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Paul Scott Stanfield reviews Victoria Chang’s new engagement with ekphrasis.

Victoria Chang, With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), 112pp.

Few poetic traditions are as ancient as ekphrasis, the literary description of a real or imagined work of art, which can be traced back to Homer’s account in the Iliad of the shield of Achilles. That ekphrasis has so long a history makes it all the more remarkable that some contemporary poets have found ways to open it up, integrating into it the discourses of aesthetic theory or explorations in an autobiographical or confessional mode. Mary Hickman’s Rayfish can stand as an example, as can the first part of Brenda Shaughnessy’s Tanya, and Victoria Chang’s new collection, With My Back to the World, similarly expands the possibilities of the tradition. The first and third sections of her book each contain 26 poems addressing paintings by Agnes Martin; between them is a kind of diary in verse titled “Today,” modeled on the series of paintings of the same name by On Kawara.

Agnes Martin’s reputation as a painter rose rapidly in the last decades of her life and has ascended even more dramatically since her death in 2004. Her canvases are usually large, five feet square or six feet square, and characteristically present a lightly drawn grid (the boxes of which are sometimes filled with small nearly identical marks) or horizontal bands of muted color.  Superficially, they suggest tranquility; one can imagine them being used for meditation exercises. Painting them, however, required the chosen and disciplined exclusion of the stress and suffering of a hard life – Martin had a difficult childhood, endured catastrophic losses and dislocations, and struggled with schizophrenia for most of her life. She painted by turning away from that stress and suffering, with her “back to the world” as she put it. (Chang’s collection takes its title from a six-panel work of the same name that Martin painted in 1997 and shares that title with a 2003 documentary.) Even with this exclusion, however, the world of her paintings never feels light or easy. Pain, the excluded other, sometimes seems present in its very absence. In Chang’s poems, each addressing a particular Martin painting or drawing, that pain is never very far away.

“On a Clear Day, 1973,” for instance, which Chang notes was the first of these poems to be written, mentions the six Asian-American women murdered at spas in Atlanta in 2021. Male violence against women figures again in “Untitled , 1981,” and oppressive assumptions about Asian women reappear in “Untitled IX, 1982”: “Some people assume Asian women are made of flowers, but some of us are made up of lines.” Concerns over climate also arise: “Once the whales are gone, an ocean isn’t an ocean anymore,” we read in one poem, and in another the poet dreams of the Tahoe wildfires, “I, in the middle of it, sparks falling from the sky like men,” and wonders at her inability “to give up facts, to have an empty mind,” as Martin urged. Can a writer have an empty mind? The circumstances of the present may be too urgent to turn away from, or perhaps the writer’s medium, language, unlike music, painting, dance, or sculpture, is inescapably referential and cannot empty itself out or turn its back. A desire to step out of the referential may have inspired the pages interspersed throughout the book in which the poem’s text has become the support or ground for abstract black-and-white designs, but perhaps language too can lift itself free. Chang’s poem on Martin’s With My Back to the World (the book’s opening poem and its title poem) describes a major “parting” that “felt like a death” and tells us, “The terror of this year was emptiness. But I learned that it’s / possible for a sentence to have no words.”

Other than the Martin paintings themselves, the phenomenon the book’s language tries most often to describe (perhaps to turn away from) is the speaker’s own depression. Gnomic, arresting metaphors for it populate the collection.

         Depression is like this, how we 
wander while trying to locate it but how the wandering itself is
depression. (“Untitled , 1994”)

Depression is a group of parallel lines that want to touch, but never can. (“Untitled, 1961)

The problem with depression is that someone else made it, but that person never existed. (“Friendship, 1963”)

I used to think depression was all around me, that I was within it. Now I see that it is always ahead of me. That it is in pieces, but it moves in a swarm. (“The Tree, 1964”)

Depression is experienced. It is the CEO of feeling. (“Happiness, from Innocent Love Series, 1999”)

Depression isn’t actually the secret, but has a secret. (“Untitled , 1963″)

Despite all these efforts, however, the core truth of depression is its elusiveness: “Once I write the word depression, it is no longer my feeling” (“Play, 1966”).

Depression need not be tied to a specific cause – “I gave up trying to locate depression’s antecedent,” Chang writes – but the book’s central section, the one not devoted to Martin’s paintings, is a verse diary from the weeks just before and just after her father’s death in February 2022. Fu-Shueng Chang suffered an incapacitating stroke in 2009 and entered a long decline into dementia; the mounting complications of his care left traces in Chang’s The Boss (2013), Barbie Chang (2017), OBIT (2020), and Dear Memory (2021). Owing to his circumstances – lost to his family in some ways, insistently present in others – and the earlier death of Chang’s mother in 2015, the grief of the second section is as resistant to analysis and as difficult to describe as the depression of the first and third parts.

It thus makes sense that the voice of With My Back to The World has none of the tumbling, unpunctuated flow and linguistic sleight of hand of The Boss or Barbie Chang. Instead, we find the short sentences, the spareness, the abrupt changes of register and focus that characterized OBIT:

The source of the blue is no longer here. What’s left, just the thick beauty in front of me, the frayed edges like my filthy mouth for all to see. I still have my soul, but parts of it have begun to migrate onto beautiful things, like this blue. I leave some of my soul here, three lines up, fourth rectangle over from the right. My soul is made of words and cut glass. Lately, the glass keeps cutting the words. The most wounded words I’ve had since childhood choose to stay here. (“Night Sea, 1963”)

It makes sense, too, that there is hardly a straight ekphrastic poem in the whole collection. Chang published several of those, based on Edward Hopper paintings, in The Boss, but here the poems have additional work to do. In engaging the formal strategies and deliberate exclusions of Agnes Martin’s abstractions, Chang turns her own back on the world, but the world’s conundrums about community, expression, and kinship somehow turn up anew in the paintings, re-coded but recognizable. The poems of With My Back to the World not only do homage to Agnes Martin but also engage aesthetic questions (how the verbal differs from the pictorial, how the representational differs from the abstract) and embody Chang’s memories of loss and estrangement. Her aesthetic preoccupations and her life turn out have a common root in her paradoxical vocation that uses language both to hide and to reveal: “Is it possible to be seen, but not looked at?” (“The Islands, 1961”).

Chang’s production in the last few years has been unusually varied and rewarding. In 2020 she published not only the poetry collection OBIT, which won several prizes, but also Love, Love, a verse novel for middle schoolers that is well worth an adult reader’s time. In 2021 she published Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, an epistolary memoir incorporating her own visual art based on family photographs and documents. 2022 saw the appearance of The Trees Witness Everything, a poetry collection using waka, traditional Japanese short lyric forms. With My Back to the World, which connects intimately to its predecessors while being distinctly its own thing, adds another dimension to an extraordinary body of work.

Paul Scott Stanfield was educated at Grinnell College and Northwestern University, and is recently retired from the English Department of Nebraska Wesleyan University. He is the author of Yeats and Politics in the 1930s and of articles on Yeats, other Irish poets, and Wyndham Lewis.

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