Imagine yourself in a cafe, sitting alone, perhaps with a book, and a once-warm drink that has nearly cooled. The cafe is closing and only a few patrons remain. The light is a warm yellow or, if you so desire, faint vermillion. Among the intermittent chime-like clatter of spoons on glass, one of the only other patrons makes a quiet comment. Your eyes glance towards your book, not sure if it’s appropriate to continue reading or if the comment invites a response. The stranger keeps speaking and the previously inaudible idiosyncrasies of their speech start to emerge from the thick murky air. But, to hear better, the stranger comes to sit at your table. In the last half hour the cafe remains open, you and the stranger learn each others’ ways of speaking and develop a strange intimacy.
You’ve just read The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang.
It takes time to get used to Chang’s style; at the outset, the brevity of her poems read like—not an alarm—but a tiny bell: will this be a book of short Instagram poems? There’s a hint of mistrust for this approaching stranger. It’s only as time goes on that you warm to the shortness of the poems and their philosophical turns. You start to see echoes of some of your other friends—Jan Zwicky or Ulrikka S. Gernes, perhaps—quiet poets with a concern for nature who strive to find resonances through words.
And there is much that resonated, so much so that in reading The Trees Witness Everything, I had to revive my stick-note notetaking process and transcribed five pages of worthy gems. Though I’m having difficulty in stitching together a coherent analysis, it’s worth identifying the central motifs before examining some of the poems more precisely: time, memory, death, grief, language, nature—you know, all the big things in life.
These motifs weave through the poems and bring them into conversation with one another. Sometimes, a poem echoes with another thirty pages earlier. Sometimes, the connections emerge between poems on the same page. For instance, in “Green Fields”, Chang writes, “I was supposed to / return to the fields daily. / I haven’t been there / since birth. On some nights, I smell / smoke that I think is / God calling me, but when I / follow, there’s just a / clothesline with half a life clipped / on it, drying in the sun” (6). Reminding me of a series of concrete clothing-based sculptures I saw years ago, I like the central image of a “clothesline with half a life clipped / on it”, an image which Chang develops in a different way in the immediately following poem, “Convenience”: “Youth stretches over / everything, can be used once. / Then we turn it inside out” (6). I really love that metaphysical idea embodied in such a way. I think about Shakespeare’s line that “an old man is twice a child”, but here it is given a physical home, suggesting, due to its proximity to the previous poem, (for example) socks in use and then re-use. I think of clothing that would be on the line being, rather than laundered, turned inside out and used again—a second youth as we age.
Of course, the coziness of some of these short poems is provided with its fair share of sombre content. Sometimes the solemnity is a more personally existential worry; in “Horses”, Chang writes, “The way their eyes stare, / sometimes I wonder if we / are really hollow inside” (7). It’s a personal kind of tragedy to examine the hollowness inside. In other pieces, Chang takes darker turns that are more global and far-reaching. Consider, for instance, “Snowfall”, which reads as follows:
This poem encapsulates a number of the key motifs. The imagery connects to Chang’s concerns with the natural world: snow falling and light, here. The grief over her mother’s death makes an appearance, and a fatalistic sense of impending doom that hovers over the poems like sword of Damocles appears in the recurrence of old wars in new wars. The payoff requires distance in time; in this particular case, there’s a delay of seven years for light to travel while in other poems the past, present, and future collapse into one another.
While we’re on the topic, I’m intrigued by the way Chang addresses time throughout the collection. It’s as though she’s trying to capture the present moment but other times are constantly in conflict with it. For instance, in “When The War Is Over,” she writes, “We are now looking ahead / But have killed past the future” (22). In the span of two lines, we see three times: “now” “past” “future”. Granted, it’s a jumble that relies on a bit of a pun, but I think those multiple resonances are warranted. It’s almost as though the poem divides time into a future and a post-future—the fact that we’ve killed past the future is a bleak notion.
There are a number of other Proustian moments of lost time, often associated with animality. In “The Shortest Night”, Chang writes, “The owl was on the / next tree with mirrors as eyes, / in case I wanted / to see the future. When I / looked, I lost another year” (14). It’s as though in wanting to see past the present moment, it’s lost entirely. Seizing the future requires giving up the present. Similarly, “Little Horses” notes, “I want so much from a horse. / It just gives me fifty years” (30). Identification with animals aside, Chang seems to strive for adequate language for experiencing time, but “the thing itself is so brief that / life is mostly memory” (100). Simultaneously, “This moment is gone. / It cut time but left no mark. / Each day contains a thread of / joy, but joy doesn’t / stitch. Our eyes look ahead while / joy travels underneath us” (87). I feel in these works an attempt to seize the moment, yet moments on their own do not produce joy—single moments don’t stitch together.
For these reasons, Chang struggles to acclimatize: “In the upper leaves, / it is already next month. / I am still writing / yesterday’s poems, waiting for / clarity to come. / But yesterday is clotting, / next month won’t come down. / How do I live in the past / but write about tomorrow?” (38). Like other poets, Chang uses the natural imagery to contemplate time, but I like this idea that the future is already present if you look enough. Chang evokes another natural image in conjunction with time. In “Another Year Come In”, she writes, “Suddenly I am / free from everything but time. Time started doubling. I starting dieting so / the gap between life / and death could remain an inch. / I try not to move, / crouch under the raspberry / bush and pull its bullets off” (20). I find the final lines haunting. The raspberry bush flowering bullets—the violence of the harvest—is a surprising turn.
The future is always precarious, always seemingly loaded with violence. Returning to the idea of having “killed past the future”, the raspberries blooming as bullets, there’s a danger in the future—-but, so too, the present. In “What Is Modern”, Chang posits that “Mass graves are modern. / I caught up with the future — / the metal trees are silent / as they wait for us. / The future isn’t modern. / It worries it won’t arrive” (28). From a philosophical perspective, I’m haunted (as it were) by the resonance with Mark Fisher here. Fisher suggests throughout his work that there’s a slow cancellation of the future. So, in Chang’s work, what are we left with? A modern day of mass graves racing after what doesn’t and won’t exist. Of course, that poem is more philosophical in its discussion of time. In “The Child”, Chang’s approach is more personal: “Each day I want to / tear off my childhood to see / if what’s left survives. / If what’s left dies, then I know / my childhood wasn’t wasted” (35). I’m going to leave that without further comment. Just let that simmer.
I’ve already alluded to the ecological bent of the collection. Nature becomes a mirror to the self; like the Owl’s eyes earlier, it becomes a way of seeing inward. This often seems to happen with trees: “The fact that leaves can’t / be put back on trees makes me / think that you do not exist” (“The Gods” 72) and “Maybe we’re not filled / with water but with leaves. The / soft ones that make no / sound. If you listen closely, / you can almost hear / the leaves in your body fall. / Maybe nothing dies, / things just get lost. Memory / convalesces on our skin” (“Witness” 106). Tragic, the passing of time and their accompanying images.
Overall, nature is given its own language throughout the book. In one poem, “trees look like question / marks, how the moon makes / strange noises but it’s daytime” (“Passing” 15). Meanwhile, “I used to think / the moon was illiterate” (“The Cold Before the Moonrise” 7). There seem to be flaws in translation, or inadequacies of interpretation. In “The Dragonfly”, Chang writes that a dragonfly speaks English; she writes down what it says but is “disappointed” because “It / just tells us what it / sees — the rows of gravestones, / faceless pigeons, that / sadness is the only thing / that doesn’t have a shadow” (42). It’s interesting that the disappointment is framed this way, since these little observations are what comprise poetry so often. There’s a longing for more, but “Sometimes the language / we have is inadequate” (“Foghorn” 36). As a sidenote, that poem “Foghorn” commits to the “surprise and delight” imperative. The back half of the poem reads, “On rainy days, people leave / yellow boots on the / porch. The egret takes off its / yellow feet and steals the boots” (“Foghorn” 36). I love that cute and amusing turn of the poem.
Poems like that offer a quiet tenderness that is both inviting and inspiring, even when I don’t fully understand them. Some of the lines have an aphoristic quality that is felt more than understood. For instance, I have some idea—though I can’t be certain—what Chang means when she writes that “birds / are a transcript of our thoughts” (“To The Book” 10) or “I want to staple / myself to a passing cloud / so I am blameless for war” (26). These lines stand out for their poetic allure, drifting on the surface of the heart and the mind. As you submerse yourself in the poems, some of the more cogent threads begin to present themselves.
There’s a sense of reverence in the poems—distinctly not a religious one, but reverence nonetheless. Chang’s speaker is “still angry / with God and all the patterns / we’re forced to follow. [...] Why does the heart have so many rivers to snake / through, each one a day’s trip, each one a suicide / mission into another” (77). There’s a sense of confinement in the religions angle. Like how Chang is confined by time, she too is confined by the rules of the world in general—”the patterns we’re forced to follow”. She offers a more explicit critique in “The Thread”, where she writes “Once I thought the thread / was God so I’ve held the string / like a leash, thinking / that one day it would pull me / toward light. But what / if it’s just a string, all the / seasons just dresses, things to put on and take off” (17). Despite this sense of disillusionment, Chang’s attention to minutiae is its own form of reverence: “Something is slumping / over a warm rock, as if / holding its mother. / I’ve watched so many spiders / lift one last leg toward God” (22). I myself had visions of writing a poem based on a time I was working at McDonald’s and watched a mosquito in a slow drift to its death on the countertop. This poem accomplishes the exact feeling I hoped to capture, the sense of slowness and attention where it feels like a secret shared with the universe.
There’s an optimistic sincerity, too. The rare poem seems unequivocally positive. In “Thanks”, Chang notes how some days she “can’t see / beyond the two small lemons / as they pull down the branches” (13). It’s a clever spin on a few phrases at once: can’t see the forest for the trees, when life gives you lemons, etc. The bright yellow lemons obscuring the view give the poem its optimistic flare (even if they’re ostensibly “pull[ing] down”.
Partway through the book, I had an odd sense of déjà-vu, as if I’d read the poem before. As it turns out, I had. I read the anthology of The Best American Poets of 2021, which included an earlier version of “Marfa, Texas.” “Marfa, Texas” is a long poem amidst the rest of the collection and stands out as a distinct achievement. The poem is a rich exploration of interiority and environment. It’s a consideration of space and our relationship thereto. For instance, Chang considers joy as a distance: “Maybe / joy is the distance that never / changes and the distance is / what allows me to feel it” (52). Just under a page later, Chang includes a series of stanzas that is a poetic exploration of interior affects:
There’s a darkness to these lines; the idea of loving the drowning, the depth, is a dark idea. It’s in that darkness, though, that a love of the world emerges. Chang appreciates the the beauty of people under the water and strives to extend love to all living beings: “to have a heart like this / is to be made of midnight” and to “live within // birds”. It’s an intuitively poetic turn that blends with the philosophical, reminiscent, in some ways, to Edmond Jabès.
After reading the (relatively) long poem, I read the poet’s notes in the back, which proved illuminating. First, I discovered all kinds of poetic forms that comprise The Trees Witness Everything. Chang identifies the forms and their syllabic patterns: wakas, including katautas (5-7-7), sedokas (5-7-7-5-7-7), tankas (5-7-5-7-7), bussokusekikas (5-7-5-7-7-7), and chokas (5-7-5-7-5-7-5-7-7). Having this context helps put the conversation into perspective. It gives insight into the cadences of the work, which otherwise pass by unnoticed. Reading the back half of the book with these forms in mind only increases the intimacy of the conversation.
Moreover, the poems are all based on the titles of W. S. Merwin’s poems. Chang notes that she did it to “subconsciously avoid preconceived subject matter, in hindsight, and as a way to inhabit another person’s mind” (118), which encapsulates the ethos of the book, and goes on to say, “I selected a Merwin title as a prompt, then one syllabic form at random [...] and then wrote a poem. I would often read the Merwin poem first, but not always” (118). I appreciate Chang’s transparency in outlining her process. Moreover, it’s interesting to see the constraints she applies to herself in advance of writing as a way of deepening her attention on an-other, modelling our own reading process.
I’m returning now to the cafe. If I was that stranger talking to you, I’ve just been rambling about a poetry book for the last half hour before close. You’re thoroughly alienated by this passionate expostulation on a book you’ve never read. There’s much more that could be discussed about The Trees Witness Everything—-the motif of birds, the feminist imperative that runs throughout the work, the occasional surprisingly gruesome image that disturbs and circles in the mind and so on. But, the cafe is closing and it’s time to get out, so I’ll have to leave it there.
In short, The Trees Witness Everything is a really lovely collection. I don’t think I know much about Victoria Chang, but I do think I understand something about the spirit or ethos of the work and that really resonates. It offers an intimacy that is rare to find—-Chang really has a unique voice that is hard to replicate. It’s great.
Hope you have a chance to read this book and hence make a new friend. Happy reading!
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