The Trees Witness Everything, by Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang’s most recent book, The Trees Witness Everything, contains over one hundred and seventy short poems; a lyric sequence written in five-line blocks inspired by her time in Marfa, Texas, during a Lanna residency, called ‘Marfa, Texas’; and, to end the book, a series of haiku, collectively entitled ‘Love Letters’. The short poems are written in loose interpretations of various traditional Japanese forms such as the sedoka and tanka. In addition, every short poem takes its title from the title of a W. S. Merwin poem. According to Chang’s note in the back of the book, she did this “as a way to subconsciously avoid preconceived subject matter…and as a way to inhabit another person’s mind.” Before she began to write, she selected a Merwin title as a prompt, chose a form from her list of Japanese forms, and wrote the poem. Sometimes she read the Merwin poem before composing her own, sometimes not.

Merwin was a great influence on me as a poet for many years. So I was happy to hear the influence of Merwin in Chang’s work the first time I heard her read in public. Some of the poems in The Trees are at least in some way in conversation with Merwin. Some of them seem to respond to the Merwin poem or theme with a post-modernist cynicism (similar to Merwin’s work in the early to mid 60’s). Some of the poems seem to be like echoes of the original Merwin poems—echoes that have been reverberating for a long time, so that though they are diminished, they are still haunting, as in ‘Little Horse’:

Little Horse

by Victoria Chang

No one judges it,

not even the flattered grass.

Horses are simple,

we train them and they listen.

I want so much from a horse.

It just gives me fifty years.

Little Horse

by W. S. Merwin

You come from some other forest
do you
little horse
think how long I have known these
deep dead leaves
without meeting you

I belong to no one
I would have wished for you if I had known how
what a long time the place was empty
even in my sleep
and loving it as I did
I could not have told what was missing

what can I show you
I will not ask you if you will stay
or if you will come again
I will not try to hold you
I only hope you will come with me to where I stand
often sleeping and waking
by the patient water
that has no father nor mother

Some of the poems share no more than a title, as Chang can find her subject in the poem from something else entirely. But it is a fun exercise to read the Chang poem and the Merwin poem together. It is a courageous act to invite your poems to be read alongside the work of a major poet.

Of course this may not have been Chang’s intention. As she says in her notes, “I chose to doubly constrain myself because formal constraints often have the opposite effect on my writing. Terrance Hayes once said in an interview, ‘My relationship to form is that of a bird inside its cage, moving around.’”

I know from hearing her speak of it that the poems in at least one of her previous books, Obit, all arrived in a short period of something like a couple weeks. I do not know if that was the case with these poems, but they seem to have the same sense of spontaneous energy. Overall the poems are far more uneven here than those of Obit, which nearly always found some way of being evocative. Perhaps writing the poems of the previous book quickly worked so well because Chang had a consistent theme to write into. There are many fantastic poems in The Trees…, but there are also those I found myself wishing she had spent a little more time on. Even if a poem is short, I still hope to have the feeling, when I first read it, of wanting to linger over it and read it again. Some of the poems, such as ‘Late Wonders’, may not be consistently interesting, but can still end with a line as memorable as “Fame is a bucket of eyes.” I would be more than happy to read an otherwise less inspiring poem in order to find a line such as that.

Of course, in a book with so many poems, it is inevitable that there may be some a particular reader doesn’t like. I could speak of how Chang’s invariable plain style does and does not serve some of the poems, but Chang’s greatest trait, her inventiveness, is nearly always on display in this book.

There are too few short poems being written and published by well-known poets such as Victoria Chang. The Trees Witness Everything demonstrates over and over again how powerful a short poem can be when it is written by a great writer. I hope it will inspire other writers to attempt shorter poems as well.

Utterance

Have you ever stood

on a highway in pitch-black

and heard nothing but singing?