that my art-making can be unique is that my vessel is unique. So I’m just happy to utilize that vessel.

AJW: I’d like to continue to talk chronologically, the way your images and meaning accumulated for me while reading your work in chronological order. In Salvinia Molesta I saw that expansion of the self into the world: what is around me, what is natural. This image of the heart remains present but expands into the natural world. You remain grounded, in much of your work, in the natural world: in trees, or in this hawk, for instance—that starts to return again and again, reminding us that biological processes are themselves often predatory—or in the wind: as these images or symbols accumulate, the verb, or this action of piercing starts to pervade the work.

Reflexively, this affects the heart too: when you have a heart, something is always going to pierce it or want to pierce it, or you are going to want sometime to pierce into it, emotionally or physically or both. Moving through what we’ve been talking about, how is the natural world, specifically, fruitful for you for expanding beyond the self and for de-centering the self?

VC: You know those Chinese scrolls—old inkbrush paintings—where the little person is tiny in the corner? I grew up looking at those; they were all over our home, and they were part of what my parents took me to look at in museums. I always thought the self was really small and next to this massive mountain. Being an Asian American, Chinese American, Taiwanese American young girl in a majority-white space, I was very small and most of the time invisible. And then within my family I was also small: I was mostly just left alone, unless I got in trouble. My sister got most of the attention, for all kinds of reasons. So I’ve always thought of myself as being small. So I also therefore don’t like lights on me, don’t like to be the center of attention, and am constantly uncomfortable with people looking at me or the focus being on me. I prefer to be in the background, even though lately I’m constantly in the foreground.

But I like to think of how small we are. I’m secondary to all of what’s happening outside right now. That mindset is a big part of my writing. I also think about the kind of learner I am: I don’t listen that well. I like to read. I like to look at things, to see things. I’m constantly looking at things. I thought everybody was like that—but some people like to hear things, some people like to touch things. I will regularly stop and just look at something.

So I’m just constantly aware of my smallness against nature, plus I just like the natural world and animals more than I like people. [Laughs]

AJW: Totally fair. Whether it’s a romanticization or not, there’s a simplicity to nature.

VC: There is. I’m just more comfortable being in a forest or near animals than I am in the noise of the world. I’m chatty and extroverted in a small group of people—it’s not like I don’t like people—but sometimes I’ve had enough. So I think that shows up in my writing: I’m always looking outward, and I have a discomfort with looking inward.

Thinking about a lot of contemporary writing: a lot of people just stay in—and the whole poem stays in—that’s totally fine! I just can’t do that. I don’t know how to do that.

AJW: And yet, regarding your perspective—I find poetry has changed so much since the invention of film, and we have all these ways to think about the view and the lens—when your poetry looks outward, to me, it’s important to note it’s not landscape, it’s not some great, [VC: Romantic] view or lens. It’s not overly broad: it remains acute. It’s still piercing; it’s still looking into the self. It’s looking into the self by looking into the Other.

VC: Absolutely. It’s like a drone. My view, the way I look at [and analyze and dissect] things, is to pull out all my little tweezers and such; and yet then I have this interest in and ability to drone way up into the sky. A constant zig-zagging [in and out] is just the way my brain works. That’s how I think about nature. It also just appears. I’m a guest in this world. I look at the natural world and what I spend time looking at appears in my poems. I like leaving a lot of space between everything, all the elements in the poem, so it becomes figurative and people can [fill it in with meaning] naturally.

AJW: My next question speaks to zooming out and zooming back in. I was reading Barbie Chang next—and the heart is still there, and piercing is still there—but it becomes a lot about meat, specifically game meat—that is to say there is both a rich openness in your use of the natural world, but also a specificity.

There’s a great quote in Barbie Chang that says Every woman begins and ends with another woman. I want to tie this in to your ability to zoom in and out, to talk acutely about the self by talking acutely about the Other. And I’d like to tie in also this quote from Forrest Gander’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book Be With, whose epigraph says The political begins in intimacy.

So I think about your interests from the start of your career onward—the historical, persona poems—I think as well as any other poet you get to the political through the intimate. How does poetry in particular enable you to move between the intimate and the political?

VC: I think the political poem, the social poem, the eco-poem—any poem that’s looking at something larger—is difficult to write, personally. I thought about this recently. I think it’s because, with a poem, usually we have this big empty canvas, right? It’s not even a canvas—it keeps going to infinity—it’s very capacious, what we have to work with, and therefore there’s a lot of room to wander.

But with the historical poem, or the eco-poem, the base is there. You started writing a poem in a space [that’s already delineated]. You’ve boxed yourself in. No one’s going to argue with you that some historical atrocity is bad. So you’ve already kind of locked yourself into a smaller room.

So now what? How do you write an eco-poem that’s interesting, that’s imaginative, mysterious? It already has the premise—it’s already there. I think that’s an interesting challenge. Today, any day, but especially today. The only way I know how to do it is to bring my own unique views, my own unique mind, the unique movement of my mind and my unique experiences and sort of conflate things together, let them entangle in interesting ways.

Otherwise, it becomes something different, rhetorically: a speech, or an essay—a great essay can contain the intimate, of course. But the personal is the only way I know how to enter that space without it becoming like a critical essay.

So yes, for me, the personal is a way to get at the political and the political is a way to get at the personal. I have thought the same thoughts as every other person before me: that, as an idea, is still shocking to me. I was just thinking this yesterday, in the airport: I was walking and thinking every single person before me has thought this thought; every single one. Shocking.

And I just think about how small we are, and how unimportant we are, and I just embrace that smallness and unimportance. This country can be obsessed with itself and making the self something larger. But the self is just this container. We are what we are. I embrace that insignificance and that smallness.

I’m not interested in fame, fortune, significance, influence, relevance: none of that matters to me. That’s what this country and the way we were raised here teaches us to desire. But I’m interested in the opposite of that: our insignificance. That’s an obsession of mine. And I’m obsessed with how everyone before us must have had that thought. I’m interested in that connection with history. It doesn’t bother me that I’m insignificant; I think it’s a beautiful thing. Because that’s something we have in common with other people.

AJW: That’s a thought that’s deeply comforting to me too. What is disconcerting to me still sometimes is the opposite, kind of: that all the other minds in the world right now are real and individual can feel overwhelming to me.

VC: Absolutely! But I think of that [too] as connection. This obsession with “making your mark,” or the mechanism of awards in this country that plucks people out and tries to claim that they are different. I’m not interested in that whole assumption. I’m interested in the opposite: we are all the same. We are all geniuses, unique and special. We are so similar to each other. Let us find the ways in which we are similar.

AJW: I agree with you so much in that sense. I’m going to move through Obit to The Trees Witness Everything, but in Obit first there’s an additional lens onto the later book that says basically I am in the trees. We all as poets have central ideas, ideas that are comforting and that we return to—of course we have central ideas that are disconcerting, and we return to those as well—I want to talk about the comforting first and then move to the disconcerting.

It becomes clear in Obit, as life events start to transpire, that there is something comforting in the cyclicality of nature. What is comforting is, in a way, that this has happened before and that consciousness can enter and remain and wait [through thinking historically] and return.

VC: One of the things I think about often is people have died before me. It’ll be okay. I’ll be okay. Everyone else has died before me. They can do it; they did it; I can do it too. It’s comforting to know that. There’s a cycle to everything, and I’m just a tiny little blip on it. I’m going to spend the time that I’m here living the most interesting life that I can, doing the things that I want to do.

I didn’t know this until recently—when I was younger I was just doing everything that I thought I should have been doing (but I always had a bit of an independent spirit)—but now as I am getting older I recognize oh, we’re supposed to be having fun here. And fun, for me, is about doing the things I enjoy doing and being passionate about the things I’m passionate about.

So I think about those cycles—this is also a cycle that everyone’s been through before. I’m very interested in respecting my elders and those before me. So when I hit a certain time period or something happens to me, I’m very ravenous in looking to things before me—whether it’s art, music, books, essays—every particular person like me (as a woman) has been through this time period if they’ve made it to this age. So I’m going to go learn as much as I can about it, and then try and correspond and converse with them.

I believe that I’m in dialogue with everything before me. I’m also in dialogue with everything in front of me. I like to talk my way through things—I like to find books to talk to. The things I write are really just correspondences with, well, dead people usually, or with nature: birds, art, etc. When a bird appears in my poem, it’s a specific bird that I’m talking to. That’s how I think about writing: it’s just me conversing with the things I collide with, and thinking about history.

AJW: I’m going to hold off a moment talking directly about Merwin and about Buddhism, but it’s still the lens through which I ask this question about balance, which is: if there is hopefulness, and there is resilience, there is also disappointment and despair. There is a lot formally to praise in The Trees Witness Everything, but what I have seen less coverage of, and that I deem so praiseworthy, is the tone of this book. It doesn’t pull any punches; it’s a book of disappointment, to me, beyond frustration. Cynicism, disappointment, failure, trauma, it’s conversant on erasure and staying with that erasure. When you write a book of 160 poems, you can stay in the dark places for many poems on a run.

So I just want to say I find that brave. I wonder if in sitting down and thinking about your readers if it was daunting thinking about, well, is a Chinese or Taiwanese American woman allowed to write a book with a tone of disappointment and despair? Did you have any thoughts like that?

VC: My tone in my poems, in general, tends toward the dark. Negative, sad, depressed: that’s just where those emotions go, they go into the container of the poem. I love being in that space. I’m sort of appalled—maybe that’s too strong a word, horrified is even stronger—of how we sometimes are just so unrealistically optimistic in this country and our culture. [AJW: toxic positivity] Yes, packaged joy.

I’m such an optimistic human being in person—I’m really positive—but, regarding “joy poetry”: joy cannot exist in these poems that we think of as joyful—Li-Young Lee’s “Blossoms” poem, “The Moose” by Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Lux’s “Refrigerator” poem—all these poems we associate with joy have quite a bit of darkness in them. Li-Young Lee’s poem about the peaches: there’s a line in there that’s all about death and darkness, and yet out of that comes joy. We cannot understand joy that very deeply seizes us without understanding death and unhappiness and depression, etc. Joy wouldn’t exist without those things: it really needs to pay homage to those things.

So that’s the space that I exist in—I pay homage to the darker things—but out of that comes the occasional puncture of beauty. My view of joy is that you cannot package it, you cannot even summon it: it seizes you. Christian Wiman wrote a lot about this in his anthology Joy: 100 Poems, in his beautiful introduction. As did Zadie Smith in her essay “Joy.” Joy—you cannot just acquire it or purchase it; you cannot just say I want to be joyful! and go feel joyful. It doesn’t work that way. It seizes you, like a rainbow does. It comes at you, and then it has to leave.

For my poems, it feels like I’m just living my usual, difficult, dark life, like we all are, and then occasionally it’s punctured—usually through an image—by beauty, or happiness, or joy.

AJW: That’s exactly how I read the collection [The Trees Witness Everything]. I read it as a need to balance the scales: we cannot have one without the other.

VC: Exactly. It’s two sides of the same coin, as they always say. Or on the same spectrum.

AJW: Here are some quotes from TTWE that I wanted to read you that just happen to fit right here:

Let me tell you a story about hope: it always starts and ends with birds. A retelling of Every woman begins and ends with another woman, to me.

I will never love anyone the way I love my memories and their cliffs. I don’t have a question: that’s just beautiful. And joyful, in addition to being sorrowful, now that I think about it.

VC: I was thinking in an even newer poem how, once my mother died, for example, I can’t love her anymore. It’s just the memories of her. It’s such a bizarre thing to think about. I can no longer love my mother. I love my memories of her. To be in love with memories is such a strange concept.

AJW: And yet. [VC: And yet] You didn’t make those memories alone: she made those impressions on you.

VC: And yet they’re just experiences. They’re just images. It’s very complicated. [both laugh]

That’s why we love poetry. It doesn’t answer anything. Like those poems you just read back: they could mean seven different things. I intend them to be very capacious and open. When you read them at different times, you can be a different reader, and you can experience something different. They need the reader: my poems need the reader to experience language in their own way.

AJW: You’ve answered what, among many, many things, attracts me so much to your work. In the [workshop] classroom, perhaps, we have swung in the direction of telling our students your poems cannot mean just anything: they have to mean [something specific]. And I disagree! They can’t mean just anything, but they can have vast resonance and mean such different things at once. [VC: Absolutely!] That’s one essential poetic function. That’s what poetry is and does.

VC: It’s true. I’m really interested in poems that don’t snap shut, you know? I could read it this way, but I can also read it this way, this way, this way, and this way. To me, a poem is reaching for the un-sayable. So how do we expect our reader to read one meaning into something? That’s just not what literature is supposed to do.

AJW: Exactly. Your poems open in the end. They don’t close; they open. [Reads passage from “Marfa, Texas” that suggests that we are nature experiencing itself.]

I’ve been dancing around it, but I want to ask directly because everything you’ve said leads me to think through Buddhist lines of thought (which are how I think through most things). Are you influenced by or attracted to Buddhist or Taoist lines of thought at all?

VC: Yes, of course. It was how I was raised. My mother would say stuff all the time that now I realize influenced me. You know, in Chinese, she would talk about ming: it’s your fate. I’ve said this a few times before in other interviews: it’s really how I view the world. You’re not an actor in your own play. It doesn’t mean you’re totally helpless. But when I was born—she told me this story so many times—she said when you and your sister were born I went to calculate your fate (to a fortuneteller, essentially).

That would be the frame through which our whole lives would move forward. Every time something happened, she would always say that’s what the fortuneteller said: you will have a big accident in your life, you know? There it is! Everything fell into that idea of fate and not having control of things, to some extent. To allow things to just sort of flow. I tend to be naturally less deterministic than a lot of people I know—I may not feel like I actually have the ability to control a lot of things, so I don’t bother. I’m active, I do the things that we’re supposed to dutifully do, but then I just let it go.

I’m on this river—I always use this river metaphor—and other people are on that river. Or they’re on that mountain—usually it’s a mountain. I’m on a river. Regardless, I’m not on a mountain; I’m not climbing anywhere, there’s nowhere to climb. I’m just floating along. And I’m happy to float.

That’s how I was raised, or what I took from my upbringing. That doesn’t mean my parents didn’t have aspirations for me: I’m the child of immigrants. But caring about a lot of the things I could have cared about just didn’t seem helpful to me.

I wasn’t educated in the Chinese philosophies, but I’m like the one who just kind of sits on the river and goes. Zhuangzi is the Chinese philosopher I relate most to in my limited reading. The way I think about the world is in the natural way [the Tao].

AJW: That brings me, finally, back to those tapestries or woodprints that were hanging in your home as a child. Those little people in the corner were often hermits, right? Or they were on a voyage. [VC: Yes! I’m a hermit.] There are mountains, but they are not on the mountains. They’re down by the river; they’re crossing the bridge. There might be a monastery up there, but you don’t know if they’re going there or not. They’re going through a pass in the snow, etc.

VC: Yes, that’s how I feel. It’s usually just one person. I genuinely feel like I am on my individual journey—everyone talks about how friends are important, etc., but I don’t think that’s actually very true. I’m on my own journey.

It’s almost like I pass through people. I pass through things on my journey to something larger.

Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems, With My Back to the World, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2024. Her previous book of poetry, The Trees Witness Everything, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2022 and was named one of the Best Books of 2022 by the New Yorker and The Guardian. Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions), was published in 2021 and was named a favorite nonfiction book of 2021 by Electric Literature and Kirkus. Her poetry collection OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) was named a New York Times Notable Book, a Time Must-Read Book, and received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also long-listed for a National Book Award and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury Prize in Literature.

AJ White is a poet and educator from north Georgia. AJ’s debut book, Blue Loop, was selected for the 2024 National Poetry Series by Chelsea Dingman and is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press fall 2025. AJ is also the winner of the 2023 Fugue Poetry Prize, selected by Kaveh Akbar, and of a 2023 Academy of American Poets University Prize, selected by Tara Betts. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Overheard, Taco Bell Quarterly, West Trade Review, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing and lives in New York.

Notes;

Victoria Chang. “Dear P.” “When a mother dies…” “To the Margin” “Love Letters.” Barbie Chang, Obit, The Trees Witness Everything. Copyright ©2017, 2020, 2022. Reprinted by Permission of Copper Canyon Press.