Victoria Chang

Nerves light up my arms with no explanation. Only some people can see the lights. On the worst days, the nerves look like pitchforks. When I am performing happiness, they shock me. On those days, I wear long-sleeved shirts and cover my ankles. Depression is experienced. It is the CEO of feeling. All other feelings are direct reports. My depression is IPOing next month. It hopes to raise $100 million so it can expand into my future.

Like all IPOs, it is dream-like and has a tagline that is about bettering society. Agnes liked the horizontal line better than other lines. I like it too

because its weight is distributed so that more depression can hang from it like laundry. The only way to see if my words are poems is if I crush them into lines. I do this so no one can see my insides. I've learned that the words are only poems if, when I flatten them into a line, the meaning remains. In my need to know, I am surrounded by lines. Even a river is no longer water but a series of lines that sounds like a stream.

from the journal AGNI
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This poem is a part of a new book of poems, "With My Back to the World," and it's a book of ekphrastic poems in correspondence with the artwork of Agnes Martin. The poems began with a commission from the MoMA Museum where I was asked to pick any piece in their collection and after searching for a while, I decided to select something from an artist I felt like I knew already. 

 Victoria Chang on "Happiness (from the Innocent Love Series), 1999"
A Portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley
"How Shelley Stands Tall as a Great Romantic Poet"

"As I was growing up, it was Keats' work that was the most compelling....with an aesthetic wish to capture and fix desire through art. But Shelley fascinates through his complexity—his reformist zeal is matched by a strong sense of personal gloom and pessimism, which he works through in his poetry, using nature as a counterpoint to his human suffering. If Keats was a first love, Shelley is a mature one."

via
THE GUARDIAN
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Cover of Renee Gladman's Book, Plans for Sentences
What Sparks Poetry:
Heather Green on Renee Gladman's Plans for Sentences


"The pathos in these lines might bring up different associations for different readers. For me, there's pathos somehow 'leaking' from these sentences, calling to mind the ways we build or fail to build communities, shelters, and habitable spaces. Taken together, the text and images here dream and draft and gesture toward future creations, lines of many kinds that will create, inhabit, and alter future spaces."
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