Atlanta Arts category interest

Chang’s latest collection of poetry, “With My Back to the World” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26), showcases her eclectic interests and ever-changing directions. Inspired by abstract art, it explores the meaning of language, love and death.

“All subjects interest me,” said Chang, Georgia Tech’s Bourne chair of poetry, the director of Poetry@Tech and a 2017 Guggenheim fellowship recipient. “I feel it is too bad that we have short lives because I feel like I could have done many different things.”

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Born in the Detroit area, Chang is the youngest of two daughters of Chinese and Taiwanese descent. Her parents immigrated to the United States to attend graduate school and met while working in the hotel industry. Her father later supported his family as a mechanical engineer for Ford Motor Co., while her mother taught high school math in the Detroit public school system. Both are now deceased.

Chang memorialized her parents in “Obit,” a 2020 collection of poems that was longlisted for the National Book Award. Deeply philosophical, the collection experiments with the traditional form of obituaries. The first piece explores her father’s stroke and aphasia, concluding: “I understood then that darkness is falling without an end. That darkness is not the absorption of color but the absorption of language.”

She returned to her father and grief in her latest collection, “With My Back to the World,” which was inspired by the minimalist artwork of Agnes Martin. Canadian by birth, Martin persevered despite an extraordinarily difficult childhood, poverty and mental illness, according to her biography by Nancy Princenthal, “Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art.” Martin immersed herself in mystical Christianity, Taoism and Buddhism and said the ideas for her artwork came to her in visions that needed only to be scaled up.

For one of her most famous oil paintings, Martin used a metal ruler to guide her hand as she penciled 24 horizontal rows on a six-foot-square canvas. The rows alternate between light and dark. Though she named it “The Tree,” according to the Museum of Modern Art, she said her paintings were “not really about nature. It is not what is seen — it is what is known forever in the mind.”

Chang wrote a poem about that painting after walking through a neighborhood near the Atlanta Botanical Garden, hearing insects calling in the woods and reflecting on her depression.

“Before I arrived to this city, I could feel the depression in my fingertips,” Chang wrote. “It made my fingers tingle. Sadness is the most alive emotion. It gets into your nerves. Its pulses feel like insects at the rim of your skin.”

Fascinated by Martin, Chang dived into work, seeking out her paintings in museums and reading a collection of her writings, including her insights about art. Chang is intrigued by people like Martin who “don’t follow convention for whatever reason, probably because they can’t.

“There is something about these writings that I really resonate with,” she said. “Maybe it was, like, they felt kind of Buddhist to me and aphoristic. They felt somehow familiar yet drastically unfamiliar.”

Asked about others who inspire her, Chang mentioned the poets Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and Rainer Maria Rilke.

“I am just looking for word combinations, sounds, images and syntax that I have not experienced before myself,” she said. “That could be a lot of poets writing today.”

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Chang wrote one of her latest poems, “On a Clear Day,” in the shape of a screen print from Martin’s series of the same name. It focuses on the 2021 fatal shootings at Atlanta area spas that killed eight people, including six Asian women. Martin’s screen print depicts a grid of 48 rectangles.

To Chang, those rectangles appear to be attempts at “controlling so much that couldn’t be controlled.” The spa shootings, Chang said, were “so traumatic. And I couldn’t believe it. Yet it felt so familiar. I felt like we are all one step away from experiencing that kind of violence toward us for things that are so uncontrollable to us.”

In her poem about Martin’s screen print, Chang wrote: “I keep counting grids. But no matter how I try, I still get 6 dead Asian women who don’t fit into 48 boxes.”

Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, that poem sparked the others in Chang’s collection, including the title piece, “With My Back to the World.” It is named after a series of six banded pastel paintings Martin completed in her 80s, when she resided in an assisted living home. Martin died in 2004 at 92.

The title, “With My Back to the World,” according to the museum, reflected her solitary lifestyle and her philosophy that “art sits outside of the cares and corruption of the world.” Chang identifies with Martin’s worldview.

“I would rather be thinking about something or reading something and thinking about it or looking at something and thinking about it versus being in the real world,” Chang said. “I have had that feeling my whole life. It is a hard thing to explain. I constantly want to be away.”

Chang’s poem concludes with a line reminiscent of Martin’s views. “The best thing about emptiness is if you close your eyes in a field, you’ll open your eyes in a field.”

Changing currents again, Chang is now working on a children’s novel that is expected to be published in 2026. She is calling it “Eureka.”