Parallel forms in Victoria Chang’s ‘with my back to the world’

Content warning: this post discusses suicide

Victoria Chang’s with my back to the world won the 2024 Forward Prize for Poetry. It’s a collection of poetry that is ekphrastic at its core: all the poems respond to fine art.

Chang is only looking at one painter throughout the collection. Agnes Martin was an American abstract expressionist in the second half of the twentieth century. Her paintings often depicted large bands or blocks that have no obvious referent in the real world.

Chang reads these paintings in order to express, through her persona, grief (especially in the poem ‘Today’), depression, and the persona’s general mien.

Shape and form

Like the careful forming of Martin’s paintings, Chang’s poems are also meticulously patterned through their shape on the page and the forms their adopt.

Whether the transfer of Martin’s typical grid systems on to the page in, for instance, ‘On a Clear Day, 1973’ or ‘Wheat, 1957’, or Chang’s insistent use of paragraph blocks—not unlike Martin’s six-by-six foot canvasses—in her prose poems, shape and form are the primary shared artistic space of Chang’s poems.

One thing among others caught my interest specifically: the use of parallels.

Parallels

Parallel shapes and patterns are important to Chang because of the way she understands Martin’s abstract expressionism. Chang reads Martin’s poem and identifies the stories they’re telling.

Chang’s ekphrasis, then, involves releasing that story to us, Chang’s readers.

In turn, Chang demonstrates that her own poetry—sometimes deceptively straightforward, and at all times carefully formed and structured—also tells stories.¹ This isn’t always the case, if we think about William Wordsworth’s famous idea that poetry captures and relays ‘spots of time’: instants that, without the poems, would have been lost to time.

Returning to Chang’s storytelling, we see that she mimics the abstract expressionist form, and manages to relay her own story that responds to her reading of the story in Martin’s artwork.

An example will help. In ‘Song, 1962’—inspired or responding to the painting shown here—the nested or paralleled stories are set in three stages:

1. The persona recalls counting the number of grids on Martin’s painting, ‘Song, 1962’.
2. The persona recalls previously inspecting a Modigliani painting, a portrait of Beatrice Hastings (possibly this painting), with a closeness similar to when she’s counting Martin’s grids. The persona is abruptly told off by a security guard telling her that she has got too close to the painting.
3. The persona recalls her thoughts about suicide that morning, connecting the security guard’s hands on her to an attempt to stop her from leaping from her balcony that morning.

There is more, much more, to this poem, but for now I want to stress the deftness of this formal approach to storytelling. Not only does Chang’s persona touch upon the graphic qualities of the Martin poem, but she also depicts two further stories.

The next story (number 2 in my list) responds to the persona’s behaviour in the gallery, rather than strictly the painting itself. This is a kind of meta-ekphrasis. Its hook is the closely-held gaze of the Martin and Modigliani paintings, respectively.

And the third story uses the security guard’s hand on her arm to offer another parallel story: staring out from a balcony.

Each story goes further back in time, but is firmly chained to the present.

Ekphrasis: temporal; ethical?

Chang proves throughout with my back to the world that ekphrasis is readily available for narrative. This means that, though the painting is static, the poem about the painting can still turn it into a dynamic story—can still lend the poem a temporal quality.

This is a little surprising, but not new. In 2016 David Kennedy wrote about how contemporary British poetry that turns to ekphrasis owes a debt to the Romantic poet John Keats. Keat’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn‘ is a powerful ekphrastic poem that also creates a temporal sense, even though the scene Keats’s persona depicts is a ‘Cold pastoral’.²

Aside from the temporal possibilities for ekphrastic poetry after Keats, Kennedy adds that Keats’s ekphrasis provides for contemporary poets an ethical pose. This ethics arises out of a poet’s anxiety for their own contemporary moment.

The question I am begging, then, is straightforward, though I’m not sure of the answer: Do Chang’s poems also contain an ethical content through their ekphrasis?

What part of the poem could be ethical? The desire to narrate, and successful narration of, the persona’s suicidal ideation? The decision to put these three stories in narrative parallel and therefore to draw them together, implying a similarity or compensation between them? Or even, the decision to use ekphrasis at all to tell these stories?

1. Chang’s collection also includes images facing certain poems that combine contemporary art with her poems. It is unclear who has created these images, so they could be another ekphrastic response. ↩︎
2. David Kennedy, The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British Poetry and Elsewhere (Routledge, 2016). ↩︎