After viewing American painter Agnes Martin’s “Untitled IX, 1982”, a work of irregular, horizontal pencil lines that are nuanced and experimental, with a subtle hue of pink underneath, poet Victoria Chang was moved to contemplate the struggle to embrace or appreciate her racial identity: “To be an Asian woman is to be seen as night… Some people assume Asian women are made of flowers, but some of us are made of lines.”
Introspective, complex and experimental, Victoria Chang’s latest Forward Prize-shortlisted With My Back to the World is a collection of poems written in response to major artworks by Martin, exploring in turn the concept of subjective and objective reality, and highlighting the relationship between one’s perception and feeling and the external events or history that take place regardless of that inner world.
An intensely private person, Martin was diagnosed with schizophrenia in her 40s. In sharp contrast with the buoyant, pastel colors in her work, she led an austere and solitary existence in a remote area of New Mexico for most of her working life. Martin’s work engages heavily with the use of grids and lines that cut across the entire canvas. This obsession with geometry and patterns takes on symbolic significance in With My Back to the World. As Chang mentions in the notes to the collection, her poem “On a Clear Day, 1973” was written at the time of the tragic deaths of six Asian-American women in Atlanta, which sparked many of the other poems in the book:
while giving testimony to grief.
In an interview with the New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Chang said “at the time of [my] writing, the Atlanta shootings had just occurred and I kept thinking about the six Asian American women who were killed”, and the way grief is embodied by the juxtaposition of words:
Once the number six emerged, I went back and counted Martin’s grids (48) and I decided to hand-write the poem in 48 rectangles, but wanted the rectangles to be lifted off of the paper as a reversal, and also imperfect, so I cut them out by hand. In some way, this felt closer to the rendering of grief that I was feeling.
Through cutting up of sentences into grids, she conveys that reality is split between grief and the actual details of historical events, at once both personal and communal, as crystallized in the metaphor of tears in “Summer, 1964”:
Tears do not come from the heart. They do not come from the eyes, or the body. They come from outside of us like time, from one large repository, which is why we cry when other people cry. In this way, tears are communal. We depend on each other for our sadness.’
There is a feminist quality to Martin’s art. The poem “Innocent Love” quotes her about “conditioning” which is “particularly / difficult for women, but still it has to be done.” Chang also writes: “Even a woman’s life is trying to become more than the woman it represents.”
Generative and confessional in tone, Chang’s poems, which adopt the titles of Martin’s paintings, go beyond the art itself and adopt a consistent poetic voice which is both subjective and objective, intimate and detached. Recalling the use of elegy in her earlier collection OBIT, these poems acutely convey the grief in absence—actual or imagined absence of loved ones—and of consolation.
Jan 19, 2022
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 collection crisscrosses a lot of forms at once: ekphrasis (poems about art), diary, elegy, interior monologue and more. The poet’s voice is characteristically at once personal and yet somewhat clinically precise, as if the poet is trying to pin down what happens or what is felt as historical truth, yet what lies in the narrative seems dream-like, surreal but universal, and no longer belongs to one person alone. In “Grass, 1967”, for example, Chang writes:
Agnes said that solitude and freedom are the same. My solitude is like the grass. I become so aware of its presence that it too begins to feel like an audience. Sometimes my solitude grabs my phone and takes a selfie, posts it somewhere for others to see and like.
Featuring broad, colorful horizontal stripes of peach, blue and yellow, “With My Back to the World” is a set of six paintings that Martin considered a single entity. Its title reflects the painter’s hermetic lifestyle as well as an art manifesto of resistance, as we bear in mind that Martin was in her mid-80s and residing in an assisted living facility when she made this important work.
While Martin’s painting entitled “Play, 1966” is a subtle white grid in acrylic overlaying a grey background, Chang’s poem of the same title dwells on how a feeling becomes publicly consumed or owned once it is written:
Is it possible to write down how we feel without betraying our feelings? Once I write the word depression, it is no longer my feeling. It is now on view for others to walk toward, lean in, and peer at.
Recalling her experiments with non-fiction in the epistolary memoir Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, here in the middle section of the book, Chang inserts some diary-like entries in the book. Dating back to January and February 2022, these fragmentary notes capture the suspended dread of the dying. The voice is deliberately detached: “No matter how much I scold you, you won’t die.” On the other hand, one’s oppressed feelings or grief return in the form of the crawling ants, which come and go:
Maybe these ants are sadness. And they can’t
be killed because they eat their own feelings.
For “Friendship”, Martin covered an underlayer of oil paint with a thin layer of gold leaf, which she then scored by hand to reveal the ground beneath. This radiant color is unusual in Martin’s work. “Friendship, 1963”, the final poem in the collection, observes “While I stared at the gold rectangles, two attendants talked about whether to work overtime and get paid time and a half.” In this poem, the poet also “meets” the artist when she realises that it’s Agnes’s voice speaking back to her.
Inspired by the works of Martin, these poems do not so much delineate the artworks, as they become the subjective art born out of those paintings. Surreal and introspective, poems reveal vulnerability and emotional honesty found in the creative process of making art and of poetry. The multi-faceted dimensions of poetic language, how it can capture and distil what’s felt, imagined or witnessed. Despite the depression or solitude that lies in the heart of the collection, there is hope in the reimagined present, for those who choose to go on living, as in “The Beach, 1964”. The painting of this title is a beige piece of densely grids made with oil and pencil. The poem offers a musing of knowledge and freedom of personal choice in life: “To know that we can, is the conundrum. That we can die or have a different life.”
The appreciation and experiencing of art: that to some degree we are no longer simply looking at a painting by Agnes Martin or the poem by Chang, but a delving into their minds or their subjective reality, that there is something profoundly revolutionary about that experience of art, the emotional honesty and connection shared between the artist and the viewer or reader. These poems do not seek to explain anything, rather they are like paintings themselves, to be perceived and experienced, ready to shed some transient moments of truth.