Thank you, and shout out to Assessment.
It matters.
You can go to assmatters.org, which is the Assessment Matters
Institute for Assessment Matteration, where assessment
really matters.
It's like a national institute that I run.
So if you'd like to be on the board,
you can also just drop me a line,
and I'm happy to have you involved.
Thank you so much for being here.
It's been a little while since I've
been back at the Poetry Center.
And it feels really good, kind of a homecoming,
to be back here.
It's also been a little while since I
saw Victoria Chang reading.
So I'm really looking forward to this evening.
Also, you have a treat in front of you.
So yesterday, when visiting my Creative Writing class,
Victoria Chang said something that, to be frank,
rocked my world.
Responding to a question about which
of the poems in one of her books she likes the best, even
if nobody else does--
it was my question, I should just say that.
That wasn't my student's question.
That was my question.
I thought that was a good question.
She told my class that she doesn't
have any feelings about the work once she's
written it, none at all.
She doesn't have any particular affection
for any poem from Obit, her great 2020 book from Copper
Canyon in which she writes these unhinged obits for her father's
frontal lobe, for her mother, for versions of herself,
voicemail language, memory, civility, friendships
and a lot more.
Nor does she have warm feelings for a series
of my favorite poems from 2014's The Boss, in which she writes
into and out of Office at Night, one among many Edward Hopper
paintings that are written about and to and in the book,
nor even for her first very lovely book
of non-fiction, Dear Memory: Letters
On Writing, Silence, and Grief, published by Milkweed
last year, in which after her mother's death,
she sorts through the objects from her mother's life,
present some of them to the reader
and uses them to ask questions in letters
to, among others, her mother, grandmother, grandfather,
a childhood acquaintance, silence, the body, teachers,
her sister, daughters, the Ford Motor Company,
and so on.
You may sense a pattern here, how she builds or finds
or adopts a form and then turns it
to unconventional directions, to surprising and thrilling
results.
Nor will she even say she loves or is embarrassed by any poem
from her first book, Circle, from which I
saw her read some years ago in Muncie, Indiana.
Might she feel a little more strongly for her newest book,
The Trees Witness Everything, another adventures in form
in which she uses Japanese syllabic forms called
wakas and frames them with titles from W.S. Merwin poems?
I suspect the answer is no.
This is a very cool book, Victoria.
How can you not feel this?
[LAUGHTER]
I asked myself why I was so shocked at this statement
and what it meant that I felt more personally
attached to these books than she apparently did.
And I do.
I guess I shouldn't be shocked, though.
As she puts it in Dear Memory, "Each book
isn't just a book but a period of life, a period
of learning how to write."
--which is true.
But it's also a book, isn't it?
And a book is a collection of poems, or essays, or images,
or image text pieces, or reproductions of objects.
But a book is also a mass of things
that collects and is collected.
It's an architectural record of a life,
maybe the best record of a writer's life, or the writing
part of a writer's life, or at least
of the writer's mind, which is, after all, one
of Chang's primary subjects.
As she told my class, "My subject is always thinking."
Yes, to this.
But the subject of a Victoria Chang work
is also inevitably language and form
and the ultimate inadequacy of both in the writer's quest
to represent the world.
Maybe this is why she doesn't carry affection for the works
themselves, just the act of working, writing, wanting,
as she puts it, "--wanting not only books but to be surprised
again and again by the possible collisions of language.
Restless making with an imperfect tool is the thing
that matters and gives the truer pleasure--" Victoria tells us,
"--not its result, the made thing,
however beautiful and moving it may be."
It's bizarre when you think about it
that we use the same word for both act and thing.
Work, we work in order to make a work."
Tim Gunn tells us from 2010 to make sure to make it work,
to make the work work.
That is, the work of art produces the work of art.
So which exactly is the work-- is
the real work of art, my dudes?
We come to art to experience whatever
sliver we get to act as witnesses to transformation
to be moved.
Another Victoria Chang poem tells us, quote, "We praise
the artist, not the apple, not the apple shadow,
which is murdered slowly.
There must be some way of drawing a picture,
so it doesn't become an elegy."
Unquote.
I still don't have the answer to my earlier question, what
it means that I cared more for her books
than, apparently, she did, except to say
that the books are all that I have.
These works are the only ones I can access,
that you can access, that we all can access here tonight,
except here tonight where we get a little bit of the worker
as well as the work.
So even if the books are diminished things by comparison
to the work done to make them, they're still pretty damn good.
I will take them.
I'll buy them.
I'll keep them and have feelings about them.
And I think that you will too.
So please welcome tonight, Victoria Chang.
[APPLAUSE]