With My Back to the World (cover)

Elisabeth Sweet: Where did the motivation for the poem visualizations come from? Was there a poem or one of Agnes’ paintings in particular that catalyzed the creative undertaking of these accompanying works?

Victoria Chang: Once I finished writing the poems in conversation with Agnes Martin and On Kawara’s artwork and writings, I didn’t feel truly “finished” conversing with these artists. I had an impulse to occlude the poems themselves, I’m not sure why, but perhaps because ultimately language feels inadequate to me to get at some of the things I was exploring in my poems. Perhaps mark-making through language wasn’t enough so I began to mark-make more in Martin and Kawara’s language which were more like strokes.

“Untitled #5, 1998” by Victoria Chang

“Happiness (from Innocent Love Series, 1999)” by Victoria Chang

“Perfect Happiness (from Innocent Love Series, 1999)” by Victoria Chang

E: Lines create a sense of security and expectation that allow minds and bodies to move and express freely within recognized boundaries. Later in life, Agnes spoke of living “above the line” always and not going “below the line for anything,” which you quote directly in “Perfect Happiness (from Innocent Love Series, 1999).” Yet, it seems that in life some lines are meant to be crossed, or at the very least examined from different sides in order to live at all. Throughout the process of writing this book and creating the poem visualizations, did you feel as though you were crossing lines, either self-established or imposed by others, even Agnes?

V: I think what Agnes Martin is saying is that she was at a different place when making those pieces such as “Perfect Happiness.” I’m not sure if the lines move or we move or both, but nothing is ever static. I think Martin’s work shows this transformation. For example, I think while I was writing the book, I was definitely below the line, to use Martin’s terminology. But years later, I am currently “above the line,” and perhaps working on that book helped shift my psyche above the line.

from “Today” by Victoria Chang

E: Can you tell us a bit about the process and intent behind redacting certain days in the visualizations for “Today” (Jan.8.2022, Jan.22.2022, Feb.6.2022)? Does redaction signal a heavier weight felt on those days or perhaps suggest events or experiences more private occurred? I cannot help but notice that on Feb.17.2022 the word “blossoms” burst through the dark.

V: I’m not sure, honestly. I think your guess is a good one. I think the act of erasure is the continued exploration of the inadequacies of language, like I mentioned above, perhaps a way of saying language is insufficient in the end, but perhaps the process was important for exploring some of the more difficult emotions I was exploring such as sadness, grief, mortality.

– – –

Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is With My Back to the World, published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the U.S. and Corsair/Little Brown in the U.K. It received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection. A few of her other books include The Trees Witness Everything, OBIT, and Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. She has written several children’s books as well. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.

theVERSEverse has curated Victoria’s work into two seminal exhibitions: POÈME SBJKT, an exhibition of literary arts held in Paris at Librairie Métamorphoses, and FeralVerse, the first exhibition of poetry on Feral File. in POÈME SBJKT, Victoria showed “2022 #1” her collaboration with Dianna Frid, a work which emerged from Victoria + Dianna’s shared interest in the obituary form and its potentials. the physical manifestation exhibited in Paris while digitized + minted versions of the work can be found on objkt: “2022 #1, Folio 1“, “2022 #1, Folio 2“, “2022 #1, Folio 3“. in FeralVerse, our team invited Alexandra Crouwers to visually + sonically interpret Victoria’s poem “Some Last Questions” which you can watch here.

Elisabeth Sweet is a poet exploring patterns of randomness whose work has been exhibited in Berlin, New York, and Paris. She is a core member of theVERSEverse, leading communications and conversations with poets + artists breaking ground in the digital. find her on socials @speciesofvalue.

ES: It sounds like listening is a whole-body experience for you – your senses lock into the world and unlock a poem. Beyond the primary five (sight, smell, sound, touch, taste), which senses empower you most as a poet?

KHD:

from KHD: var(listen). visit the project which culminated in “Howling” by Katie Dozier

ES: It sounds like listening is a whole-body experience for you – your senses lock into the world and unlock a poem. Beyond the primary five (sight, smell, sound, touch, taste), which senses empower you most as a poet?

KHD:

from KHD: var(listen). visit the project which culminated in “Howling” by Katie Dozier

ES: The ears are always open; we cannot close them. We hear the world around us, but that does not mean we listen.

If we hear with our ears, what do we listen with?

KHD:

from KHD: var(listen). visit the project which culminated in “Howling” by Katie Dozier

conVERSEverse     {

aurèce vettier: var (mount dialogue, line 7);

// triangulated dialogue technique: each line from the poem prompts ES (Elisabeth Sweet) to create a dataset of resonant texts, quotes & questions. PM (Paul Mouginot) uses the resonant dataset as input for his dialogue with the poem, making invisible connections within aurèce vettier’s Potential Herbariums ecosystem visible. 

“you are dying too.”

PM: I think I share these words by Daumal about death.* Often, the fear of something reflects the longing for its opposite, and in this sense, the fear of death often reflects the longing for life, the desire to express oneself, to share, to explore

When I meet people of all ages who sincerely do not seem to fear death, they are often people who have achieved a kind of absolute freedom, who live not for others but for themselves, and who manage, as best they can, to situate themselves perfectly in the present.

New technologies continue to change our relationship with time, notably by speeding up production times.

These new tools, and in particular artificial intelligence, have two faces: they can further increase the context of over-supply and frenzy but through their ability to digest, they can also help us focus our narrative, our story, and improve our capacity for introspection.

Personally, this is what I’m totally passionate about.

// link to piece

}

conVERSEverse     {

aurèce vettier: var (mount dialogue, line 6);

// triangulated dialogue technique: each line from the poem prompts ES (Elisabeth Sweet) to create a dataset of resonant texts, quotes & questions. PM (Paul Mouginot) uses the resonant dataset as input for his dialogue with the poem, making invisible connections within aurèce vettier’s Potential Herbariums ecosystem visible. 

“you are not what you used to be anymore.”

PM: The quote “Far within me, where the memory of what I am is still unclouded, a little child is waking up and making an old man’s mask weep” is one of the ones that struck me most in Mount Analogue, perhaps because I sometimes feel like an old man whispering in a child’s ear in a 35-year-old man’s body.

I really enjoy embarking on adventures roadtrips, unusual encounters and explorations. I then digest all this in two ways: on the one hand, by dreaming, and on the other, by trying to represent these dreams using tailor-made artificial intelligence algorithms.

As I see it, this work of introspection has gradually transformed me over the years. It’s a bit like crossing a forest, or crossing a storm, to use Haruki Murakami’s words in Kafka on the Shore.

We’re constantly confronted with difficult environments and significant events, and each of us develops our own tools for getting through them, but deep down, everything is already present within us, and all these tools often act as enhancers, percolators.

// link to piece

}

conVERSEverse     {

aurèce vettier: var (mount dialogue, line 5);

// triangulated dialogue technique: each line from the poem prompts ES (Elisabeth Sweet) to create a dataset of resonant texts, quotes & questions. PM (Paul Mouginot) uses the resonant dataset as input for his dialogue with the poem, making invisible connections within aurèce vettier’s Potential Herbariums ecosystem visible. 

“well, be comforted; we are saying this to you:”

PM: When we think of the solar system, we often imagine the sun at the center, and the planets orbiting it, forming peaceful ellipses.

In reality, if we take the galaxy as our frame of reference, the sun itself is in motion, and due to gravity, the orbits of the planets are not ellipses, but rather spirals, rather like springs

It’s all a question of frame of reference.

I don’t see the four seasons as a cyclical phenomenon, and more generally, I don’t see nature as a fixed frame of reference. Plants and animals adapt to ever-changing temperatures and environments. However, it’s true that time constants are much longer than those of humans even if they tend to accelerate.

I don’t think it’s repetition that’s crucial in the seasonal cycle, but rather a form of permanence, an enveloping aspect – in short the fact that nature is present at all times evolving gently. This offers us many possibilities for anchoring ourselves.

Sometimes, a long walk in the forest can help us overcome an anxiety attack or come up with new ideas.

// link to piece

}

conVERSEverse     {

aurèce vettier: var (mount dialogue, line 4);

// triangulated dialogue technique: each line from the poem prompts ES (Elisabeth Sweet) to create a dataset of resonant texts, quotes & questions. PM (Paul Mouginot) uses the resonant dataset as input for his dialogue with the poem, making invisible connections within aurèce vettier’s Potential Herbariums ecosystem visible. 

“we think it is because you can’t bear to see us rotting away into nothingness.”

PM: For the moment. I don’t like the idea of rotting very much, even if by decaying we create fertile ground for future plants and lives.

Intuitively, to get in touch with our soul our inner voice, we might think we have to dissolve our emotional and psychological barriers.

Personally, I’m convinced that cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence algorithms can help us with this introspective work, by leveraging our intimate data.

These tools help us to perceive what has always been there, but has remained a little hidden in our memory.

I think this is one possible interpretation of René Daumal’s quote. We explore our unconscious, and return to reality enriched by this augmented memory

// link to piece

}

conVERSEverse     {

aurèce vettier: var (mount dialogue, line 3);

// triangulated dialogue technique: each line from the poem prompts ES (Elisabeth Sweet) to create a dataset of resonant texts, quotes & questions. PM (Paul Mouginot) uses the resonant dataset as input for his dialogue with the poem, making invisible connections within aurèce vettier’s Potential Herbariums ecosystem visible. 

“the rivers lose their way, and so does our tongue that cannot tell of our deaths”

PM: Over the years, I have found that my daily creative work helps me to understand and appease my relationship with the concept of death. With artificial intelligence, it is now possible to extend an artist’s visual or sound aesthetic beyond death. But even if it is possible, do we really have to do it? Doesn’t death create rarity, as in the case of René Daumal’s unfinished novel, or an artist’s work in general?

Doesn’t the finiteness of our lives allow each of us a period of time in which to develop our work and express ourselves?

Today, a large proportion of my decisions are guided by a form of intuition, by astonishing coincidences that could be called synchronicities, by Carl Jung’s definition. Over time, I’ve come to believe that some of these synchronicities are too subtle to be the simple fruit of absolute chance, and I find it reassuring to think that perhaps this is how the people we love communicate with us beyond death.

// link to piece

}

conVERSEverse     {

aurèce vettier: var (mount dialogue, line 2);

// triangulated dialogue technique: each line from the poem prompts ES (Elisabeth Sweet) to create a dataset of resonant texts, quotes & questions. PM (Paul Mouginot) uses the resonant dataset as input for his dialogue with the poem, making invisible connections within aurèce vettier’s Potential Herbariums ecosystem visible. 

“and the rocks and the hillsides fall apart.”

PM: The symbolism of the mountain permeates my daily life and my work. In my opinion, our existence is akin to climbing a mountain. It’s made up of forest crossings, encounters with other hikers, and animals.

As René Daumal put it: “the mountain is the link between Heaven and Earth.” Often while climbing and for a very long time, we don’t see the summit of the mountain, the ultimate goal. Yet as we, we begin to appreciate every step every smell, every animal call in the night.

The sides of the mountain are collapsing, because there are no more plants, no more roots to hold the surface together, but also because a system sees its entropy, its disorder, increase over time.

This is part of the order of things, the second law of thermodynamics. In a world in crisis. in collapse. how can we continue our ascent and find a form of joy?

I think that combining intimate data with tailor-made artificial intelligence algorithms helps me find answers in the watermark – as is the case with “le travail des rêves.” a body of work I released earlier this year. These questions are eternal, and I think we can find answers in both ancient literature – I’m thinking in particular of Thucydides and mountain literature.

Roger Frison-Roche’s “Premier de cordée” (1941) is a magnificent example of this perseverance. Despite the hardships and the deterioration of his physical condition, the narrator never stops getting up and attempting the climb again, guided by his love of the mountains and of life.

// link to piece

}