In Tree of Knowledge, Victoria Chang’s poetry is transcendent; it doesn’t observe and identify social and environmental injustices so much as it travels past them to gaze at the world where such things originate. It is as if this deeper vision can disempower the unfair acts.
In Chang’s vision behind the veil, it seems a fuller accounting is possible. She does not write with the more common sacred rage of the disenfranchised, though there are victims here—trees and “the Chinese people.” Moving past recrimination, judgment, even lamentation, she pursues a different way of seeing, and of writing. As a kind of cartographer, she explores and then returns to bear witness to a place wholly unknown to us, but visible, just beyond the ranges of bitterness, rage, hatred, and shame.
Chang’s poems create a universe where discovery and a different way of seeing play an important role at almost every juncture. She insists, at times, on overturning new-seen things, fully examining both sides, as if remembering that things are almost always composed, in some part, of their opposites. Thus, we see lines such as “Art is a guarantee of sanity, and I think art is a guarantee of insanity” and “Charles Wright wrote, The urge toward form is the urge toward God. But I think that the urge toward form is the urge away from God.”
This article appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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One powerful element of the book is the inclusion of photographs of early-20th-century Chinese immigrants, to each of which Chang attaches a very short poem. Among the most compelling is a photo of cannery workers standing at a table with enormous salmon before them, waiting to be filleted. The workers are presented vertically, and the dead fish lie horizontal on the table. Writes Chang, however, with a truth that is truer than the photograph,
We are a
derangement.
A premature
and horrible
death. We are
arranged,
lying down.
The fish are
standing up,
scraping
out
our narratives.
In the Black Ram region of Montana’s Yaak Valley, there is an ancient forest where one can almost hear the waves of the light, filtered and refined and made slower by so many layers of leaves and branches. The senses tangle like roots, transfer and convey information in ways not previously known possible. In “Female Head,” Chang writes as if she’s seen this forest: “The first sound of the chain saw. Leaves around / the earth on alert.… I hear that / trees can distinguish their own roots from the / roots of other species. I wondered if the other / trees could feel panic underground. If the roots / lit up around the earth in a circle.”
In Tree of Knowledge, protagonists—often, it seems, the poet—search for yellows, reds, greens, and blues, amid psychological darkness. It is here, rather than by relitigating ancient battles of hapless human injustice wrought by horrible ignorance, that hope and even revolution can come from journeying ahead to this further territory: a place where, Chang writes in the book’s center—its heartwood, “Eureka”—“it’s possible that these trees aren’t headstones // it’s possible we can outlive violence.”•
TREE OF KNOWLEDGE: POEMS, BY VICTORIA CHANG
Rick Bass is the author of more than 30 books, including, most recently, With Every Great Breath. He is the winner of a Story Prize, a James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and a PEN/Nelson Algren Award Special Citation for fiction and a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He has served as contributing editor to Sierra, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Big Sky Journal, Amicus Journal, Outside, Orion, Field & Stream, the Contemporary Wingshooter, and many other publications. He serves on the editorial board of Whitefish Review and teaches in the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program. He was born and raised in Texas, worked as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi, and has lived in Montana’s Yaak Valley for almost 40 years.
