Victoria Chang, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief

 

I wonder whether memory is different for immigrants, for people who leave so much behind. Memory isn’t something that blooms but something that bleeds internally, something to be stopped. Memory hides because it isn’t useful. Not money, a car, a diploma, a job. I wonder if memory for you was a color.

When we say that something takes place, we imply that memory is associated with a physical location, as Paul Ricoeur states. But what happens when memory’s place of origin disappears? (“Dear Mother,”)

Lately I’ve been going through Los Angeles-based poet Victoria Chang’s striking non-fiction project, the stunning and deeply felt, deeply intimate Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief (Minneapolis MN: Milkweed Editions, 2021), a book of memory, history and mentors. Interspersed with collaged archival photographs and other documents, the collection is composed as a sequence of letters individually directed to intimates such as her late parents, childhood friends, acquaintances and former teachers, as well as to her daughter. Dear Memory follows Chang’s poetry collections Circle (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), Salvinia Molesta (University of Georgia Press, 2008), The Boss (McSweeney’s, 2013) [see my review of such here], Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon, 2017) [see my review of such here] and Obit (Copper Canyon, 2020) [see my Griffin Prize-shortlist interview with her here], although I’m realizing how far behind I am on her work, having missed The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon, 2022), with a further poetry collection forthcoming in 2024 with Farrar, Straus & Giroux: With My Back to the World.

This is a book of contemplation, recollection and reconciliation, as Chang offers the fluidity of a combined book-length essay and memoir through the form of journaled and unsent letters. There is such an intimacy and an openness to the way she holds the book’s form, one that predates, arguably, even the novel; think of books such as The Pillow Book (1002) by Sei Shōnagon, or even Bram Stoker’s original Dracula (1897). The back-and-forth of recollection in Chang’s Dear Memory are even reminiscent to what Kristjana Gunnars wrote about in her novella, The Prowler (Red Deer College Press, 1989): “That the past resembles a deck of cards. Certain scenes are given. They are not scenes the rememberer chooses, but simply a deck that is given. The cards are shuffled whenever a game is played.” Or, as Chang writes, mid-point through the collection: “Now I admire writers who write with an intimate intensity but also a generous capaciousness. I enjoy reading work that expands while it contracts. Writing made by an instrument with a microscope on one end and a telescope on the other, leaving some powder on the page in the form of language.”

Dear Memory writes to and around her immigrant parents, offering her childhood as a foundation for the collection the narrative spreads into, through and beyond, including her own ways through thinking and into poetry. Chang writes of memory as a way to articulate becoming, and an articulation around writing, around poetry, is as foundational to her as the lost threads of either of parent’s lives, the sequence of multiple family restaurants they ran and the difficulty of being the only child of Asian descent in predominantly white communities. There is such an intimacy to these pieces, one that demands slowness, demands attention. One that is framed around an acknowledgment of loss, both long past and those losses that are ongoing, but composed in a manner through which to solidify, before those losses slip entirely away. “Memory is everything,” she writes early on, in a lettet to her mother, “yet it is nothing. Memory is mine, but it is also clinging to the memory of others. Some of these others are dead. Or unable to speak, like Father.” Or, as the piece “Dear Teacher,” begins:

I stumbled into your poetry workshop even though I wasn’t studying poetry. I was one of the few graduate students there. I remember you at the head of a long wooden table, presiding, as if your chair were a throne. The room was brown with wood everywhere. We were knights of poetry. our plates were white sheets of paper filled with our own flesh. Your words were infinite. They were an entire country.

At the end of class, you wrote each student a note. Your note said my poetry had become poems out of poetry and that my poems had begun to strike forward to the possibility… You also wrote that you wished I had made my voice more present in class and that my form of articulation was far from shy. You told me to call to talk about next semester.

CJ Evans, LIVES

 

CJ Evans’s beautiful book, Lives, explores and circles around, into, and out of what it means to be free and alive in a world where humans insist on war and environmental destruction. Evans’s speaker is constantly trying to remain present in the world through deep perception and seeing, unable to free himself from his past (having served time in literal prison and the metaphorical prison of addiction). In the process, he gifts the reader with his keen perception and awakens the reader. Evans writes in “Now That the Time for Lives Getting Better is Done”: “And what else could my heart be for it not to try?” The collection renders through language a gorgeous natural and domestic landscape within a landscape that is dying—one war, one shooting, one plastic bottle at a time. Lives maps the apocalypse while simultaneously trying to resist it through language and life. (Victoria Chang, “INTRODUCTION”)

It is hard to know what to say about California poet and Two Lines Press’ Editorial Director [see my interview with him on such here] CJ Evans’ second full-length collection, LIVES (Louisville KY: Sarabande Books, 2022), given the lengthy introduction by Victoria Chang, judge of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry that provided this book’s publication. Following his full-length debut, A Penance (Kalamazoo MI: New Issues Press, 2012), LIVES crafts lyric narratives of connection and disconnection; of being alone, as every other part of America might be: singular, and untethered. He writes a cadence of descriptive meditation and thoughtfulness akin to that of Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell [see my review of Brockwell’s latest here], although one that manages a particular flow closer to that of water, flowing and connecting well beyond the boundaries of each standalone poem. Evans writes of seeking connection, even redemption, writing extensively of standing alone in the dark, only to discover that someone, there, has possibly been there the whole time, reaching out. “This shamed, this used,” he writes, as part of “IN THIS POEM WITHOUT YOU / I’M ALONE AS URANIUM ORE,” “this american body of mine / is near-done. Or I’m done with all it has become, / being american.”

Writing from underneath a shadow of environmental disaster and wildfires, school shootings and suicides, American political and cultural failures large and small, Evans writes of swirling storms and trying to find and even reach the calm centre. The poems, as Michael Ondaatje once paraphrased Jack Spicer, can live on their own no better than can we, and this book as a whole feels less a collection than a kind of metaphysical lyric suite, held together through a common tone, and a variety of intricately-woven threads across a great distance. “Panoramic,” the cover copy uses to describe the work, and his poems maintain a wide scope and deep attention, often returning back to particular tethers, to hold himself in place. He writes unapologetically of life, and a faith in living, almost as though believing in such because he has to; he needs to. “Just for today,” as the poem “INQUIRY INTO STORM” begins, “let’s erupt / the reverie with a plosive, // play in the halation, / the emblazoned, the significant // spiral of our specific / tornado.”

AN ORCHARD IS A FOREST WE BROKE

Walk with me the rows and whir: poor trees poor trees
poor wilderness clipped, fruit plucked, ugly branches robbed
of the weight of little animals. Pears rot around the roots,
blind black eyes in yellow skin infolding, eaten from inside

by neglect and wet. Along down the row and earth bends
away from them toward naked dirt between, and here,
in the cold cradle of winter, we wear high vulcanized boots,
and I work hard each day to remain in the world with you.

The poems in LIVES are grouped into four sections, three of which are built out of assemblages of shorter poems, but the second section holds but a single, extended poem that seems to anchor the collection as a whole, the poem “TRYING TO HEAR A HYMN TO LIFE.” Subtitled “after Donnelly & Schuyler,” the poem, as Evans offers in his acknowledgments, “is after poems called ‘Hymn to Life’ by Timothy Donnelly and James Schuyler, and also nods to poems of the same title by Lou Andreas-Salomé and Nazim Hikmet.” It is almost as though the entire collection swirls around this poem as a central core, akin to how Manitoba poet Di Brandt’s collection Now You Care (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2003) was structured around the central core of a longer sequence as well (my review of such seems to have fallen offline, formerly up via The Antigonish Review).

The narrative Evans writes across the seventy stanzas, each five lines in length, of “TRYING TO HEAR A HYMN TO LIFE” loop and swirl around a variety of images of wetlands and Lake Merritt, resting in the centre of Oakland, California, the Simon and Garfunkle song “America,” the memory of Sandy Hook, his daughter’s imaginary sabertooth, “Toothy,” and other family moments, connections, memories, dislocations and trauma, all wrapped up and around not only a belief in life itself, but the very act of that particular brand of faith. “I can’t see the lake from here,” he writes, early on in the poem, “but I believe / it still is. Just as I believe in the shellmounds / I’ll never see, the sabertooth, that the flat moon / is actually a sphere. I believe as I do / in this tabletop you can’t touch: wood pulp crushed // in a hydraulic press with glue.” Or later on in the same poem, offering: “I believe in this as much as god / or biology, which is to say, a bit less // than to make a bet with it against a bullet, / but enough. I call it belief, but it’s purposefully, / wondrously unexamined.” There is such a stunning beauty to this collection, one that shows itself as open-hearted while playing rather close to what might suggest a deeply-wounded chest. This is what one might call a darkly optimistic book; one filled with as much beauty as one can muster, and everything one can see after having been in the dark.

 

Victoria Chang, Barbie Chang

Barbie Chang can’t stop watching

      the Ellen Pao trial

while the rest of the world wonders

     about a plane crash in

the Alps helping Ellen Pao is not an

      option Barbie Chang

opted out but never really severed

      ties with the people in

the office she kept quiet because by

      speaking she would

become a victim something projected

      upon like the canvas (“BARBIE CHANG CAN’T STOP WATCHING”)

The first thing that struck me about Southern California poet Victoria Chang’s fourth full-length poetry collection, Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon Press, 2017) [see my review of her prior collection here], is how it is reminiscent, structurally, of Toronto poet Shannon Bramer’s second collections, scarf (Exile Editions, 2001), both of which are accumulative character-studies heavy on interiority, wrapped around a central image/character. Whereas the image and story of a scarf provides Bramer’s character Vera her narrative through-line, Victoria Chang writes her character and central figure “Barbie Chang” as a “perpetual outsider,” writing her character’s feeling of disconnect against the loaded cultural figure of “Barbie.” What makes the connection stronger is in how Chang doesn’t need to present information any more than the name itself, and her main character isn’t mentioned once without her full name: “Barbie Chang.”

Chang (Victoria, I mean) also adds the figure of “Mr. Darcy” as a side-character, referencing the character of Fitzwilliam Darcy from Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice (1813), through Barbie Chang’s “romantic misadventures with Mr. Darcy,” as she writes, to open the poem “MR. DARCY LEANS”:

Mr. Darcy leans into Barbie Chang again

      weans her from his lean

then leans again his face doesn’t reach

      her face but she can feel

its heat soldering her to him his shoulder

      lacks flesh but she still

wishes for it when he says cheese she

      shows her teeth and

wonders when she will believe in the

      idea of which space again

Barbie Chang is a hefty and complicated character study, as we watch Chang’s (Victoria, I mean) protagonist deal with parental health issues, heartbreak, racism and anxiety while attempting to maneuver the potential minefield of social engagement, as she writes to open the poem “BARBIE CHANG GOT HER HAIR DONE”:

Barbie Chang got her hair done for

      the school auction

she was afraid sick of the Circle since

      she heard of their

shopping for matching dresses so out

      of the nest she flew

into the auction thinking she could

      outmaneuver her

loneliness thinking she could overcome

      being classified thinking

I find her rhythms of her poems fascinating, wondering how her lines are meant to be heard or read, with the jagged, staggered meanings and collision of phrase. I find the rhythms jarring, but am fascinated by how they are meant to sound, and meant to flow, reading instead a kind of uneven ground meant to keep the reader slightly unsettled. The effect requires a slowness, but aloud would be quite different to hear at higher speeds. How am I to read these? How does she, I wonder?