Abram: Hello, I’m Abram Van Engen. Joanne: And I’m Joanne Diaz. Abram: And this is Poetry for All. Joanne: And today, we’re going to read a beautiful poem from Victoria Chang’s book titled Obit. Abram: Joanne, would you be willing to get us started by reading the second poem in that collection? Joanne: Absolutely. [You can read this poem here: https://kenyonreview.org/reviews/obit-by-victoria-chang-738439/]. Abram: This poem is amazing. Joanne, before we get into this poem, can you just say a word about who Victoria Chang is ? Joanne: Yeah. Victoria Chang is an amazing poet, very prolific, the recipient of many grants and awards for her work. The poem that I just read comes from her book Obit, but she has, in the time since she’s written that book, published a beautiful nonfiction hybrid word/image collage book called Dear Memory. She also published a book called The Trees Witness Everything and just this year, in 2024, her newest book of poems is titled With My Back to the World. In all of her work, she’s very concerned with grief, with memory, with loss, with trying to understand personal histories and how they relate to public histories. I just love her work. Abram: You know, this is a poem about grief, it's a poem about dying, and it's in a book called Obit. Joanne: For the few of us that are left who still subscribe to print copies of newspapers, if you open the newspaper to the obituary section, you’re going to see (not always, but often) a photograph of the person who’s died and essential information about them; the date that they died, where they were living, where they’re buried, and the loved ones of the person who’s died. It's a fairly standard sort of template. That’s interesting to me because it's a very official, public-facing document of a person’s life, and what Victoria Chang has done is transform that into a poetic form. Many, not all, but the vast majority of poems in this collection appear as a narrow column of text that looks like any one of them could appear in a newspaper. But then, as you look at them more closely, you start to see that there’s an interrogation of this form that's very powerful. There’s a lot of repetition where Victoria Chang, throughout the collection, keeps returning to the death of her mother and to the illness and death of her father. They both died within a few years of each other. You get the impression from these poems that the poetic speaker is someone who is witnessing their slow demise, and the poems call attention to the pain of that. And, one last thing I’ll say, I know I have a lot of thoughts about these… Abram: Do you have a few thoughts about this book, Joanne? Joanne: Yeah, I do! I think about this book of poems a lot. It's really a stunner. And not only are the deaths of the mother and father being commemorated, but also the death of ideas. So, for example, there are numerous obituaries for her mother’s teeth, for her mother’s lungs, for civility, for the future, for America. There's all kinds of ways in which she is rethinking this inherited public template to articulate private griefs. It's really very powerful. Abram: So that helps me with a little bit of the form, the sense of what she’s doing, because if you look at this on the page, one of the first questions somebody might have is “why is this a poem?” What it looks like on the page is a paragraph. There is no… you know, usually when you look at a poem, there are line breaks, there are stanzas, there's things going on that say, “hey, this is a poem”. When we look at this, it looks like a paragraph, but that’s by design. That’s in part to mirror the obituary in a newspaper. And then knowing that that’s what it’s doing, it’s able to veer off in new directions. So you expect a certain kind of thing, you expect an obituary, and then you get these lines, like “the way memory is the ringing after a gunshot”. We don’t expect that line in an obituary, and so where that begins is not where it ends. But it does in a certain sense play with that form, because where it begins is where you might almost expect an obituary to begin. “My mother,” and I’m going to skip a word here, “My mother died on August 3, 2015, in her room at Walnut Village assisted living in Anaheim, California, of pulmonary fibrosis”. That’s the first sentence, that’s the first line of the poem. It’s more than one line because it’s this narrow column, but that’s the first sentence. But there’s one word missing; this word “unpeacefully”. And there, we don’t expect that kind of word in an obituary either, but it’s the fourth word and she sticks it right in there. “My mother died unpeacefully”. And then it goes on and gives you the basic facts of the situation. What do you see her doing from the very beginning of this Obit poem? Joanne: Well, the first thing I’ll say is, as I hear you talking, I’m reminded that ever since reading this book for the first time, when I look at an obituary page, I now look at it differently because of Victoria Chang’s collection of poems. We’ve discussed this many times on this podcast, that poetry is the art of attention. It’s all about paying attention and taking, perhaps, what we take for granted and seeing it in a new way, and I think that’s a major contribution of this collection. But to go to your specific question about the first sentence, “My mother died unpeacefully on August 3, 2015, in her room at Walnut Village assisted living in Anaheim, California, of pulmonary fibrosis”, just like you said, every word in that sentence almost feels like you could read it a newspaper obituary, except for that word “unpeacefully”. And I think what’s so troubling about that word is you want it to read “peacefully”, you want to hear that someone has died peacefully, surrounded by family and friends, prepared for death. That is the ideal, isn’t it? That’s always the hope. But this is a mother who died unpeacefully. Strange word, though, because what does it mean to be “unpeaceful”? Abram: Yeah, it’s a striking word to begin an obituary. And then, the second sentence you would expect, when was this mother born? You go to the biography of the person, you go to the life that they lived. And instead of going to when this person was born, the second sentence says this: “The room was born on July 3rd, 2012”. In other words, three years before she was moved into this home, Walnut Village Assisted Living. And so, suddenly, we’re talking about space here, we’re talking about the actual place and the next word kind of belies what’s going on here. “The village,” that is, Walnut Village Assisted Living, “wasn’t really a village,” and there were “no walnut trees,” right? “Just cut flowers.” And so she’s bringing us into the actual space of the actual death and how we got here just three years before. Joanne: She’s also providing a series of corrections and clarifications. So we all know of different everything from assisted living facilities to neighborhood subdivisions to condominiums. They often have these names. Walnut Village, it sounds like, perhaps has a connotation of community, perhaps something organic growing there. But it’s not. The village is not really a village, there are no walnut trees. And that phrase is really interesting to me, “just cut flowers”. If flowers are cut, they’re in a vase. They’re divorced from where they originated. They’re perhaps brought in from some other location and there’s something temporary about them, not enduring like a walnut tree. Abram: And then the next sentence turns to the nurse, the Hospice nurse. “Days before, the Hospice nurse silently slid the stethoscope on top of my mother’s lung and waited for it to inflate.” And then this line, “waiting becomes an injury”. What do you see her doing as she turns? This is, by the way, if you’re looking at it on the page, almost the dead middle of the poem and suddenly it’s going to start turning into fragments instead of sentences, and we’re going to start turning into repetitions (“the way…”, “the way…”, “the way…”) and suddenly it feels like this poem is going to veer even more than it already has. Joanne: Yeah, I like what you’re saying. That way in which she pulls away from full sentences and then moves toward these phrases, “the way waiting becomes an injury,” “the way the nurse breathed in, closed his eyes, breathed out, and said, I’m sorry”, she’s kind of hung up on the way. She’s not even thinking about the facts of what just happened, but the ways in which they unfolded. And I’m really interested in the nurse. He goes on, breathing in, closing his eyes, breathing out, really calling attention to the physicality of the nurse, even as the mother’s body is static, is immovable. And finally, we’re seeing the reaction of the nurse in this situation. There’s something where the poetic speaker is trying to understand the fact of the mother’s death through the nurse and the nurse’s reaction to what’s happening. Abram: And as soon as he says that, the poem picks up with a series of questions. So that also is interesting that the mind starts to wonder. Ss soon as this happens she's beginning to, first of all, try to reconstruct the moment and, second of all, try to remember exactly the details. “Did the blood rush to my face or to my fingertips?” “Did he reopen his eyes before or after he said I'm sorry?” I mean, that second question is so interesting because on one hand what does it matter? And on the other hand it feels like everything matters on whether he reopened his eyes before or after he said this and so these questions that are really zeroing in on the moment of death and then back to this repetition, “the way memory is the ringing after a gunshot,” these questions are almost like that ringing after the gunshot trying to get back to the moment itself but never quite able to grasp it. Joanne: I like what you just said that everything matters. Every single little thing matters and this is not a tiny book. This book offers dozens of almost prismatic ways of looking at death and grief and you know as I hear you talking, that quality of attention there it is again. And it may seem to an outsider like whether or not the hospice nurse opened or closed his eyes before or after saying “I'm sorry,” I mean who cares? Of course it matters because it's as if the poetic speaker wants to hang on to this very moment this edge between life and death to kind of preserve every bit of it that she possibly can. Abram: Can I ask, have you ever been there when someone has died? Joanne: I have not, have you? Abram: I have not, but I have been to many funerals. And many funerals, that is such the right line for what happens. Memory gets up and starts walking. When you come to the funeral and they have died, memory gets up and starts walking and that’s why you have all these remembrances, because they’re all attempts to pay attention and to get back to that life before it ended, and precisely all the memories are what come to life after the person has died. And here she is at the moment of death and it starts to happen immediately and first, she’s trying to remember the moment of death itself. What exactly happened? How exactly did it happen? Joanne: Wow. What you just said is really moving to me and now it sounds facile to suggest that she’s personifying memory. That’s not what she’s doing. It's more complex than that. But it does feel like this is a poetic speaker who is working so hard to focus on every possible thing so it can be preserved about this moment, and memory just gets up and starts walking. And I can really, when you just said what you did about funeral services and memory just leaving, just going out the door. Abram: But it feels like these are things we have to hold on to now, and so as it's walking around you are trying to capture it and get it back. But it's also in a certain sense coming to life. I mean, you know, it's always striking to me the stories I hear about people that I never knew. What, when I go to a funeral I learn about somebody I never knew before because speaker after speaker is saying I remember this, I remember this. Of course, I wasn't there. I don't remember those things. But they are all these stories that come to life and give me all these angles on a person that I never knew before and so there is a kind of coming to life of memory at the moment of death that is kind of remarkable and that this line I think does an amazing job of getting us to realize or capturing in its own way. Joanne: Well, elsewhere in this collection, there's so many different meditations on death, on memory, on grieving. But elsewhere in the collection is one poem titled “My Mother's Lungs” and, to go to your point, there's a passage in that poem where Victoria Chang writes “What if my mother never told me stories about the war or about her childhood? Does that mean none of it happened?” and then elsewhere, thinking about her last words, what dies with them. Also in that same poem that I was just reading from, this precipice between life and death, there's another passage in that poem, “My Mother's Lungs” that reads “The obituary writers said the obituary is the moment when someone becomes history.” Abram: What the forum enables is a kind of room to breathe. Yes, we carve away. Yes, we keep only what is necessary. But these poems sort of build towards insights that can, in certain senses, stand alone. That she is coming to realizations as she goes, she's coming to recognitions as she goes, and she's keeping the space in there that built to that recognition. So in different poems she'll say something like “suffering changes shape and happens secretly” or “is language the broom or what is being swept?” These are moments where she's working through the poetry and coming to realizations, coming to insights, and then letting them stand, but not necessarily taking away all the structures that enabled her to get there. Joanne: And this is where Victoria Chang's collection points to poetic practice in general. Yes, it's elegies, but it's not just about elegy. It's about writing toward discovery, writing toward knowledge. Abram: And just to go back to the central sort of point of this episode, so much of that comes through in the form itself. This taking what is standard, very ordinary form (the obituary in the newspaper) and using it to do something completely new Joanne: Yeah, that's great. With all that we've discussed, would you be willing to read the poem again? Abram: [Reads poem] Joanne: That was beautiful. Abram: Well, for more Victoria Chang, you should check her out, find her books. Joanne: And thanks to Copper Canyon Press for granting us permission to read these poems today. Abram: For more information, you can visit our website at poetryforallpod.com Joanne: And please remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Abram: If you like the podcast, please leave a review and share it with a friend. Joanne: And thank you for listening.