In the first line of my interview with poet Victoria Chang, the voice-to-text program I was using transcribed the word “ekphrasis” as “Exorcists.” A felicitous mishearing, much to my delight. Ekphrasis, a Greek word meaning “description,” is a rhetorical practice in which language depicts something visual. Examples of ekphrasis abound throughout the history of poetry, usually in poems describing visual art.

 

With My Back to the World, Chang’s latest collection of poetry, is a wildly innovative, deeply unsettling and moving addition to the tradition of poetic ekphrasis. For Chang, extended experiments in ekphrasis acted as exorcists of sorts, exposing painful experiences as they were happening, expressing feelings she wasn’t aware she was feeling. This cross-media exchange resulted in truly original work, characterized by its stark beauty, its strangeness, its intelligence and relentless candor; I’ve never read anything quite like it.

 

Though poems in the book’s framing sections take their titles from the titles of Agnes Martin paintings, their relationship to Martin’s work is knotty, digressive and dynamic, far from straightforward. Every encounter between the poet and a painting generates a dreamlike scene or startling vision; these accumulate into a disquieting portrait of Chang’s inner life.  

 

Multiple overlapping modes of art making inform this collection. First, the work by Agnes Martin. Because Chang doesn’t include it in the book, the reader must imagine the source paintings, which shadow the poetry as inspirational absences, phantom images evoked by each poem’s linguistic turns. For example, because of the mathematical nature of Martin’s work, which relies on the calculated use of lines, grids and other marks, Chang will often count different elements from the painting; this counting leads to further counting. “I now know that my heart is made of 1,376 grids,” she says in “Play, 1966.” Counting becomes an important motif shared by both artists, both media.

 

Second, the poetry itself. With each poem Chang takes a painting not as an image to describe but as a springboard to contemplate persistent, nagging questions, insights, emotions. Enigmatic musings—on depression, for instance—often emerge. “If I turn the canvas on its side, the lines look like my depression stacking,” Chang says of (and in) “The Tree, 1964.” “Once I write the word depression, it is no longer my feeling,” she declares in “Play, 1966.” “It is now on view for others to walk toward, lean in, and peer at.” Other motifs include the intrusive gaze (often male), women’s bodies, loneliness and grief, animals and insects, fields, trees, the nature of language, the nature of the self.

 

The poems appear in blocklike rectangles corresponding to canvases, as if every page in the book were a wall in a gallery, hung with a poem. Chang plays freely with formal elements: prose poems abound, as do poems of varying line and stanza lengths; there’s a poem cut vertically in half (“The Islands, 1961”), a poem quartered, a grid poem. She employs numbers, Chinese characters, and typography symbols, so that the written work conveys a visual dynamism in conversation with the paintings that inspired it.

 

Third, what Chang calls “illustrations.” Poem-based visual works crafted by the poet accompany certain poems. One such image opposite “The Tree, 1964” features a composition in the exact shape of the poem on a gray canvas-like background, with small vertical marks over the words, as if the poet has carefully scored through the poem’s content. The work resembles a series of tracks, or a record of someone counting something, days spent in captivity, perhaps.

 

Fourth, the hybrid work created in the imagination of the reader. As people immerse themselves in the book, they invariably bring their own impressions to bear on that process. An array of complex experiences unfolds, each hovering at the borders between text and image, emotion and intellect, poet and painter, writer and reader.

 

The book’s middle section, a serial poem entitled “Today,” takes inspiration from the Today Series, paintings by the Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara. These works feature the date of the painting’s creation rendered in white on a monochromatic background. Chang’s poetic homage reads like short lyric diary entries, each headed by a date in the same graphic format as the Today paintings. This section also includes accompanying “illustrations,” with some of the text blacked out, as though censored.

 

The sequence constitutes a record of the poet’s thoughts, speculations and feelings, not always welcome or pleasant, as she keeps vigil over her slowly dying father. The act of writing, of engaging with language, becomes one way to navigate the unbearable agony of waiting. For example, in the second two lines of the unnervingly concise quatrain “Jan.19.2022,” Chang makes a poetic leap from the figurative to the literal: “Every phone call says the same thing, that he / is hanging on. And I imagine you / holding on to the edge of a building, / the city’s mouths waiting for you to jump.” The entries take the poet through her father’s death and cremation, leaving her with an ongoing grief, as well as the possibility of hope.

 

In addition to fertile interchanges with Agnes Martin and On Kawara, Chang’s work reflects an impressive range of artistic and intellectual influences, among them Etel Adnan, Ad Reinhardt, Mary Ruefle, Adolf Loos, Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa, a 20th century Portuguese literary figure, was known for his inventive cast of “heteronyms,” the myriad alternative identities he assumed as a writer. Quotes from Pessoa in “The Islands, 1961” and “Play, 1966” point to Chang’s deep skepticism regarding the construct of a unified self.

 

Adventurous and probing, pointed and haunted, With My Back to the World rewards close, committed, repeated reading. Each painting, each poem, each illustration leads Chang to fundamental questions: Who are we? Why do we feel the way we feel? Why do we die? How do we live? In posing these questions, and in trying to grasp answers that endlessly elude her, Chang makes work that shimmers with vulnerability, sorrow, turmoil, yearning, curiosity and mystery.

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Lauren K.Watel 

Decatur, Georgia 

October 2024