Art making is about how to integrate what I’m thinking into my poetry, not the other way around,” says Victoria Chang about writing Tree of Knowledge, her eighth collection, a hybrid text that interweaves ekphrastic poems; untitled persona poems in red type; and reproductions of archival photos, through small portions of which Chang hand-sewed red thread. This book advances existential inquiries found in Chang’s previous work, most recently With My Back to the World.
Throughout Tree of Knowledge, the color red marries living with dying, a duality evidenced in the menopausal body; a eucalyptus tree chopped down before Chang’s eyes; the forced expulsion of Chinese people from Eureka, California; and artworks by Alice Neel, Joan Mitchell, and Hilma af Klint, among others.
The collection also delves into Chang’s experience of aging. In “Self-Portrait,” she observes, “As the afternoon light / moved down, it became harder to tell what / was alive and what was dead. Death follows / us until we turn to look at it.”
Perhaps, Tree of Knowledge suggests, the clarity we seek about death, grief, and senescence resides between layers of lived experience rather than at the end.
This interview, conducted over Zoom, has been edited for brevity and clarity.
This interview appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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How did Tree of Knowledge emerge from your previous books, and how would you locate it within your experience of aging?
Perhaps all of us, no matter how many people we have around us, can feel alone. Then I think, this isn’t true—I have a constant companion in life, which is poetry, which is art. Poetry keeps me company and is always at my side, no matter what.
Much of With My Back to the World is about depression and sadness. True, some of my personal sadness stemmed from difficulties related to my parents and their illnesses, but in hindsight, some difficulties during the time of writing that book also related to the slow, relentless march toward menopause.
My poems [in both Tree of Knowledge and earlier work] were a record of those hormonal changes. I feel like it’s important to write those things that one must, even if they are taboo topics or those that other people haven’t written about. I’m struck by how hard it is to find the word menopause in a poem. For me, menopause and the decade leading up to it were all-consuming.
Was the dying eucalyptus the spark of Tree of Knowledge?
One day, these killers arrived and started chopping down this massive eucalyptus tree right across the street. It shocked me. They came every day. It was a long process because the tree was so large. I watched them intently as they worked.
I was so distressed by that experience that there was nothing to do but to write. They had to take the tree down because it was unsafe, but I felt that we were in the tree’s space; it wasn’t in our space. Why didn’t they cut us down?
At some point, I wrote a long tree poem, “Eureka,” and placed it in the middle of Tree of Knowledge. I had already been thinking about the expulsion of the Chinese people in Eureka, California, for a long time.
“Eureka” feels endless; there’s no terminal punctuation. I kept rereading it because the last line of the final titled poem, “The Cloud of Unknowing, 2019,” tags back to it: “I knew I would never have this chance again, so / I turned right on Eureka.”
This poem felt like it could go on forever. History goes on forever because the evildoers are always looking for things to destroy or kill.
This isn’t just a poem about Chinese Americans, though. This is a poem about inhumanity toward marginalized people throughout our history. Writing this poem felt very emotional to me, and constraints such as a 10-syllable line were helpful to my compositional process. There’s also a lot of anaphora and repetition in the poem.
The effect is incantatory.
Perhaps the poem evokes the circularity I was feeling. I also wrote smaller persona poems and stitched red thread through historical photographs of Chinese Americans. I wanted to give agency and voice to these people.
I wanted to use my hands because sometimes I feel that poetry and language are inadequate to get at the things I’m trying to get at. I remember spending eight hours at a time stitching and restitching onto and through these photographs; it was therapeutic to be sewing on these people. I felt a great sense of connection to them.
It feels critical that our docupoetics preserve history and cultural memory that regimes seek to erase. Did the history behind “Eureka” find you, or did you travel to Eureka to research it?
I came upon this story about Eureka, California, where Chinese people were chased out of their homes [in 1885], on NPR’s website, and I read an interview with Jean Pfaelzer, who wrote Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans. I was surprised I’d never heard about this history before.
I traveled to Eureka, took a tour of where the Chinatown used to be, and visited the Clarke Historical Museum. Cal Poly Humboldt has a great online archive of Chinese American history. I went down many interesting rabbit holes while learning and reading.
You often apply abstraction when writing out of grief, as in “Weeping Woman,” where “the / mothers’ faces broke into small rectangles and / triangles.”
In Boston recently, I saw a beautiful exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art focused on Indigenous abstract artists, so I’ve been thinking a lot about abstraction. In the catalog, the artist Teresa Baker said, “Abstraction allows the work [to] be autonomous. I want to get the work to a place where I can’t place it.”
In my ekphrastic poems, I tend to view and write about abstract art because it opens up thinking and capacious possibility. I want to write poems that appear legible but keep you thinking because they aren’t legible, in the end.
Writing isn’t therapy, but thinking through can be therapeutic.
Writing poetry is not therapy, but it can feel therapeutic and simultaneously painful. Writing, for me, is less about meaning-making but more about the process of perception and thinking. Poets are willing and able to go to deep, dark places to bring back light.•
TREE OF KNOWLEDGE: POEMS, BY VICTORIA CHANG
