Time to Get Out of Yourself

Patricio Ferrari interviews award-winning poet Victoria Chang on the occasion of her Limelight Poetry reading at the New York Public Library.

By Patricio FerrariSeptember 11, 2025

• Poetry

ON TUESDAY, June 17, 2025, I spoke with poet Victoria Chang at the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, following a performance by Chang and violinist, vocalist, and interdisciplinary artist yuniya edi kwon. The conversation and performance were curated and hosted by Limelight Poetry as part of its World Poetry Salon, founded by poet Wang Yin. Victoria Chang read poems while yuniya edi kwon played the violin.

As I reflected on our gathering, I found myself considering the essential—indeed, vital—role of collaboration. As we all know, collaboration is omnipresent. It happens whether we recognize it or not: bees pollinate trees, which communicate underground through their roots, even sending chemical signals to warn nearby trees about potential threats. Collaboration happens. And it endures—even, and perhaps especially, in times of unrest. It sustains us, and it matters deeply in the arts.

Collaboration lies at the heart of Victoria Chang’s craft—certainly since OBIT (2020), but even before. In her most recent three books of poetry, OBIT, The Trees Witness Everything (2022), and With My Back to the World (2024), we’ve witnessed a remarkable range of collaborative modes: not only with other artists but also—perhaps most profoundly—as a deeply attentive reader of poetry and of the world.

Limelight Poetry invites, per their mission statement,

outstanding poets and artists from around the world to share their work in various forms, with the goal of showcasing poetry in underrepresented languages. Drawing on the city’s rich cultural resources, Limelight Poetry connects poetry with other art forms, fostering a global exchange of poetic expression. It welcomes audiences into a vibrant and inspiring world of poetry, music, and beyond.

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PATRICIO FERRARI: I thought we might begin by talking about collaboration as a kind of terrain—how it has unfolded for you, and how it may have deepened over time, from OBIT through the books that followed.

VICTORIA CHANG: I feel most stressed when I’m working with other people and collaborating, but it’s also the most exciting feeling to actually be onstage with another artist, like yuniya. That feeling of stress runs along the same wire as excitement. So for me, collaboration is better. Whenever I’m out in the world, I see new things, hear new things—and then ideas and new emotions arise.

Reading is a form of collaboration too. I spend a lot of time reading, and I always get better ideas, new feelings, or thoughts for my own writing when I read. I don’t know if I could write if I were the only person on the planet. That’s what art is to me: a form of interaction and collaboration.

With OBIT, one of the enduring questions is: How do we write an elegiac poem today? How do we write an elegy without turning it into an autobiography—not centering the “I” or the person we’re mourning? And how do we avoid sentimentality? There are, of course, techniques available, but even with those, the challenges persist.

I was deeply moved by OBIT—in many ways—but especially by how it resists sentimentality. Even before tonight’s event, we spoke briefly about how OBIT is about you, Victoria, and yet not about you. You write in the book, “Victoria Chang—died,” but the “I” dissolves in the process. Could you speak to that?

I avoided writing elegies for exactly those reasons. How do you do something that so many others have done so well, long before you? But also, how do you write an elegy and write about something so deeply personal and still make it meaningful to someone else?

When I was writing OBIT, I knew I wasn’t writing a diary or a journal. I was making a piece of art. That’s the premise I bring to my art-making. I was actually very aware of that problem with the elegy. I was trying to figure that out—how do I use language to convey how I’m feeling in a way that removes it from me and makes it shareable, so that it became less about me, and more about this flat kind of definition. How do you even describe grief? Even the word grief doesn’t describe itself. I was aware, while drafting these poems, of the moments when I was getting stuck in the realm of the self. And I remember, a few times while writing, thinking: Okay, you’re here again—it’s time to get out of yourself.

In OBIT, as we’ve been hearing, the content is so close, so poignant—and yet the book is also remarkably layered in its attention to form. Even the word OBIT—short for obituary—serves as a kind of formal container. There’s craft embedded in the language of the title itself.

As we move into the book, we encounter the prose poems—those recurring rectangles of grief. And we know rhythm is repetition in time. You honor that rhythm for a while, then break from it. After so many entries, you shift. When you bring in tankas, there’s a renewed intimacy: “my children, children,” right? You address your own children, yes—but the poems also speak to all children. When I first read that tanka, I heard echoes of Khalil Gibran. So my question is, Why did you choose the tanka as a recurring poetic form in OBIT?

I think I was practicing all these other forms—writing sonnets, pantoums, all kinds of poems just for fun. When I’m not writing or making something, I feel agitated and uncomfortably unhappy. So sometimes I just write things or make things because it makes me happy. It’s how I live.

The tankas happened to be among the formal experiments. I had placed these formal poems in the back of this manuscript that was starting to take shape. Then a friend read the manuscript and asked, “Why are these in the back? What are these? These little ones—these tankas—these will work in here. But the rest of them, maybe not so much.”

And then that friend said, “You should move them around. Try placing them throughout the manuscript.” So that’s kind of how they ended up in there.

It was a wonderful choice. Let’s share one of your early tankas from OBIT—the 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic poem:

My children, children,
remember to let me go,
delete my number,
save the number of the trees.
Remember, the lemons speak.

After so many entries in OBIT, there’s a tanka or two that come in, and this happens throughout the book. That was really well constructed as well, because we may be really taken by content and even by the lexicon, the diction of the poet, but often poetry books will lack formal constraints, or not necessarily pay heed to poetic forms at all. But you did in that book. And then your next book comes around, and you take the formal constraints even further, because you explore more Japanese forms. If you want to tell us a little bit about that. And perhaps about brevity, the importance of brevity in your work—perhaps for depth or for inquiry.

I kept on writing miniature poems in various forms and syllabic lines. After writing a book like OBIT, that took a lot out of me personally and I felt very sad, but the conundrum is that when you make art related to your sadness, you’re layering sadness on top of sadness, and then you might spend years revising, which is then layering more sadness on top of your existing sadness, and then you have a stack of sadness.

After OBIT, I just wanted to have fun, not that sadness wasn’t fun, because I think sadness is oddly joyful, which is really strange to think about. The Trees Witness Everything, which is the book that you’re referring to—the book of miniature poems—was just putting so many constraints on top of so many other constraints that it became almost comical to write that book.

I used W. S. Merwin’s poem titles as my own. I was also playing with these various Japanese syllabic forms with the understanding that English syllabics are different from Japanese and other Asian syllabics. I was using my fingers to count syllables, recounting, because it’s hard to get the syllables to match what you thought was a great line, and so I had to rewrite a lot, which was another way of really just enjoying the process of making—because when the syllables are wrong, you have to let a line or even a poem go. I didn’t even write those lines down. I learned a lot from that process. It’s not about the outcome; it’s more about the joy of making and remaking and revising. It was an important book for me to write, because it further embedded my own poetics—of process and of making verses of outcome.

It’s so organic also for the form that you chose. For those who know Merwin’s work, it really lends to brevity, to depth, and to so many of the themes that you’re drawn to, such as the natural world. We heard words such as cormorant, rain, or different types of trees; the natural world is part of your environment and your diction. OBIT, The Trees Witness Everything, and With My Back to the World are really an invitation and also a conversation with so many poets, philosophers, and visual artists.

When reading The Trees Witness Everything, I could not stop thinking about Antonio Porchia. Porchia wrote aphorisms, and every so many years he would add aphorisms to the previous edition and put a new edition out. Shortly after Porchia’s death in 1968, Merwin read, translated, and published those aphorisms. Could you tell us about your relationship with the aphorism? And if you want to link it back not just to Merwin, but also to Chinese poetry?

What I love about aphorisms is how they make your brain fold, and then they make it refold, and then unfold, and then refold in different ways. I’m attracted to the aphorism and the kind of doubleness or tripleness that happens when you write or read poetry, and the poets I like a lot are very aphoristic. I think it’s really fun to write aphorisms, and also they’re false—most aphorisms are actually wrong. The most interesting ones are the ones that are incorrect, if that makes sense, if there’s such a thing as a correct aphorism.

I also really love short forms such as the haiku because they can also be funny. I think I have that sensibility, because I like funny people and I like seeing the levity in all situations. I think often about Bashō’s haiku, translated by Bob Hass: “Year after year / on the monkey’s face / a monkey’s face.”

In With My Back to the World, your latest book, you bring in the artist Agnes Martin, the American painter often associated with minimalism—who devoted herself to silence, solitude, and spiritual discipline, which she channeled into her iconic grid paintings. You take titles of her paintings and some of her paintings and try and write about the nonfigurative. And in your ekphrastic poetry, you’re engaging again with emotion that’s beyond the eye—though the eye itself is in retreat, once more. At the beginning of the title poem, you write: “This year I turned my back to the world. I let language face // the front. The parting felt like a death. The first person ran away like a horse.”

In that opening page—this is what I felt as a reader—you shake hands with us. It’s as if you’re saying: This is the “I” that will be in the book … and yet, that “I” is already slipping away. You bring in Martin, weave in her titles, and each poem becomes like one of her paintings—sometimes engaging them directly, other times more obliquely. And still, it’s not a book about a specific her. Would you talk a little about what it’s like to write a book with a visual artist—not as subject, but as a kind of quiet, chromatic collaborator?

The Museum of Modern Art had commissioned a poem engaged with a piece of art from their collection, and that is the second poem in the book, “On a Clear Day.” I didn’t quite understand Martin’s art when I was younger. I picked her work because I didn’t understand it. I think that’s more exciting than picking a piece of artwork that you love or understand.

I didn’t know that the commission would start a whole dialogue with Agnes Martin. My father was in his last months of dying, and suddenly I could connect with Martin’s work. Perhaps Martin and I were doing the same thing—she was drawing, writing with her grids, and her grids were some form of language.

And I feel like I’m painting with words. I never feel like writing is the perfect medium for me. It’s always felt just slightly off. As poets, we have the gift and the problem of meaning, and so you’re stuck with meaning. So I’m stuck with these words. And I feel like Martin was writing—with a graphite pencil and a brush—in the same way that I’m trying to paint with language. I feel that connection with her work at this stage in my life.

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Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is With My Back to the World, published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States and Corsair in the United Kingdom. It received the Forward Prize for Poetry for Best Collection and was named a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also a finalist for the Griffin International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as long-listed for the National Book Award. Other recent books include The Trees Witness Everything (2022) and her nonfiction book, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief (2021). She has written several children’s books as well, and Eureka is forthcoming from FSG Books for Young Readers in 2026. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been translated into many languages, including Italian, Chinese, Spanish, Romanian, Greek, and Dutch. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and director of Poetry@Tech.

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Featured image: Photo of Victoria Chang by Pat Cray.