 In her poem “The Swan, No. 20 (Hilma af Klint)” from the Review’s October 23, 2025, issue, Victoria Chang delineates the line of beauty (a word that appears five times in the poem) that she discovers while contemplating the eponymous painting. Chang translates af Klint’s combination of abstraction and representation—a shell, a fractured field of color—into language, wondering alongside the painter how to move from form to feeling, from “the way a snail’s conch just grows, mostly right but sometimes left,” to the way “it hurts” to apprehend “both the source and the disappearance.”  Victoria Chang; Chang, the author of several poetry collections, including OBIT (2020), which The New York Times named one of the best books of the year, and With My Back to the World (2024), as well as three children’s books and a memoir, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief (2021). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and she is currently the Bourne Chair in Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her next poetry collection, Tree of Knowledge, will be published this summer. In November I wrote to Chang to ask her about navigating personal loss through poetry, striking a balance between creativity and financial security, and ekphrasis. Velislava Kuzmenko: Grief appears in much of your poetry. How do you write about personal loss while still keeping enough distance to shape it artistically? Victoria Chang: I don’t think of writing a poem as writing about personal loss, but rather, writing a poem is an act of writing out of personal loss. I never feel like I’m writing something purely personal, if that makes sense. I’m not writing a diary. Even the first person “I” and my personal experiences aren’t at the center of my mind while I’m making art. Sure, these experiences might be a starting point for writing a poem, but I’m not thinking about translating those experiences into language. Instead, poem-making for me is about something much larger—the metaphysical aspects of being human. The way I think about grief poems, at least my grief poems, is that they are an effort to explore the condition of grief, as opposed to, say, my personal grief. My family are immigrants, and my parents often stressed the pursuit of financially stable work rather than artistic dreams. Have your family and upbringing influenced your perspective on balancing creativity and financial security? What is some advice that you could offer someone who wants to be a professional poet, rather than write poetry on the side? My parents definitely emphasized the importance of being able to feed and support myself. I never disagreed with them because I feel like I can only write and be an artist if my mind is free of those kinds of financial stressors. Other kinds of stress—grief, sadness, existential crises, for example—might help my art, but financial worries do not. I am still writing on the side, actually. For my day job I work as a professor at Georgia Tech and am also the director of the university’s poetry center, Poetry@Tech, and I travel to do readings and events; I’ve always had a regular job. Also, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to write poems for eight hours a day, all year long, although in order to write “on the side,” I still spend many days—for months at a time—writing and revising for eight or more hours. I think maintaining that level of intensity all year long would be emotionally difficult. Having a regular job, though, however flexible, requires a keen sense of balance. I’m constantly teetering on the edge of madness because I cannot get back to my art-making when or as much as I’d like to. I will always have a manuscript in my backpack or handbag, grabbing the minutes wherever I can. I’m not sure what a “professional poet” means because, for me, poetry is the same as breathing or eating or sleeping. It’s just a part of how I live, how I respond to the world. I would write poems whether I had a day job or not. I think of another term instead—“community poet,” or maybe just “community member.” For me being a poet means participating in a vibrant and rich community, reading and sharing other people’s poems and books, talking to other poets about poetics, mentoring emerging and younger poets, and more. I don’t think there’s a static community of poets either; everyone can make their own community. Being a “professional poet” or “professional” anything means that you are somehow able to feed yourself from the work itself. While I get paid honorariums to do readings, sometimes quite generous ones, it would be hard for me to live off of honorariums and royalties from books alone. By that definition, there are probably only a handful of “professional poets” in this country. Our government doesn’t really support the arts like some other countries do, providing arts stipends, universal health care, and so on. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Then we could all be professional poets.  New Subscriber Benefit!Subscribers are now able to share unlocked versions of our articles with friends, family, and social media channels. When signed in to your account, look for this gift box icon in any of our articles. Hilma af Klint’s painting The Swan, No. 20—depicting a spiral shell against a background of eight multicolored triangles—explores color, visual balance, and, perhaps, their place in the natural world. Your poem in part seems to translate that into language, from “colorful rug” to the abstract connection af Klint makes between the swan of the title and the visual subject. What was it about the painting that impressed or moved you so much that you decided to bring it into your own work? How did the painting shape the poem’s form or emotional direction? My friend told me about Hilma af Klint a while back. I’ve been thinking about her art for a few years now, especially when I was able to see the “Tree of Knowledge” series of paintings in New York. Af Klint was astoundingly ahead of her time. She knew this too: she wouldn’t allow her work to be shown until twenty years after her death. I love thinking about and studying artists who were visionaries. Af Klint probably found her present world to be stunted and staid, which visionary artists of any kind probably feel often. My poem is part of a whole series that I wrote in response to all of the paintings in af Klint’s swan series, part of a manuscript of poems I’m working on related to an actual, real-life swan that I witnessed die of avian flu. I love writing ekphrastic poems because there’s always something to say when looking at a piece of visual art, such as af Klint’s painting. Just looking conjures thoughts, images, sounds, stories, memories, and ideas so you don’t have to stare at a blank page when starting a poem. I simply let her painting guide me. Can you tell me more about the place of the shell in your poem? Does the speaker relate to the snail, like she has a “shell” of her own, and “survives by curving”? I recall doing some research about how a snail’s shell forms, and I learned a lot of interesting facts that I incorporated into the poem. I think I was mostly just going along with the imagery in the painting, free-associating, and somehow, as I often do in my poems these days, I ended up ruminating on larger abstract ideas related to beauty. I think I was thinking about the swan that died of avian flu versus myself. In your poem you write, “Beauty just becomes, whether it is/witnessed or not. Because beauty is both the source and the/disappearance, it hurts so much when we get there.” How do you understand the relationship between beauty and disappearance? As a poet, how do you navigate that paradox—making art that may never be “witnessed” yet still carries its own meaning? Some people, such as William Carlos Williams in a poem called “January Morning,” imply that a poem needs to be seen or read before it finishes itself. I’m not sure if I totally believe that, but I think about it often. Our time on this earth is so short and ephemeral that the idea of others witnessing my poems during my lifetime, after it, or ever, simply isn’t my focus. Maybe beauty is beauty because of its disappearance; I’m not sure that’s a paradox. I’m not so concerned about readership or what others think of my writing, my poems, or my life, especially not at this age. I’m more interested in writing my way through, around, above, and below my life, as a way to navigate life’s joys, beauties, and sadnesses all at once. I think of my poems and poem-making as a kind of companion to my life, literally as if poems were walking next to me as I go about my day. Just as I might walk around and some people might “see” me, but most of the time no one does or cares. But I care because I am the only one living my life. That’s the most important thing to me, how poem-making enhances or sharpens my ability to perceive or how it might be a manifestation of my increasingly keen and profound sense of perception as I age. Writing poems is one of the great joys of my life. If my poems move people, then that’s a bonus. Which of your senses guides you most when approaching a poem? Are you drawn to the sounds of the words, the textures of language, the musical tone, or something else that engages you deeply? All of the above and more. I love the image first and foremost, but at different times in my life and for different kinds of poems, other things like music and sound might have held importance. Lately I’ve been writing a lot of prose poems (OBIT is a collection of prose poems, while this series of af Klint poems are also prose poems because her paintings are squares). What you lose in prose poems is attention to the line and all the hesitations and velocities of the line break, so everything else must be sharpened, including the image. When I’m writing, I try to let the poems guide me with a soft leash, whispering what to attend to. Poem-making, for me, requires a deep sense of listening to the poem. It feels like an egoless process. I’m not making a poem because I’m special, but I’m trying to make a poem special. The artist Ruth Asawa said something similar: “An artist is not special. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.” More by Victoria Chang at nybooks.comThe canvas is flipped from right to left. But the shell is smaller. All morning I thought the shell was the same shell. That it was a seashell. But maybe it’s a snail shell. I knew my placement of the shell on the beach couldn’t have lasted.… For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the Review’s website. And let us know what you think: send your comments to editor@nybooks.com; we do write back.  You are receiving this message because you signed up Update your address or preferencesView this newsletter onlineThe New York Review of Books |
sábado, 10 de enero de 2026
Community Poetry
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