Consider prominent poets with ties to Michigan. There’s Philip Levine and Robert Hayden, both U.S. poet laureates, though Hayden served long enough ago, in the 1970s, that the role was called something else. Internet lists include Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates, a pair surely more famous for their novelistic exploits. But where, Google and ChatGPT, is Victoria Chang? National Poetry Month is a useful excuse to note that search algorithms and chatbots aren’t yet the arbiters of much about poetry, including success in the field, which Chang, who grew up on Cass Lake and now resides in California, has lately experienced in waves.
Her latest book, With My Back to the World, inspired by the visual artist Agnes Martin, won the prestigious U.K. Forward Prize, putting her in company with past winners Jorie Graham, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, and other poetry heavyweights. In a recent interview, we discussed her home state recollections and what verse and creativity are good for anyway.
What’s your earliest Michigan memory?
Snow. No matter what, I wanted to go outside, and those impressions and imagery shaped me as a writer, I guess, since they still make it into my work. I remember going out one day that was so cold and still. Nobody else was around, and it looked like the smoke from the chimneys wasn’t even moving. It just seemed like a painting.
How was poetry part of your childhood?
I went to West Bloomfield High School and had a few amazing English teachers. One was Ruth Leinweber. She had us reading so much poetry and would sort of prance around the room and recite Emily Dickinson. We had to memorize, too, and I can still hear some of these lines in my head today: “Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me.” I can’t say that I liked poetry much at the time, but she introduced it, and her passion just sort of carried me on and I kept doing it.
What did your parents make of your interest in poetry?
They were immigrants … math and science people. Their opinion was “As long as you can feed yourself, you’re free to do what you want.” I liked math, too, and for years always had practical jobs with regular paychecks. I was able to follow through on what they wanted, at least at a minimum, and otherwise had all the freedom in the world.
You have an MBA from Stanford University and worked in business for a stretch. How did this affect you as an artist?
Sometimes, you can learn what you want to do and who you want to be by opposition. I had a bunch of classmates in business school who wanted to start companies and be venture capitalists. They wanted to make a ton of money — I found I just wasn’t interested in that, though I was in the people. Poetry is really about creation. So is starting a company; it’s just that the focus of the creative energy is totally different.
So why poetry for you?
I also write children’s books and make visual art for fun. Poetry just happens to be the medium in which I’m working and teaching. In the classroom [at Georgia Tech], I teach technical things, such as how and why line breaks are used and so on. But mostly, I’m teaching how to live truthfully, emotionally, and authentically in the world. And to wake up our dead emotions and our dead selves, which is how most of us live most of the day. Poetry is a means to live a really rich and colorful life through your perception.
Which poets do you read?
I like poets and writers who ask big metaphysical questions: What are we doing here? Is it just random chance? Can we seek more spiritually by exploring beauty and truth? At the moment, The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa is always nearby, as well as Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Larry Levis, Charles Wright, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath … there are just so many. I read all the time.
Any advice for someone who might want to try their hand at poetry?
For me, anyway, when I’m writing and making art, that’s what shapes my days and how I arrange my calendar. I’m always trying to get back to it. As for subjects, think about the hundreds of interactions you have in a week with books, language, media, and people. What sticks? What haunts you? I like to be struck by something rather than having a rote daily practice.
This story originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our digital edition will be available on April 7.
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