On Ghosts and Looking Forward with Victoria Chang

Cao Yu, Everything is Left Behind, 2019.

with Lily Nilipour

Chinese artist Cao Yu’s Everything is Left Behind is, in a literal way, made of dead pieces of the self: The white canvases are threaded with fallen strands of Yu’s own hair. It makes for faint ink—the characters are wobbly and almost hard to read, as if the canvas may shed its language as easily as we pull clumps of hair from our scalps. Yet, just by attaching the hairs to the canvas and making them into language, Yu resists the erasing force of loss. Meaning may still be made from these fragments.

Much of the work of poet, professor, editor, and critic Victoria Chang deals with these questions of identity, language, self-fragmentation, and loss. Her poetry has garnered much praise and critical attention, and her most recent poetry collection Obit (2020) won The Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry and was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry. Obit itself is a sort of anti-elegy, repurposing the form of the newspaper column to reflect on themes of grief and the failure of language in expressing that grief. In reading Obit and listening to a reading given to the English department, I found that Chang’s work is extraordinarily multi-faceted. Her keen and attentive eye to people, nature, and the world around her make her poems at once surprising and mournful; they are like the swan songs of spiders.

Last month, caesura editor Lily Nilipour had the chance to ask Chang about the pleasure of writing poetry, processing grief, being Asian American, and much more.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Lily Nilipour (LN): Could you tell me a bit about yourself: yourself as a poet, as an educator of poetry, and how you came to poetry?

Victoria Chang (VC): I think poetry came to me—it’s just something I’ve always done, and it’s a very busy life. I’m convinced at this age that I like to be busy because I seem to have been busy every day of my life. And so I think poetry just fills in all the cracks in my life, but I think the cracks are very important and probably where my life really is, if that makes sense. Today’s a great example—I’m spending seven and a half to eight hours on Zoom in meetings of all sorts, and I enjoy it. I’m very extroverted. But that’s not where living really is—it’s in those cracks of our existence and our lives. And so poetry has always filled in those cracks, and it’s made me, I think, a better person. I love it so much.

I did actually work on some poetry this morning: I am being commissioned to write a tiny poem for Blue Bottle Coffee, which is so cool. I did write five little poems actually, because if I don’t like it, I just keep writing and trying more things. I do fill it in the cracks of my day, too, whenever possible; I always read a poem every day. It’s the first thing I do: I wake up in the morning; I read a poem.

In terms of how it fits into my life now, it’s a big part of my teaching life obviously, which allows me to work with different people at different stages in their writing lives and also to think about poetry, too, because when I’m teaching, I’m always learning from my students but also learning about what those particular students might benefit from. Each student and each person is unique, and so I’m always stretching myself and thinking, “what could I teach them?” and “what could I offer to them?” and “what can I learn from them?” It’s just a big part of all of my life, in ways that are really wonderful.

LN: Part of what struck me in your talk a month or so ago was that, exactly as you said, you engage with a lot of poetry all the time. I was also reading some of your other interviews, and I saw somewhere that you said poetry’s become addictive, or you really enjoy writing so that you can surprise yourself. I was wondering if you could talk more about that element of surprise that comes with writing poetry.

VC: Oh, it’s so fun! It’s like you’re on the train of language and you never know what’s going to come next, what word is going to come next—it’s the coolest thing. And I just did that this morning, experiencing that joy of language and surprise. I don’t even know where the poem is going or what it’s doing, but I was rereading them and seeing, “Oh, there’s the hand that led to that hand and that one,” and it’s just so fun and so enjoyable.

As a person and as a human, I love new things, so I’m very interested in exciting new things. I get very, very excitable—I recently started drinking caffeine in my older age, but I’ve never needed it in the past because I was always very excited by different new things in life, like a little child in some ways. That is what I feel with language too. It gives me that newness and surprise and joy that I so enjoy about being alive.

LN: And I think that excitement comes through in your poetry. The first time I heard about your poetry was when two of my friends were telling me great things about Obit. They were talking about how they would start reading one poem, and then they’d get to the end and think, “What just happened?” and stop and rethink the whole poem. I feel like so many final sentences in these poems have such interesting twists or take me somewhere that I didn’t expect. What is the process of coming to that surprise at the end?

VC: I think sometimes while I’m writing I try very much not to look back, so it may feel like that, too. I’m very much a forward-thinking person, and so to reflect and think about things

that have happened in the past is just against my nature. I’m just very into the future. When I’m writing, it’s almost like I put shut doors behind me. The minute a word comes up I shut that door, and the next language, the next language, shut that door. It’s not like I’m always trying to go back to the beginning and say, “Oh, what did I start with?” I’m fine with where the poem has ended, even if it’s totally different. I think I actually don’t try to think, “Okay, what have I just done?” I just keep moving forward.

LN: Do you think that relates to this idea of multiple selves? Or that as we move forward through time, we leave behind our past selves and embody other selves?

VC: Absolutely. And it doesn’t mean that the ending of the poem might be so different than the beginning. There could be an echo—and I think they’re related. It’s very difficult for the ending of a poem to be completely unrelated to the other parts of the poem; it’s a matter of how light that shading is or how thin that thread is or if that thread may be seemingly invisible. But as many poets have talked about in the past, the ending is entirely dependent on the rest of the poem, and without the rest of the poem the ending can’t exist, really, on an existential basis. Like if you were to take the endings of my poems and cut them off, or cover the rest of the poem but the last sentence—what is that? It’s not the same thing anymore, because that ending was very much dependent on everything that happened before it to get to that point.

LN: Do you feel like that also applies to looking at your work over time, from where you started in your first poetry collection to where you are now with poetry? Do you feel like there are those echoes that circulate?

VC: Sure. I think that’s how we are as people. I am certainly not the same person I was when I was 25 or 22 or even any age. I wasn’t the same person, to your point, as I was this morning: I’m totally changed. I’m so changed from this morning, so many things have already happened today. I’m no longer the same person. I think that’s really interesting.

But there are threads. I am same in some ways, but I’ve changed, and I think poetry is no different book by book. It really is a representation of the time that we happen to be in at that particular moment, it’s a photograph when you really think about it. And it gets stuck in time; once it gets published, that is the time period that it represented in your life, and then you go on to represent other time periods of other things that you might be working on.

LN: I was wondering if we could focus a little bit on Obit. It’s such a powerful book in so many ways, and I was wondering if you could talk about what it was like writing the book.

VC: It was really hard, actually, to write the book. It was very emotional, if I remember, too—I felt really sad while writing it. I remember sometimes crying at certain points in remembering things, and certain things just triggered me and made me cry. And then I had to revise it after

that. I found myself really surprised even a year later, when I was reading and revising certain poems that I suddenly would feel emotional again at certain points. But that decreased. As time went on and I read it over and over and over again (because I’m totally obsessive), at some point I didn’t feel anything anymore.

The first time I read these poems aloud was when I was teaching at a writers’ conference in Idyllwild. I distinctly remember standing for that audience and reading a couple of these poems for the first time and feeling really stressed, because I was feeling like it was very triggering and emotional for me.

Now I do these readings and I don’t feel that anymore. But I sometimes feel that they feel ghostly to me, and the emotions are even ghostly. I still can feel like they could be sad—I think they’re sad, and people tell me that they can be really sad, but I’m so separated from that sadness that I felt when I wrote it that it’s hard for me to imagine what that means anymore, as time passes and your feelings change. I think that’s true with grief too: it changes all the time.

My mother passed away in 2015, which is getting to be sort of a long time, but I think about her every second of the day. I have one of her sweaters in my closet; I still have her phone number on my cell phone in the Favorites. I’m sure someone else owns that number by now, but I won’t take it off. And there’s no image, like next to other people who don’t have photos or names, it has a P or a WT or a DC. For hers, it’s just ghostly, it’s one of those empty unfilled faces. I won’t take it off. She’s a part of my life; every day, I think of things I would tell her. It makes me sad on a daily basis, but in little moments.

LN: Even hearing you talk about it now, it makes me sad!

VC: I know. Sorry!

People tell me sometimes, or they write and say, “It’s so sad!” Other people are different, though. Some people read it and they’re like, “Yeah, it just got too much, it was too much of the same.” I really do think everyone reacts to things differently, and I think it depends on the person, their way of dealing with emotions, how deeply felt of a person they are, if they have experienced grief, if they’re poets or not.

LN: That’s really interesting, because I was thinking about that in terms of processing my own emotions and responses. On the one hand, I felt like I could relate because my mom is also Chinese, so I think some of the emotions that you express—not just grief, but anger and the conflict around love—I really related to. But on the other hand, I have not grieved someone like that—I’m still in that position before experiencing my first real moment of grief. I think reactions depend on the reader, too, but all the elements are there.

As a writer I try and contribute in ways that I can, through my writing. I hope that helps move things forward, because we can all only do so much.

VC: I’m glad you mentioned the Chinese aspect of things, because I’ve gotten various feedback from people, non-Asian people, who say, “Oh, this is so different, so unusual,” and this and that. And I was like, well, is it?

I mean, I don’t think so. It is my experience of grief, and I happen to be a Chinese and Taiwanese American human who grew up in a Chinese and Taiwanese family. I think that it’s probably not as uncommon as you think, but our stories are so much so, and have been so much so, from one perspective, that even if there’s variation and diversity within that perspective, it is very uniform at the end of the day. This is the importance of getting other voices out there, because our experiences might seem really different and foreign—I hate that word—to other people, but it’s not really. There’s a huge diversity of life and experiences in this country and it is a good time to finally get those voices out.

LN: That leads to some of my other questions, which were about being Asian American and the current conversation happening around that. I’ve also been reading Minor Feelings, so that’s also on my mind. What are your thoughts on this current moment?

And one more aspect of that—I saw that you’ve talked about invisibility as well as visibility in your childhood, and how that might have influenced your poetry. Seeing that these conversations are becoming much more visible right now, I was wondering if you have new thoughts on that.

VC: I do. I think this is a time of reckoning for all BIPOC people and humans and everyone. I just think this country is so racist, and it’s been so obvious to me my entire life. It constantly flummoxes me to think that people actually, to this day, don’t think that. It’s misogynist, it’s racist, it’s terrible!

But there’s a lot of work to do, and I think that literature and poetry, and in the case of Cathy Park Hong’s book, are important additions to helping to reshape our culture. It takes time. Being the age I am, I’m surprised it’s taken so long, yet I’m also really surprised that we’re here. In my lifetime I wasn’t sure that we would ever get to this place. And don’t even begin to talk about Black people and Indigenous people and what’s happening today. There’s so much stuff going on, and not even just nationally, but internationally—there’s a lot of conflict going on right now.

It’s really hard to get your head around all of it, but I think as a writer I try and contribute in ways that I can, through my writing. I hope that helps move things forward, because we can all only do so much. I think that my role in this world is to move things forward in writing and all writing-adjacent things, so if I’m associated with certain institutions or organizations, I can make change in those ways to push things forward. I’m always looking for ways to make a difference in my own life, and it seems to be very effective for me to do so through my writing but not just by writing. The writing has given me different avenues and platforms. In all the places that I’m asked to do things, I’m always thinking about, “what does this mean for BIPOC writers, should I do this, how can I support them, can I give up my honorarium?”

I’m always trying to figure out ways to support change, and necessary change, and so I’m glad to see that things are moving in a better direction, but it’s a lot of work, and it’s going to take a lot of time. But I always invested in that, and I think that it’s important to stand up for the things that we believe in; otherwise who will?

LN: What interested me about Obit as well was that you write so much about language and the absence of it and how violence is kind of an absence. I was curious if you could talk a bit more about that relationship between absence and violence, if that is what the relationship is—in terms of poetry and writing as a form of filling that absence or speaking, but also in politics and in current events.

VC: I think every word we put forth is political. As a writer, I’m exploring different things, and sometimes I can’t find the right form for whatever I’m writing about. In Obit, there are things that happened around that time that were to me very racist, like when I was at a workshop, I was lectured by a white woman whom I worked with. There were so many things that were so wrong about that. It entirely traumatized me. I kind of hint at those things in Obit, but then I blow those things out a little more in this new book that is coming out in October, which is called Dear Memory.

We’re just discovering the process of what to say, how to say it, in what form to say it, what language to use, but to me, writing is absolutely a political act. I think the fact that I look the way I do is a political act—and I don’t mean to represent people that look like me—but I am not dumb to believe that that my presence in certain rooms makes a big difference.

How I present myself, like whether I choose to stay silent or whether I speak up, is important. I was just telling someone in another meeting that I spoke up in a search committee meeting when someone was referring to someone else as speaking too quickly so they had trouble understanding them. And I was like, “Really?” This person had an accent and was a Latinx person, and I had no trouble understanding this person whatsoever. So I was very clear about, what is that coded for? Whatever venues that we’re in, we need to speak up, and when we see those kinds of issues and injustices, we need to raise those issues and injustices.

For me, writing is that, too. I may not be seemingly, palpably vocal in my social media or even in person as some other people may be, but if you look through my work it’s all there—there are political concerns throughout all of my writing, in every single book that I’ve ever written. It just depends on which book and how to express it in a way that works best in terms of the art. It’s been a part of my life being an Asian American person, and I’m proud to be one today. But I can’t say I always was in the past.

LN: I did notice in one interview, you mentioned that you had been bullied in the past, and then you said you wouldn’t have called it that until recently, because you were ashamed of that past. I was wondering about the internal work that goes into these reckonings.

VC: So much internal work, and it’s very much inspired by all the other work that’s happening around me outside of my body and inspired by other people and other movements. I’m always learning, and from a lot of young people, to be honest, these days. It’s not to say that I always agree with everything that everyone else is doing and why—I am of my generation—but boy, I will tell you that the youth really inspire me in many ways, and one of the ways is to look a little more closely at things that I took for granted or accepted as okay.

And that’s one of the things, that I was relentlessly made fun of growing up in Michigan. I used to just blame it on myself, like “Oh yeah, it’s just me and the way I look,” or maybe I gained too much weight, or maybe this or maybe that. And at the end of the day, it’s like, wait, no, it’s not your fault! It doesn’t matter what you look like. I mean, my puberty days were not that great, but it doesn’t mean someone needs to pull their fingers across their eyes and call you “Chink” and chase you in P.E. relentlessly every Friday and make fun of you in front of all these people. It doesn’t mean any of that is okay!

So I do think growing up and being older, and being in a culture of silence and now not being so, has been really a wonderful period of growth for me. I’ve written a middle grade novel about that called Love, Love, and again, it’s in this new book that I talk about those kinds of things a lot, and I admit a lot of things in there that I would never even have told people, because I think if people met me today, they’d be like, “Oh, she seems like a very well adjusted person.” I remember in grad school I was always considered that cool athletic girl, outgoing, and so I just shed that history very easily. Now at this age, I’m like, you know what, that’s a part of me and I need to say this and speak this so that people know this and then it can make a change in someone else’s life or culture at large.

LN: Can I ask you a few questions about craft? My first one is about similes and metaphors. As an undergrad who’s taken poetry classes or creative writing classes it’s always like, write metaphors, use this to convey your ideas. But in Obit you often just use the word “is,” like “this is this,” and I feel like that elides the more circuitous figures of speech. I was wondering what your

relationship with figures of speech is, especially when you’re writing about grief or something that’s hard to express.

VC: I think there are a lot of “is”s in Obit because you can’t really describe grief, and so the constant repetitive nature of the metaphorical reachings was entirely because I was trying to see if I could define it through language and explain it to someone. I think at the end of the day, it’s truly inexplicable. It is one of those things that one needs to go through, and really feel, but then, I don’t know—I was so intent on trying to explain it, and I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m a writer.

I’m always flummoxed, again to use that word, by other people who have had parents pass and they don’t feel desire to write a word or even to talk about it. For me, I just feel this incredible desire to write it down and to try and navigate it. My mother appears a lot in this new book too, because when she died, I felt like my whole history died, and so this new book is an exploration of my culture and all the things I didn’t know. Now I watch Chinese dramas all the time—I just want to practice and hear the Mandarin because I have no Mandarin in my life anymore.

My mother and I talked fairly frequently, though not really socially; she’s very shy, I would say, and a little bit prickly. It’s not like she was easygoing. But we did talk a lot, and so I was always listening to her and hearing her when she would talk to other people like my dad. It’s gone. It evaporated. The minute she died, it’s like, wait, my whole language died; this language that we shared in common is gone.

And not only that, but I used to occasionally ask her questions about things, anything related to her history. She was very, very reticent about it, but if they were innocuous questions like, oh what’s this called, what’s this food called? She’d be like, oh, that’s a youtiao, and I mean, I already know what that is but there are a lot of things to ask her about, and she would just say it, and that’s all gone—I have no one to ask those questions to anymore.

And just boxes and boxes of her junk. I started looking through the boxes and boxes of her junk and putting together a book that uses the archival material to reflect on silence and being an immigrant’s child when you realize so much of your existence has depended on someone else’s attachment to culture, so that when they die, you feel like your whole history has just died and you wish you asked more questions.

But again, nobody else necessarily writes these things down, even though it happens to everybody, I’m sure. I, as a writer, feel this is how I process things, so I write it down, and then if someone is willing to share it in terms of publishing it, why not?

LN: In the attempt to get at these questions in Obit, do you feel like you embodied a style or a

For me, I just feel this incredible desire to write it down and to try and navigate it. My mother appears a lot in this new book too, because when she died, I felt like my whole history died.

way to express that, maybe if words themselves failed to do that?

VC: I think sentences, syntax, word order is all hugely important: pacing, line length, sentence length, whether it’s fragmented or not… Those are all the choices that writers make subconsciously while they’re writing but obviously are hugely important to the piece that you’re putting together. I remember feeling like it had to be very flat and dictioned. In terms of the actual sentence structure, I think that I’m always aware of pacing: when do I use a shorter fragment? When do I use a longer sentence? When does something need to be a little longer and why? These are all things that I’m considering as I go. It’s absolutely a big part of the writing process, but at this point, I have to admit it’s all very subconscious.

LN: I couldn’t help but notice that you mentioned The Waves in Obit. I am a huge Virginia Woolf fan, and I love that book. I have a small writing group and we have this running joke where we just say, if you’ll excuse my language, “Fuck, The Waves.” Somehow The Waves just keeps coming up, and we just keep going back to it all the time, so it was really interesting that you also went back to that text. Could you talk about The Waves?

VC: Yeah! I love The Waves; it’s so beautiful. And I love Virginia Woolf and just how innovative and independent she was—I very much identify with her as a person. The Waves is always around me physically—it’s probably around here somewhere now. How I used it in Obit was as a word dictionary. I just had it around and would open it to a page. I just gave a talk actually where I found one instance where I used it for language. In The Waves there’s the passage where “pots of jam” was there; it’s a beautiful, gorgeous passage. And all those sentences are gorgeous, but I just took “pots of jam” because I’m using it as a word dictionary, so I don’t want to take the whole thing. I usually didn’t take the whole phrase, I usually would just use a word, but in that case, I liked the fact that “pots of jam” is very English, it kind of takes us out of that modern contemporary diction for a split second and it may subvert things for the reader.

I’m all talking more as a critic now than I am a writer, because I don’t know what I was thinking when I did that, but something must have appealed to me about “pots of jam,” so it does show up, and it does shape the direction of the poem. I do that a lot—I just have things around and I’ll just use a word, and the word will trigger something, and then it’ll take the poem in a different direction. It’s more as a path to be more playful. I think of writing, as I mentioned in my reading, as entirely play-based, and it is so fun when I think of it that way, and it makes everything more fun.

LN: Earlier you had mentioned echoes and echoing, and you quote “Four Quartets” in Obit also. That poem is really about echoes—in terms of style, thematically, and also just words, words coming back. Could you talk more about echoes and if that relates to anything else you think about in poetry?

VC: I feel like we’re always influenced by other things or other people. When I first started writing, I kind of was thinking that I had to sound like other people, and then I thought, oh, maybe it’s finding my own sort of thumbprint. And now I’m kind of like, no, no, it’s not quite how I feel. I think now I feel like it is just playing, with language as your tool; therefore, I think playing naturally may involve utilizing other sources. If you were a visual artist, you may be using other materials to inject into your painting, and it could be language that you’re putting into your artwork. Like Cy Twombly, the artist that scribbles.

I think it’s just by nature. That kind of thinking will bring in echoing of different things. And language is like an echo of other people. I didn’t make language, but I can also make new language, but anything that I make is always going to echo something else that someone else already did. I cannot avoid the fact that we are descendants of so many other things and people.

LN: On descendants—we had a poetry talk from lecturer Richie Hofmann a few weeks ago, and he talked about, as a young poet, crafting your “poetry family,” and he was saying that that should include dead poets and contemporary poets, and all the poets that they read. Who do you think is in your poetry family?

VC: Yeah, I talk about that too sometimes—not always; sometimes I talk about making your family tree. So, maybe I have a little bit of a simpatico with how Richie thinks about how finding one’s own writing identity is not done alone and in a vacuum—you’re looking to make your family trees as you go, and it may change, but I do think that thinking about who are your influences and who you influence, even, are all important questions.

For me, as I kind of alluded to earlier, I am looking toward inventive people. I think I tend to be very much an inventive person in my poetics, but also my way of living is very much about creative ideas and solutions, even in my work life. I’m always like, well let’s brainstorm and think about how to solve this in a different way. That is very much who I am, and so I identify with people who are always pushing the boundaries a lot: the Woolfs, the Gertrude Steins—a lot of women—the Marianne Moores… I’ve talked about those three a lot. I love Elizabeth Bishop. The T.S. Eliots are always interesting to me, people in those liminal transitional periods of history.

Lately, I’ve been writing a lot of syllabics, short poems, and that is obviously reaching to some of the Japanese poets, and classical Chinese poetry can be very small and imagistic. I’m not a

huge fan of the romantics—it’s a lot of discursive bubbling around that doesn’t really interest me as much. I like a sort of steely and cleaner language, which is more of the modernists, the imagists.

LN: One last question: What do you do in your free time if you have any?

VC: I don’t have any free time! [laughs]

No, I do, I do have some pockets of free time and I look forward to those pockets, but a lot of my free time is with poetry. If I’m not working out—and I’m hardly ever, I have so many injuries that I’m no longer a fitness person—I just do stuff to keep myself healthy and while I’m doing that, I love watching my Asian dramas. I’m watching a K-drama right now, I’m also watching like four different Chinese dramas at once, and I just kind of go in and out of them.

If I’m sitting at my desk, I do a lot of reading. I’m taking Mark Wunderlich’s Rilke class, and he sends his letters and gives us writing assignments and reading assignments, so I’ve been reading a lot of Rilke. And then I have about 100 books lying all around me, and I’m at various points in all of them.

Another thing I do as a hobby is I write criticism, so I am always looking for other books to review. It’s another way to flex those brain muscles and get better as a thinker. I love writing criticism; I’m not that good at it, but I really enjoy it, so I do it, as a way to practice thinking.