AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Team Mystery

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, Team Mystery.

Victoria Chang lives in Southern California. When I sat down to talk to her, I saw through the window behind her, an enormous ficus tree. “Oh yes,” she told me, “we live in an area that’s called the Tree Section, so there are these monstrously large trees everywhere.” On her desk was a printout with the scientific names of all these trees—something for a new project she was excited about.

But tree-lover is only one of many lives Victoria Chang leads in parallel. She has also written a stack of books, she has an MA in Asian Studies from Harvard, an MFA from Warren Wilson, and an MBA from Stanford. She worked as a financial analyst, a management consultant, a marketing manager, a business writer. And today, she is a core faculty member at Antioch University’s MFA program, serves as this year’s Poetry Editor for the New York Times Magazine, and she has two kids, two wiener dogs, plus, for many years, until their deaths quite recently, she was a long-term caregiver for her sick parents.

When we talked, Victoria Chang had just published a poetry collection titled The Trees Witness Everything. But I didn’t want to start there, with her own poetry.         

Helena de Groot: I wanted to start with your work as the poetry editor for The New York Times.

Victoria Chang: Sure.

Helena de Groot: Because I’ve been really enjoying so much, not just your selections, but also your introductions. They’re so concise and so helpful, without being overbearing or over explaining. So I just wanted to know, how do you pick your poems and then how do you write that intro?

Victoria Chang: Yeah, you know, I thought hard about that role. You know, whether to take it or not. And I went back and forth for a while, because it’s a very public role. And, and I don’t particularly like being very public. But when I decided to do it, I was very committed to doing it the way that I wanted to do it, meaning, you know, I really wanted to include translated poetry, and I also wanted to broaden things just a little bit. Again, I think the editors in the past years have done an incredible job. But I just had a slightly different vision, and I think that’s the beauty of bringing on different kinds of people, is that everyone has a different vision. So, you know, mine was to include more women and/or queer, non-binary poets, more Asian American poets, which have been very few and far between. I hadn’t also seen many Native American poets throughout the New York Times poetry that I had looked at, because, you know, I actually put together a spreadsheet that I could actually get and sort of see. You know, I just wanted to broaden things just a little bit. It’s so easy, because there are thousands and thousands and thousands of amazing poets that are writing poetry every year. So, then when you only have 50 slots, give or take, how do you do all of what I just said in 50 slots? I mean, in some ways, it felt like building an anthology while also paying attention to current events. So it’s been hard, because, I really do, I have this, my esthetic is inclusion. (LAUGHS) You know, I want to include everybody.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Victoria Chang: I’m like, everyone deserves to be in the New York Times. And I just can’t. And that really keeps me up at night, because I think everyone has a poem that’s good enough to be in The New York Times, if that makes sense. I don’t believe in this sort of whole, like, very narrow gatekeeping culture that we have. Yet here I am, you know, as a gatekeeper with 50 slots. And so, that’s been the trouble that I’ve been having all year long. And I wanted to include older poets, younger poets, this poet, that—I’m already running out of space for the year, and I feel increasingly like I’m suffocating because of that. And then in terms of how I write the little write-ups that go in front of these poems, I just kind of read poems and then I sit with them, and if I feel like I have something to say about them or there’s something interesting about them is kind of how they get selected. I mean, I need to have something that I want to say about them that’s ever so small, and then I kind of write them, and I think of them as being little art forms themselves. I try and make them interesting to read. And I try and include some things that might give people a little bit of a map to the poem, but not too much. So it’s pretty much what you said, and I’m very aware that the readership of the magazine could include practicing poets and also people that don’t write poetry at all. So, I’m picking poems with that in mind, but I’m also trying to challenge the readers that may not write poetry or read a lot of poetry. So I’m not going to pick always, like, the easiest or the most legible poem, but 30 lines, it’s not a lot of space anyway. But yeah, small presses, too.

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Victoria Chang: So that was something that I’m very, very considerate of. So, tiny, tiny presses, the smaller the better, and the more esthetically maybe askew that your work is, it is a presses that are doing that. I’m more interested in that, too. So just trying to stretch a little bit the good work that’s already been done there.

Helena de Groot: I was wondering if we can get to a specific poem that you picked recently and then talk about it a little bit more. It’s by Rick Barot.

Victoria Chang: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And it’s that poem, “Errands.” Do you want me to send you a link or can you easily access it?

Victoria Chang: I can access it. And it’s Rick—I’m pretty sure he pronounces it Barot.

Helena de Groot: Ah, Barot. Okay, that’s good. Okay. Thank you for that correction.

Victoria Chang: Yeah. And let’s see.

Helena de Groot: Do you talk to poets before you’re including their poem, or is it just a kind of a surprise for them?

Victoria Chang: I love to surprise the poets. Yeah. I try really hard not to tell anybody, but I’m constantly soliciting books. So, I have hundreds and hundreds of books that are coming in, five or eight a day.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Victoria Chang: And then I, you know, I try really hard. You know, I feel like I’m on the search for something special.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Victoria Chang: And that’s—I really enjoy that process.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I’d love to for you to read this poem, and then we can talk about it a little bit.

Victoria Chang: Sure. It’s called “Of Errands” by Rick Barot.

(READS POEM)

On a table in the living room

there is a gray ceramic bowl that catches

the light each afternoon, contains it.

This is the room we turned into

the room of her dying, the hospital bed

in the center, the medical equipment

against the walls like personnel.

In Maine, once, I rented a house hundreds

of years old. One room had been

the birthing room, I was told, and I sat

in that room writing towards the bright

new world I am always trying

to write into. And while I could stop

there, with those two recognitions

of endings and beginnings, I’m thinking

of yesterday’s afternoon of errands.

My father and mother were in the backseat,

my sister in the passenger seat,

and I driving. It was like decades ago

but everyone in the wrong places,

as though time was simply about

different arrangements of proximity.

Sometimes someone is in front of you.

Or they are beside. At other times

they are behind you, or just elsewhere,

inconsolably, as though time was

about how well or badly you attended

to the bodies around you. First, we went

to the bakery. Then the hardware.

The pharmacy, the grocery. Then the bank.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. Yeah. I so love how this poem starts and ends. Almost like a camera, just observing very dryly, almost, you know, without comment. You know, in the beginning there’s that, on the table in the living room, there’s a gray ceramic bowl. You know, it catches the light each afternoon. And then at the end, you know, just that very dry summation, like, you know, bakery, hardware, pharmacy, the bank. And then in between you have this grappling of a magnitude. I mean, it goes to so many places so quickly, like, you know, death and what it means to parent your parents, and how the passage of time actually shows up. I really just love this poem. And I was also curious because, your three latest books, The Trees Witness Everything, Dear Memory, and Obit, have all centered around the death of both of your parents. And I was wondering if there’s a conversation between what’s on your mind and what kind of poems that you pick?

Victoria Chang: Yeah, I mean, you know, I have a list of the poems that I’ve published so far and I’m like, death, death, death.

Helena de Groot: Yes! (LAUGHS)

Victoria Chang: And then I was like, okay, who is our most hopeful poet? And I’m like, Ada Limón! And then I put a poem in there by Ada Limón. I’m like, the reader needs a break.

Yes. (LAUGHS)

But yeah, I’m just attracted to the darker sort of themes in poetry. And I think poetry is just such a beautiful place to explore the themes of grief. And I think that’s why there are so many poets write these kinds of poems. You know, Joyelle McSweeney lost a child. And I put a poem in there by John Pineda, “My Sister, Who Died Young, Takes Up the Task.” And so there are those kinds of poems that I am definitely attracted to. So, yeah, I mean, I definitely think that if anyone’s looking for that sort of cheery, joyful poem, they may have trouble finding it in my year, but I am trying. But you’d be surprised at how few people actually write about that stuff, too. Like, people don’t really write about joy and happiness. And I wrote a whole talk because I was so obsessed with this idea. I wrote a whole talk about joy in poetry. And my conclusion was that our most joyful poems actually are quite sad, in many ways, and the two are not mutually exclusive. They often go hand in hand. You know, we think of Ross Gay as a poet of joy, but in some of his most joyful poems, his fig tree poem, you know, he’s talking about violence against Black bodies in Philadelphia throughout that poem. And if you focus on the joy, you don’t see that other aspect of the poem. But people sharing figs with people under the canopy of fig trees is what people think about when they think about that poem.

Helena de Groot: When I talked to him, I asked him about that, like, yeah, you are supposedly the poet of joy, but every time I read your poems, they are, they are infused with suffering.

Victoria Chang: That’s right.

Helena de Groot: And he said, well, but isn’t that what joy is? Isn’t joy something that you only feel when you’re connected to everyone, to everything, and if you’re connected, well, you’re connected to their pain, too.

Victoria Chang: Absolutely. I think that’s true. And I think we can only experience joy because joy seizes us when we are living our regular lives, which can be filled with sadness and grief and unhappiness and all these other emotions. And I think that it’s not until we are living a real life, which are all those things, can joy actually seize us. Can we actually feel joy. So it’s somewhat related to what she was saying. You know, we can’t summon joy. It comes at us. It takes us over in a moment and then it cannot last.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Victoria Chang: And seeking it is a bit of an endless, useless pursuit. And you’ll waste your life doing that.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I was wondering if we can get to a poem from Obit, your previous collection. So it’s an obit for approval. It’s on page 31. Okay. And just so that people have sort of a context for the Obit book, it’s a whole book where every poem is in the shape of an obit. Is there anything that you want to say before you read it, or do you just want to read it?

Victoria Chang: No, I can just read it.

Helena de Groot: Oh, maybe one more thing that I wanted to say before we read the poem is the poem starts, “Approval—died on August 3, 2015,” which is also the date that your mother died.

Victoria Chang:

(READS POEM)

Approval—died on August 3, 2015

at the age of 44. It died at 7:07 a.m. How much money were you get was my mother’s response to everything. She used to wrap muffins in a napkin at the buffet and put them in her purse. I never saw the muffins again. What I would do to see those muffins again, the thin, moist thread as she pulled the muffin apart. A photo shows my mother holding my hand. I was nine. I never touched her hand again. Until the day before she died. I love so many things I have never touched: the moon, a shiver, my mother’s heart. Her fingers felt like rust branches covered with plastic. I trimmed her toenails one by one while the morphine kept her asleep. Her nails weren’t small moons or golden doors to somewhere, between ten last words I was cutting off.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. Yeah, well, you know what struck me so much about this poem, or what I found so affecting, is the way that you talk about these muffins. You know? “She used to wrap muffins in a napkin at the buffet and put them in her purse. I never saw the muffins again. What I would do to see those muffins again, the thin, moist thread as she pulled the muffin apart.” And it’s only then that you go into the part of the hands, you know, that you hadn’t touched really, for most of your life. And I tried to imagine the poem without the muffins first. And I was—I saw immediately like, oh, that would be a lot less affecting, but I can’t understand why. Like, why are the muffins, this silly detail, why is that the thing that makes my heart bleed when I read the thing about the hands?

Victoria Chang: Yeah. I mean, I think that naturally our minds can be very associative. And I think that’s how grief kind of works. You know, it’s like, you think about some detail about someone and then suddenly you think about a picture. I think that’s just how our brains function. And I really, when I’m writing poems, I don’t want to allow myself to interrupt the poem’s or the mind’s natural movements. And I just wanted to pretty much transcribe that movement of memory in the mind. And then the question is, how do you make that into art, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I also felt that in reading your work, sort of from the earliest books to the most recent one, is that there does seem to be a kind of condensing in the form. And I was thinking about that when I read something in your memoir-in-letters, and there’s one letter where you quote Jeanette Winterson, who writes that, “the most powerful work offers itself as raw, when, in fact, it is sophisticated. It presents itself as a kind of diary, when really, it is an oration.” And I love that quote. And I thought it really applied to what I think your poems do well. You know, like, their form is so carefully crafted, which allows the pain that is inside the poem to be as painful as—I found your poems sometimes hard to read. That’s how much they hurt. You know, and so, yes, you can follow the wilderness of your mind free associating. But then there’s also the rigor of the form.

Victoria Chang: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: How do you do that? What is your approach to form, and how does it help you contain the wilderness of your mind?

Victoria Chang: Yeah. I mean, I’m thinking about the muffins now and the role that they play in this poem. And I, I really think that the muffins sort of set up the fact that a person is observing someone else and remembers this really odd detail about how they used to steal muffins from the buffet and put them in her purse to eat later. And I hate metaphors that are sort of announced, but this one is very subtle. It’s like you just think someone’s telling a random detail about the muffin, but the muffins actually become a metaphor for love through observation. And then also the fact that the muffins disappear, because the mother must eat these muffins at some point. So, in many ways, the muffins also become a metaphor for the mother who is now no longer here, and also a metaphor for touch and lack of touch. You know, the speaker never gets to touch them.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Victoria Chang: Yeah. And then also eating together is a very lovely sort of thing, too.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah. And you also almost describe a kind of tenderness that the mother in the poem would … grant these muffins, you know?

Victoria Chang: Yes!

Helena de Groot: That maybe were not granted to the child. Yeah.

Victoria Chang: Yeah. You know, I think that the intimacy and the lack of intimacy is very much so already embodied in the poem. And so I think, intuitively, readers jump in, and they reach for that because they’re so smart and they feel those things, you don’t need to map it out to them.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: In various interviews, you describe yourself as disorganized, messy, and sloppy.

Victoria Chang: Yes.

Helena de Groot: But then, of course, I also know that you have this past as this very organized person. You know, you have an MBA from Stanford. You worked in finance. You worked as a marketing analyst, a business researcher. So, if you are indeed disorganized, then you probably are very good at functioning as if you’re not.

Victoria Chang: Oh, yes, absolutely!

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) And so, as a poet, how do you sort of make that work for you?

Victoria Chang: Yeah. I mean, I think that we are who we are. And I’ve been lately describing myself as sort of a polymath, not as bragging, but I really am all over the place, I’m interested in everything. But when I have to do a job for other people, like, someone’s paying me to do work, I can be exceptionally organized and on top of things and respond to emails very quickly. So I have a lot of that kind of executive functioning skills naturally, and yet I’m also extremely creative. We were joking about this, the poet Catherine Wing, myself, and Joy Castro, the creative nonfiction writer, the three of us were talking about this and Catherine said, “Are you team plan or team mystery?”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Victoria Chang: It was like this binary, team plan or mystery? And I said, I’m team plan, because I have a job and can do a lot of administrative things. And then we were on the plane coming away from a conference that we were all teaching at. I was taking a nap on the plane. And then I get up and Joy Castro, who’s sitting in front of me, who, actually was reading my book, The Trees Witness Everything, unbeknownst to me, was like, “You are team mystery.”

Helena de Groot: That’s gorgeous.

Victoria Chang: It was so funny, because she was like, “You are not team plan.” And I was, I just thought that was funny. I was like, I actually am all of the above, all the time. Yeah. It’s like, I’m not one or the other, and neither is stronger or better than the other. Like, I feel like I’m equally everything, if that makes sense.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh. Yeah, well, I can see that now, in your work as a poet. In your work, as you know, the editor at the New York Times Magazine, in your work administrating these writing programs. But I’m just wondering what it was like before, when you were still operating in that world of spreadsheets that has no patience for any kind of wilderness. Were you very unhappy?

Victoria Chang: No, because I think it’s a different kind of wilderness, you know, I think, I think that there’s so much creativity in other fields. If I’m sitting in a meeting talking about something related to work, I’m operating with the same brain. And the ideas that I know that I come up with are very creative. It’s all being channeled from the same person and the same brain. And so it’s very exciting to be a part of a team of people that are making something or building something together, and it’s just as exciting and creative to me.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, of course. I was wondering if we can get to a few poems from your latest collection, The Trees Witness Everything. But before we get to specific poems, can you tell me about the format of most of the poems in this collection? You know, the tankas. Like, what are they, and how did they help you write?

Victoria Chang: So, typically I just write, and who the heck knows what is happening or where these things are going or whatever I’m doing. And, you know, I really, really always push back against people’s kind of negative articulation of the quote-unquote “project book.” Because I feel like the people who complain about those things and criticize the quote-unquote “project book,” they don’t understand how art is made. (LAUGHS) I’m just going to be really harsh. I mean, if you think about all the visual art, Matisse, Agnes Martin, an artist that I’ve written a ton of ekphrastic poems now on, Matisse doing one cut-out, you know, or Calder making one mobile. I just don’t think we work that way. We’re obsessive people. We want to make it this way and then make it that way, and look at it that way, and refract it this way until we beat it to death. So, yeah, I noticed that I had written these tankas in this Obit book. And my friend, the poet Ilya Kaminsky had just said, “You’re really good at these little tiny poems, you should write a whole book of tiny poems.” And I said, “Okay, I’ll try it just for fun,” just to exercise the mind kind of thing. And so, I did a little bit of research and I found all these other forms, the katauta, which is five-seven-seven, and the sedoka which is five-seven-seven-five-seven-seven, various other syllabic patterns. And I love writing syllabics because you’re like on your path, you’re like, “Oh, I’m writing this thing.” And then you’re like, “The syllables don’t work.” And then you have to go back and write about something that you didn’t want to write about or didn’t think about. You’re just trying to get the syllable count right.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Victoria Chang: So it really does get Victoria Chang the writer and the mind out of the way. And then I thought I would make my life doubly hard. And I, I thought, I’m just going to use W.S. Merwin’s poem titles, because they’re so open.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Victoria Chang: Like, “Dew Light.” You know, “The Removal.” The removal of what? (LAUGHS) You know? “Witness.” Of what? Who? Where? “Threshold.” Like, I just loved how expansively pliable these titles were. I just thought, why not give myself some constraints that can allow myself to be more free and just do it for fun? I was just, I was just kind of playing around. And so I, I really wanted to try a new thing, which is, avoid subject matter altogether. But, as you can see, it’s impossible.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Victoria Chang: Some of my obsession still come through. And then also, you know, I thought short poems must be hard to write, because I don’t see that many.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Victoria Chang: And so I thought, you know what? I’m going to try it. They must be hard. And if something is hard, I run right into the fire.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) I did have a sense that that was true. But it’s funny, I mean, it makes me think of that, was it a Churchill quote where he’s like, “I’m sorry for writing you such a long letter, but I didn’t have the time for a short one.”

Victoria Chang: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Well, I was wondering if you want to read a few. On page 41, there’s one titled “The First Year.” Maybe you can start there.

Victoria Chang: Okay.

(READS POEM)

The First Year

The year after death

is full of stretching, where things

pull so hard your bones

break, because they were never

bones, were always solitude.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. I’m just going to go into the next one, if that’s okay.

Victoria Chang: Sure.

Helena de Groot: There are two poems on every page. And so I was wondering if you can read both on page 77.

Victoria Chang:

(READS POEMS)

The Wild

I am still angry

with God and all the patterns

we’re forced to follow.

I still can’t look beyond death.

Why does the heart have

so many rivers to snake

through, each one a day’s

trip, each one a suicide

mission into another.

Burning Mountain

The fires are long gone,

but desire is left behind.

Desire was never burning.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. I felt like these poems, they were sort of aphoristic, in a way. Like, every poem seems to contain this very small, very true thing. And it’s hard to come up with true things all the time, you know? (LAUGHS)

Victoria Chang: Yeah. It is funny because they do read like little aphorisms. I love, love, love aphorisms. And I think they’re so hard to do. And I also think that—I love witticisms, you know, like, jokes. I’m constantly interested in jokes. And when people tell them, I just think they’re so funny. It’s like this spontaneous moment of, like, having someone suddenly throw a glass of water in your face, and you wake up with awareness. I love those moments. And in terms of like truths and things, again, it’s just something that I like to do. And I’m really interested in wisdom. And I’m always asking people who are older than me to tell me something that’s important for me to know when they were my age. I mean, I’ve done that, like, four times in the last week.

Helena de Groot: What kind of answers did you get?

Victoria Chang: Oh, I get all kinds of interesting answers. One person told me, a woman told me that you really should clear—she wished she would have known that it was important to clear off everything that didn’t matter, because the next 10 years, your energy really, really dissipates. And I was like, oh … as someone who has, like, unbelievable amounts of energy, I never get tired. I’m always doing 800 things and talking a mile a minute and I have a thousand ideas in a second. So I—that really scared me, to just look at yourself and think, “What is the most important thing to me?” And then everything else should go. That one, I’ve been thinking about nonstop since this person told this to me. I mean, people have, I’ve had injuries, physical injuries, too, where I’ve had to stop doing certain things, things that were your entire identity before. You adjust, just but it’s like a death, you know? And life is one grief, some smaller, but some larger, after another, punctuated by these very sharp moments of joy. And I know that. And then to hear someone else repeat that to me, who’s 10 years older than me, really frightened me.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Victoria Chang: And then another woman just told me, “You just cannot give a crap”—but she used the F-word—“about anything anymore.” Just, everything is like, you know, F- it, just don’t care about anything. And I was like, well, that’s really freeing, too, is like, just don’t care. And I’m still very much so like, in my poems, I don’t care. But in personhood, I very much care what people think of me. I don’t like to be in front of people. I don’t like to be on stage. I don’t like to have a light shined on me. Feel free to shine it in my work. That’s mine. But I don’t need it shined on me.

Helena de Groot: Is that something that you’ve always managed to do, to not care what people think about your poems? Or is that a thing that’s come later?

Victoria Chang: I’ve always not cared. I don’t know why. I mean, I actually can’t explain it. I’ve had this conversation with a lot of my friends who care, and they don’t believe me sometimes that I really don’t care. And I think it’s because going back to the sort of polymath thing, I’m interested in everything. And poetry is important to me. I mean, I’m sitting in a room full of hundreds of books. It’s sort of just become my life, if that makes sense. But I think about a hundred other things in a day. And I never really wanted to be only a poet, you know? If I had more time, I would do lots of other things.

Helena de Groot: And so if you had like another day’s worth of time for every day that you have, what would you do?

Victoria Chang: Would I have to be making something? Or could I just, like, receive.

Helena de Groot: Anything.

Victoria Chang: Okay. I think, I really, I’m always interested in documentaries, you know, could be about someone climbing Mount Everest. Or it could be about some random person who loves mushrooms or something like that. But I’ve thought it could be really fun to kind of work on documentaries. I love drawing. I’ve always loved drawing. I think it’d be really fun to be a painter, you know, like to paint and things. And so, you know, I love reading contemporary philosophy. I mean, there’s so many things—I love working out. I love walking. And I used to love cycling until I couldn’t really do it for injuries and things. I loved running until I couldn’t do it for injuries. So, I mean, I just love being a part of the world. I love talking about business. You know, I’m always reading about companies and stocks. And I’m curious to know about what companies are doing. Like, the CEO of Airbnb was talking on the radio. I was really interested in listening to him talk about the culture of Airbnb and whether to make people come back to work or not. You know, I think about those things all the time and, and so yeah, I feel like, maybe it’s not that I don’t care about poetry, but it’s not all or nothing for me. Like, the stakes aren’t so high, because in the space of my brain, it actually doesn’t take up that much space. And I never wanted to be, you know, like a famous poet or a successful poet or even a poet that people read. I just, I just thought it was cool to write poetry, and it was a part of, like, water and air for me. And so, yeah, I don’t, I also don’t need, I don’t need that much. You know, so I don’t—now, I mean, if I write a book and it gets published, yes, I will try and work hard on it. And you know, and I would love for the book to be read. But beyond that, it’s like, there’s not much, you know, not much I can do about it. And my mother was very into fate, so she’d always talk about just like, “That’s not your fate.” You know, if we’re talking about a book and it goes out into the world and it gets a ton of attention or doesn’t get a ton of attention, or people hate it or people love it. I cannot control that. Like, what happens was already predetermined. It’s my fate. If people love it, they love it. If they don’t love it, then they weren’t going to love it anyway. But you have to follow your own dream, your path of doing what you want to do and not, you know, focus so much about how things are received. You just allow things to be how they are and how they will be. And don’t get so upset about things, because you never really had any control over them anyway.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I really feel like you hit, inadvertently maybe, like you hit upon, like, a key or something to writing, to doing anything at all, to being alive, but also to writing poetry.

Victoria Chang: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah. By not putting all this pressure on it, letting things come and go, that actually you’re, you’re more truthful, I think, to what poetry can do.

Victoria Chang: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: You know, it’s not supposed to be a product.

Victoria Chang: No!

Helena de Groot: It’s not supposed to be a performance.

Victoria Chang: No.

Helena de Groot: It’s supposed to be a practice, I think.

Victoria Chang: It’s a part of life, you know, it’s just another part of life. I mean, it’s no different than tending for your little bonsai plants or doing the trimming that’s required. I mean, you just suddenly look up, and it’s, suddenly an hour has passed, and I was trimming this bonsai plant. I mean, that’s what poetry is to me.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Victoria Chang: It’s like, just getting lost in your own tangled brain, in your heart, in your body. It’s a practice of spirituality. And I think we’re supposed to enjoy it. So, if I don’t enjoy it, I’m not going to do it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Victoria Chang: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, it makes me think about something you said way at the beginning, when we were talking about your role as editor for The New York Times Magazine, and you said, you know, “It’s hard to choose because I think everybody has a poem that’s good enough to be in the magazine.” And I wasn’t 100% sure if you meant every poet or you meant everybody. (LAUGHS) And so, do you think that everybody has the capacity for writing at least one great poem?

Victoria Chang: Yeah, I think I was probably more thinking about poets. I think that for some people, it might not be their particular optimal mode of expression, but I think that they’re capable of doing something like writing a really wonderful poem in some other way. You know, they could be a great yoga instructor, or they could be wonderful with certain pets. Or they could be good caretakers. I just think of them as being sort of these, like, gifts. You know, we all have them. It’s hard to map out one’s life path. And by the time you know the path, you’re on your way out. And so, I think that that’s the joy of life. If we knew everything, I mean, what’s the purpose of being here? I just think more and more the purpose of us being here is to learn everything that we can in a short period of time. And, and then we die. But the process of just learning all of it is such a joy.

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Helena de Groot: Victoria Chang is the author of six collections of poetry, including The Boss, which received a PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award, Barbie Chang, Obit, which received an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, an LA Times Book Prize, and a PEN Voelcker Award, and her latest, The Trees Witness Everything. She also published a memoir-in-letters titled Dear Memory, which was on countless “Best Books of 2021” lists, and two children’s books, Love, Love, and Is Mommy? She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

She currently serves as the Poetry Editor for the New York Times Magazine and she is Core Faculty at the MFA program of Antioch University in LA. She lives in Los Angeles with her family. To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose and Eric van der Westen. I’m Helena de Groot, and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.

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