The poetic interrogations of Jennifer Chang's AN AUTHENTIC LIFE

Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark, which received the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, A Public Space, and The Yale Review, and has been honored with fellowships form MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency program and with the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation. 

She is the poetry editor of New England Review and teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and the University of Texas at Austin. Her most recent book, An Authentic Life, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Interview by Isabelle Sakelaris 

In a few of the poems, you write about looking or observing and complicity. In “The Poem of Force,” you wrote, “It may not be true // to look is not to act // who’s to say,” and in “Letter to Capitol Hill,” you wrote, “In school / we loved to use the word ‘research’ / as it freed us from complicity, // as if the archive were not a mirror” (7, 92). When, if ever, is it appropriate to look instead of act? What is the difference between looking and witnessing, and does bearing witness without acting make us complicit in injustice?

I wrote “The Poem of Force” after reading Simone Weil’s essay “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force,” in which she describes the perpetrator and the victim of violence as “brothers of the same distress,” a phrase I repurpose in my poem. Weil is writing in 1939, at the beginning of World War II, and thinking about Homer’s frank depiction of war, and the essay contends that whatever side you are on makes you less human, turns you everyone into object. The hero of The Iliad, she declares, is force itself, the violence that binds these relationships and tears apart humanity. It’s a piercing argument, and it made me think about the protective instinct I feel for my children when we are around strangers, in public, imagining the potential danger of the other, and so the poem. Where is the force that imbues our everyday lives with violence? It is, I agree with Weil, as much within as without.

We are all complicit in injustice. I say this at a moment when many of us feel acutely powerless as more and more of our rights are being legislated away. The difference between to look and to witness is that witnessing suggests that, in the least, what’s being observed will be reported to someone, anyone. Witnessing makes space for reflection, a form of critical thinking, which Weil believed was essential to being ethical. But right now, reflection feels inadequate and makes me realize that witnessing, too, might be too passive. So, while it might never be appropriate to look instead of act, I’m feeling the limits of witnessing, critical thinking, and the small actions that currently amount to resistance.

Copper Canyon Press

In the poem “In the Middle of My Life,” you write “That figure, / which is and is not me, // which was me, perhaps will be me. / I don’t particularly like writing / in the first person, in the future tense” (11). What is your relationship to the lyric I in poetry? Is it related to the reason your speaker—perhaps a stand-in for you—avoids writing in the first person and future tense?

Years ago, a smart reader pointed out to me that the lyric “I” in my first book of poems, The History of Anonymity, was frequently dispersed between selves within a single poem. I was struck by the truth of that observation then and continue to abide by it, consciously and unconsciously, because I realized that it was something I had long ago observed poets formative to me like T. S. Eliot and Jorie Graham or later on in Harryette Mullen and Myung Mi Kim. Theirs are speakers that coalesce multiple subjectivities. For me, the lyric “I” is not fixed because the self is not fixed, and how that uncertainty or formlessness manifests in the poem is a voice that evades, is unstable, and wanders off. The speaker “In the Middle of My Life” is a more fixed self than in, say, “The Death of Socrates” or “The Age of Unreason,” but I intentionally muddy the clarity of that voice by placing it in conversation with the friend and with herself, so the speaker exists in the present and in the past, in the conversation on the phone and in the conversation in her head. The effect, I think, insists on the variousness of voice: the lyric “I” is not seamless but fractured and, yes, rhetorically and formally dispersed. No speaker, on the page or off, has one voice.

Playing with voice has been a primary inquiry (and joy) in writing poems. I quote James Longenbach’s in “In the Middle of My Life” observation that in poetry “voice is a metaphor.” There is no “voice” in poems, so who’s speaking? In fact, no one is speaking. I think part of me, as a maker, sees the “I” as an opportunity to alternately perform and isolate one thread of experience or identity or cognition. I love that fracturing of a self, the lyric “I,” because, in part, it allows the possibility that other voices are hiding in the one voice we encounter on the page.

Many of your poems make innovative use of the negative space on the page. For example, some of your poems move between single and double spacing, you make frequent use of indentation, and even use right-justified lines. How do you approach the visual aspect of your poetry, and how has that approach changed over time?

There were certain poems in An Authentic Life that I purposely added more returns to after each stanza. I made this choice for “The Age of Unreason” because the poem needed to take up a lot of space. I’m writing about and against the historical invisibility of Asian Americans. You call it “negative space,” which it is, but I very intentionally call it “white space” when I reflect on this particular poem’s craft. Asian American history exists in a white space, literally, and it exists as a kind of absence, and that was crucial to how I wrote the poem, both in the spaces between stanzas and the spaces within lines. That’s a visual expression, but it’s also a spatial and thus political expression.

In “Letter to Capitol Hill,” I make similar choices with adding negative space. The poem contends with literary history, specifically with a kind of misreading, and, at the same time, reflects on a loss. It is also both an epistolary poem and an elegy, and consequently, it becomes a conversation with someone who is no longer here. To me, white space was necessary to capture the mortal distance between the “I” and the “you,” as well as the distance between reader and text or, to put it another way, a student and her lessons. It’s a very sad poem, one that I have trouble reading without a catch in my throat, so the white space expresses my own rhythm of grief. The white space provides a break from language: I almost don’t want the poem to move forward to a conclusion that, in many ways, reifies the end of a life, the end of a conversation.

To me, negative or white space, whatever you want to call it, is language, too. It takes time and makes music, and I hope that readers will hear that space as time and music, that they will let the silence of space become an expression they experience as they would a word or phrase. One of the poem’s—any poem’s—most important interlocutors is silence, after all, and how else does the poet write that exchange into the poem except through white space?

In “The Death of Socrates,” you write about the daughter figure, “A daughter—loved despite that. // An American—loved despite that” (22). In the next poem, “A Conversation between Women,” you write “We call that love, the despite-ness” (25). Would you please share more about the idea of despite-ness and love? So much of this book investigates the speaker’s relationship to her father, during his lifetime and after. Do you think the despite-ness of love can change over time?

This is such a difficult question, and I think if I knew the answer, I probably wouldn’t write poems. The “despite-ness of love” is where I dwell, I think, I worry, and reflects the costs of love. The labor of love. There is the trivial: I love my husband despite his habit of leaving drawers half-open. And there is the consequential: I love my father despite the damages of his narcissism. Which is to say, love forms even where there are flaws and other impediments to love. It changes over time, of course—sometimes the half-open drawers and the narcissism overwhelm my ability to love, sometimes I close the drawers unthinkingly and sometimes I answer my father’s phone calls without hesitation—but this does not necessarily mean that the despite-ness of love evolves. Rather, one bends to the heart’s weather. In this, I disagree with Shakespeare, who writes “love is not love, / Which it alters when it alteration finds”: love does alter, even lifelong love.

Also in “In the Middle of My Life”, the speaker is interrupted by external voices (in italics; writer’s own). For example, “It will not // always hurt—Are you / by the creek?—being his daughter. / Yes, but it’s so dry.” You also write lines that can be read left-to-right and right-to-left. For example, the line “to come home again. I will not,” could also be read “I will not come home again” (11). I’m interested in your use of interruption and simultaneity. I saw this as a visual representation of the dialectic you’ve created with despite-ness. Is that a fair reading? What is your approach to form and content in your work? Does one come before the other?

In the example you give, that interruption is another voice, the friend the speaker speaks to on the phone. This reflects the way I sometimes write, where I’m hearing so many voices at once – my own various voices and the voices of friends, overheard strangers, other writers, my children, my id. My thoughts proceed by, and despite, interruption. As I write, it creates a rhythm and then eventually a form. I would say that I find form as I’m writing and that then, gradually, clarifies what the content is.

“In the Middle of My Life” began as a poem about a walk I used to take while talking to my friend and then it became a meditation on voice as I began shaping the poem into staggered tercets. The movement across the page, the line breaks and stanza breaks, reveal a mind in action, a woman trying to decide an authentic language for love and care, and that, for me, required playing with the speaker’s voice and the voices around her. How do we speak when we speak to others tenderly – there is the phone call with the friend, the long-ago letters to a former love, the unsent letters to the father, and the interrogation of the speaker’s voice. It took the cascading quality of those tercets to lead me to recognize my own content, and so form and content become a dialectic, where each fulfills its necessary being in reaction to the other. It’s exceedingly rare that I know ahead of time what the form or content will be in the final poem.

The following lines in your poem “An Essay on War” reminded me of one of my favorite Lucille Clifton Poems, “why some people be mad at me sometimes” (1987). You wrote,

“Most of us have not been to war,” I begin

“yet certain photographs

make us remember

what never happened to us.

Either our imaginations are marked

or no longer our own” (43).

Would you please share more on the idea of public, or imagined, and personal memory, and how times of war and injustice influence them?

I’m grateful for the comparison to Clifton’s poem, which is one of my favorites, too! She distinguishes her memories from “their memories,” and the implication is that they think her memories are too unimportant to bear the heft of history. Well, her memories are history is what I think she’s saying. Within the personal is the public: we live in history and do not—cannot—live apart from war, injustice, the world’s pain. I think about how poorly critics have misunderstood Emily Dickinson, that as a domestic poet, a homebound woman, the Civil War made no appearance in her poems, and yet she writes, “My Life has stood – a Loaded Gun.” Such an image arises from the imagination of a woman whose friends and neighbors were dying on the battlefield, for whom violence was a daily fact even as she swept the floor or baked bread. As with language, our memories have context. We do not imagine from a void, and I personally feel the crisis of our historical moment every time I sit down to write, even when I think I’m only writing about a tree or listening for a distinct music. That tree and that music—the concrete and the abstract—exist simultaneously in public and private memories, as well in imagination and reality. None of it escapes the residue of history.

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Isabelle Sakelaris is an art writer and aspiring poet who lives and works in New York City.

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