A conversation with Wally poetry alum Victoria Chang

 

On working at Morgan Stanley, evil, and weeds

 

�Many poets display a single strength. Some write beautiful nature poems, others write well about relationships, still others have a gift for addressing issues like politics or economics. Chang can do it all.� So raved a Kansas City journalist about the second poetry collection from WW alum Victoria Chang (poetry �05), Salvinia Molesta, published this fall by the Virgina Quarterly Review. During Chang�s time at Warren Wilson, she worked with Pimone Triplett, David Baker, Elizabeth Arnold and Linda Gregerson. We asked Gregerson, a Renaissance literature scholar, to read Chang�s newest collection and talk to her former student about her book titled after an insidious weed.

 

You trained early on as an historian, and I'm struck by the depth of your historical engagement in the poems of Salvinia Molesta.� Could you speak a bit about the role of history in your poems and also about poetry's obligation to history, as you see it?� What is the difference between the way you engage history in a poem, and the way you engaged it as a scholar?

 

I have a BA in Asian Studies and an MA in Asian Studies so I spent most of my early academic years studying Chinese history. I wrote poems at that time too, but they were mostly personal self-obsessed poems. It wasn't until I returned to poetry in my late twenties that a flood of poems with historical references started coming out. I try not to force anything from my poems or to ask anything of them so I let the poems write themselves with as much guidance as they would allow me, hence the historical poems influenced by my studies. I think poetry should be obligated to whatever the particular poet feels necessary to write about, whether it is history, politics, illness, love, death. I just happen to have a motley background and the type of personality that is interested in everything, so that everything I touch tends to appear in my poems in some shape or form.

 

I think writing a poem with historical references is much more challenging than the way I engaged with history as a scholar. I'm always challenged to make the poem go beyond a simple retelling of the historical reference. It seems like the poem should do so much more than that, so I focus on language and other elements. I don't think of a historical poem as a narrative, but as an emotion.� It feels more like the inside of a tornado versus a narrative of the tornado's movements, if that makes sense.

 

I know of no other poet in America who could have written on the subjects you engage in section three of your book, the section I think of as Paper Profits Run Amok in the 1980s.� Could you tell us something about your experience in the world of business and what it's like to render that world in a poem?� What are the particular challenges for you as a writer here?

 

I've always straddled two different worlds, or a multiplicity of worlds at once. I worked in investment banking at Morgan Stanley in the early 1990s and the infamous Frank Quattrone was my boss. I met some really nice people then, but also met some not so nice people. I learned a lot about business and did ultimately get an MBA and really enjoyed those years in business, but decided that kind of hardcore business wasn't for me. I'm not as driven by money as a lot of my colleagues in business. I still work at Stanford Business School as a researcher and writer and enjoy it very much for the intellectual work, but those early years in business were unexpectedly ironed in my brain.

 

When Enron came about, I became very obsessed with the characters involved in wiping out the life savings of so many people. I did hesitate to write about those experiences because I read a lot of poetry and knew that the areas I was exploring were not conventional. But ultimately, I think it's hard to run away from your poems and I didn't want to get in the habit of caring what other people or poets thought about my poems. I didn't view those people as all bad and I wanted to really think about how we're all the same in so many ways. We each have some evil in us and some good too. I didn't think Clifford Baxter, an Enron character that committed suicide, as all evil. I wanted to get into his head as much as I could.

 

The structure of your book seems so perfect and necessary it's hard not to think of it as having always been as it is. Was the organization always a given, or did you try alternatives?� Can you speak about using the plant Salvinia Molesta, the ultimate invasive species, as an organizing figure for the volume as a whole?

 

I worked so hard on the structure of the book because I didn't write the book as a project but as separate poems. After I began to sense that there was a book-length manuscript, I looked at all the poems and noticed a thematic thread that crossed through the poems. The three sections became clear immediately, but I recognized that each section was very weak. I was also hesitant to organize the book in threes because my first book did the same thing. But ultimately I trusted the book and let it be organized the way it wanted to be organized. After that I spent a year or so working at each section as if each were a smaller book and strengthening poems, writing new ones, taking weaker ones out, etc. My friend told me the third section was extremely weak, so I spent another 6 months writing new poems toward that section, which is always hard for me.

 

The book very much explores the paradoxical nature of human beings, the good and bad of all of us and I was casually looking for a governing metaphor to help organize the book, to serve as the glue for the book. I was looking into weeds in general and found Salvinia Molesta on the internet.� When I found it, it became immediately clear to me that this would be the title of the book and the title of a poem in the book.

 

And finally, what kind of poems are you working on now?

 

I'm busier now than ever with a two year old and a four month old at home, so it's hard to find time to write poems, but I try to write whenever I can.� I've lost my prime morning writing time which is depressing, but now I write at all different times if my mind is alert enough or if I feel the pull of a poem�that itchy, annoying, frustrating feeling I still get once in a while. I'm working on two manuscripts, the first is a set of poems about the difficulties of parenting, which might stay a private manuscript because I've found it difficult to write about domestic issues in an innovative way. The second is a set of prose poems that explore desire, love and infidelity, topics that I began to explore in the second section of Salivinia Molesta.