Review: The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang

All the Moods and Forms of Motion

On the subway in the summer, sweat runs down your back. You try not to make eye contact with anyone. You dread being touched by strangers. At the same time, you're curious. You’re a writer, you’re young, you’re quite lonely. Imagine all the lives that swirl in that subway. People newly in love, people grieving the longest loves they’ve ever known. People freshly moved, people adored, people alone. People who look around the subway car, looking to mine material for a new poem or novel. People offering up seats and taking up conversation, people locked within themselves. People in motion, hearts headed towards an infinite number of destinations, clutching handbags, children, books, phones, suitcases, parents. In the midst of all this, a single poem on the wall of a subway car.

Passage

Every leaf that falls
never stops falling. I once
thought that leaves were leaves.
Now I think they are feeling,
in search of a place—
someone’s hair, a park bench, a
finger. Isn’t that
like us, going from place to
place, looking to be alive?

I didn’t read Victoria Chang’s poetry collection The Trees Witness Everything until months later. In that moment, it was just one poem out of the whole, read too quickly for pen-and-paper analysis. Nonetheless, I felt impressions of beauty and longing, a sense of rightness. What can a poem on the subway do for you? Well, here’s what it did for me. It felt like a stranger was taking my hand. Our gazes brushed, sentences almost shimmering in the air. I found myself half in love. I found a past version of my father, racing me from streetlight to streetlight, calling me kiddo. I heard my mother singing. I saw myself crying on a plane, stumbling in love. I felt everything I had ever touched, every man I had ever loved. It left me in a labyrinth, pulling at the thread of the original longing. Rice fields of Sagae to the humid streets of Tokyo, my mother’s hair cut to shoulders for swiftness. She was always trying to leave for somewhere else. I imagined her in motion — working at a bank, translating on the side, wearing fur coats, dating engineers, traveling to every country she could ever hope to love.

Then, there are the things that came later, the assonance of leaves and feeling, sonically confirming their connection, the full-stop after leaves and the shorter comma pause after feeling, suggesting more fluid possibilities of movement. Then, the manipulation of time and space for a leaf, or a feeling, that falls forever. Then, the dawning of form, a kind of waka, specifically a choka, alternating between five syllables and seven syllables, ending on two lines of seven syllables, the perfect spot for a reaching question.

I inherited form from my mother. She taught me haiku but told me longer poems like tanka (5-7-5-7-7) were more elegant. The Trees Witness Everything concerns itself with questions and answers, mothers, inherited language, rain, light, time, dreams, violence, publication, love, hope, desire, grief, fire. Within all these elements, what does Chang do with form? Imagine that in her hands, form is a capped bottle on the windowsill and the poem is the days-old water inside it, filling with pressure and heat. This is the heat of living. To think more specifically about Chang’s attitudes towards form, I turn to her poem “The Shipwreck”:

I sit at my desk.
Desire is an anchor —
I lift it and words come up.

We begin with an everyday situation. This ‘I’ could be an office worker, a teacher, a writer. There is a stagnancy in that first line, a sense of entrapment because of its end-stopped and mono-syllabic nature. But then we turn to a beautifully crafted metaphor (“Desire is an anchor”) which breaks the form and starts a creative rush. With only six syllables, the line leaves the last syllable to the pause of the em dash, rife with possibility. A moment to reflect, to wander, to gather strength and inspiration to finish the world of the anchor metaphor. The metaphor works even in the realm of syllables, with both desire and anchor having two syllables.

The last line remains mono-syllabic and its beginning (“I lift”) matches the first line in assonance and structure. But as the speaker lifts Desire, words come bubbling up: words for a manuscript or words for a lover. The still, seated body floods with energy and heat, having turned Desire into an anchor, something which can be lifted when needed. Desire keeps the ‘I’ stuck at the desk for this eventual lift into writing and expression. Chang’s understanding of desire as a thing of constraint which can create the conditions for self-driven freedom and creativity is one way for us to understand her attitude towards form.

Another form at play within Chang’s collection is the form of commissioned poetry. In her notes at the end of The Trees Witness Everything, she explains that four poems (including “Passage”) as well as the “Love Letters” haiku sequence, were commissioned works for public view. The isolated, condensed poem has its own power. It lends itself to memory. It lends itself to the motion inherent in our daily lives. It can activate something in you through a glance and also reward a longer degree of attention, like a cat learning to trust.

We can post poems on trees and buildings. Poems can be a part of our infrastructure. They are already on our subways. They are already in our hands, poems on social media, haikus on tea bottles, and Donne poems on the wrappers of dark chocolate. Jasmine tea brings the taste of twilight. Chocolate melting on your tongue brings seduction and God. They render even these small everyday items slightly unfamiliar.

One close friend even has the last lines of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” tattooed on her body: “there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.” And so, the ekphrastic poem returns to a body that wakes and roams each day. Things are always in motion, and poetry moves with us. A roaming leaf, a feeling, we are seen in every place we wander. It seems Chang’s poems agree, whether it is the people next to us on the subway or the trees which greet us as we return aboveground.