I’d like to think that art is not very mathematical, wooden, or mechanical. It is ineffable, indecipherable, effluent, and fluid.

Victoria Chang’s newest book of poems is With My Back to the World, published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her latest book of poetry is The Trees Witness Everything (2022). Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory , was published in 2021. OBIT ( 2020), her prior book of poems, received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.

Writing feels like being within you, silence, and then emerging, bronzed. Somehow, writing feels more related to beginnings than endings. Writing feels outside of time. In a windowless room. Not in a room at all. In a state of being half-awake and half-possessed. In an endless snowstorm, ploughed under. Alone. As I reach for memory that has become extinct.

Artist Reflection

For me, to make art is to float or flutter in a state of non-intention for as long as possible or maybe even forever. The process of making is what I enjoy the most.

My book, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, was even more of a process of exploration than usual. I didn’t really understand or know what I was doing until I was far into the process. I started with one epistolary letter to my late mother, then another and another, until I had a stack of letters. At some point, I decided to include images because the root of the letters were actually a box of photos, birth certificates, and many other documents. Then at some point, I included poems on top of images, then small pieces of cut paper, then the paper became alight on the page, then more collaging of an interview I found where I spoke to my mother when she was still alive. I think of this book as being able to see the insides of someone’s body, like with a scope, while the body is moving along in its workings.

In terms of hybridity, I think that I tend to listen to whatever it is I’m working on and ask it what it would like to be. Sometimes, the work answers clearly as poetry or prose. But for me, most of the time, the work answers with some form of hybridity because I think poetry and prose are human labels. I think of art as having a fair amount of range. It is weight-bearing. It is flexible. Some poetry feels very poem-like. Other times, poetry really feels very prose-like to me. It really just depends on each poem. The same is true for prose. I tend to be drawn more to lyrical prose or prose writers who have a lyrical ear, or some kind of attention to sound. I’d like to think that art is not very mathematical, wooden, or mechanical. It is ineffable, indecipherable, effluent, and fluid.