Jennifer Chang and I met for this interview over video as we closed in on the darkest night of the year. It seems a disservice to describe our conversation in themes, as if one could bottle unfolding thought into neat piles: freedom; power; dreams; fragments and lyric; Asian American poetics; the indeterminate self and the living that makes it, which makes poetry.
As I read An Authentic Life, her latest collection, I found my own mind whirring with her speakers between the lines. Her careful diction threads the lineages of power between fathers and ancient philosophers; home and war; the stories we tell and the stories we live. Throughout the book, Chang’s line shifts from poem to poem, eluding and surprising the reader in thought while also accumulating new ideas toward a larger question: how to find freedom within the constraints of history and sociopolitical conditions? Is it even possible?
What Chang offers are not answers, but definitions toward dissolution. That is, to read An Authentic Life is to experience statements of suspension, a refusal to let go of the question, and to embrace what we do have that exceeds finality and enclosure: what friendship is, or a grove of trees.
Jennifer Chang is also the author of The History of Anonymity (Georgia 2008) and Some Say the Lark (Alice James Books 2017), which was awarded the William Carlos Williams Award. She teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and the University of Texas in Austin and serves as the poetry editor of New England Review. An Authentic Life is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.
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Y: In the title poem, “An Authentic Life,” your speaker rides a horse without being able to see or manage exactly where it’s going. First, horses seem to show up in your work, like in “A Horse Named Never” from Some Say the Lark. What do you think that’s about?
JC: I’m not an equestrian. But there is some truth to “An Authentic Life” in that I had a childhood friend who rode horses, and I would occasionally go with her to her lessons. Even then, I was fascinated. It was so ritualistic, so beautiful. I was amazed by the animals and by the weirdness that children sat atop them, trotting around a circle. Like they were giant toys. As an adult, I’ve ridden horses a handful of times, and each time, I’ve been intensely aware of their beastliness. They’re massive, unfathomable, seemingly wild, and yet tamed.
To me, horses represent that uncomfortable liminal space between human culture and animal nature. Horses exemplify beasts of burden, but they’re also powerful, dangerous animals. I’ve known horses to accidentally step on dogs, immediately killing them. Weirdly, they’re markers of civilization by nature of their subjugation. Horses, in that sense, recall, for me, Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry, which considers poetic craft in terms of horsemanship. Writing poems, like riding a horse well, is about mastery; both seek to tame the unruly nature of creature/language.
Y: You were able to bring in so many different valences of the horse. One of them seems to be linked to freedom in some way. What is freedom to you?
JC: The question of freedom has always preoccupied me. What is freedom? How do we attain freedom? That we are free may be a misconception; I certainly don’t feel free. I’m a daughter; a mother; a professor; a citizen; all these roles come with constraints. I also don’t feel free because we live in a country where our rights are consistently being taken away. Freedom is incredibly precarious right now.
Thinking about freedom leads me to Auden, the final lines of “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”: “In the prison of his days / Teach the free man to praise.” Auden observes here that our freedom is in our ability—our responsibility—to speak and, in particular, to praise. This is a call for poetry. He’s elegizing Yeats, but he’s also writing in September 1939, on the precipice of world war. Our days are a prison of other people’s folly—politics, mindless nationalism, ignorance. To praise, as an exertion of freedom, has the potential to liberate.
One reason why I love poetry is the immensity of freedom I sometimes feel when writing. It’s not unlike the illusion of freedom you feel when walking. For the past few years, I’ve been working on an essay about women walking in poems. The history of walking poems has been dominated by male poets who portray walking as a limitless freedom. The reality of a woman walking is that you are constantly aware of the limits to your freedom. Those limitations are everywhere in a woman’s life. That’s true for most marginalized identities. My preoccupation with freedom is as much a reflection on history as it is, at heart, a desire. What fuels poetry if not desire? I long for freedom!
Y: In “On the Soul,” your speaker says, “I’m not interested in union, / exactly, but why we think / we know what we know, / why we make law / of what we deem reason… / Whose reason?” That feels resonant with what you were talking about with freedom just now. It also reminded me of the end of “Time, Rampant and Flourishing,” where you write “It is a park or it is a forest. It is older than any heart.” You employ techniques that introduce uncertainty, such as “this or that” statements. You’re overwriting, like an open text à la Lyn Hejinian’s “Rejection of Closure,” or using negation and line to unsettle meaning. Are there any craft strategies you tend to emphasize?
JC: Line is often the most important decision I’m making when revising or even writing the poem. The line helps me figure out what I’m thinking. Line both impedes and propels a sentence. Your point about uncertainty makes a lot of sense to me. When I’m writing a poem, I’m enacting the thought process, and that thought process has a kind of rhythm, a kind of accident—a tendency towards spilling. Thoughts spill over the line, or there’s a lot of hesitation, pausing. Thinking has, for me, a stop-and-start quality.
Enjambment breaks the continuity of a thought, and that’s a cognitive rhythm. I don’t have continuous, seamless thoughts. My speakers certainly don’t. The poems are a process of working through a thought, and so very few of these poems resolve. When I first started writing them in 2017, I thought I was writing a book just about Socrates. I was living in Washington, D.C., and I was really interested in the roots of reason. I went to the University of Chicago where we had to read a lot of Plato. I was idealistic about the “Great Books” before entering, and then I got there and very little of it, of Plato, made sense to me.
The poem about Xanthippe was one that I wanted to work on for a very long time; I couldn’t figure out how to write it. I knew a dramatic monologue in the voice of Xanthippe by the Victorian poet Amy Levy. It was totally not interesting. In the meantime, I thought I’d write about Socrates. There’s a book by Emily Wilson, the translator of the Odyssey and the Iliad, about the myths surrounding Socrates, how he’s alternately the father of reason and a charlatan. This was during the pandemic and the first Trump “regime.” I was trying to figure something out about reason, law, and democracy—where it came from, and why we trust law when its sources, like the Socratic dialogues, let’s face it, can be quite dubious.
As I was going through some of my old college books, I remembered that when I first read them, I felt confused, frustrated, and, admittedly, bored. However, I noticed something weird—Socrates reminded me of my dad. He is constantly asking people questions, always the center of attention. “That’s funny,” I thought, and of course, that began showing up in the poems, until I found that I was writing about my dad and how we accept voices of authority as voices of reason. He was the law in our house. I don’t think that parallel is at all frivolous, comparing those two kinds of roots of law, both in the house and in the nation.
Writing is a very intuitive process for me. I find that every time I think I’m writing about one thing, I end up writing about another. I certainly did not want to write about my family, and yet, here we are. I think the book is about my father, but it’s also an interrogation of power, an interrogation of who possesses power, who is granted power, who accepts power. Interrogation, like uncertainty, is a way to reject those conceptions of power.
Y: In “The Innocent,” you write: “It’s summer again, and then / everything’s remnant.” I liked your specific diction. In other poems, there are words that are absolutely outside of my regular vocabulary like “embouchure,” but there are also words like “remnant.” You could have used “everything’s leftover,” but “remnant” blooms into “survivors” and “scraps of a whole.” That got me thinking about the fragment and your use of fragment: maybe this also has something to do with Asian American poetics and also your poetics. Tell me about your relationship with the fragment and how it has evolved in writing this book.
JC: I wrote an essay, an academic essay, about fragments.
Y: You did? I should have seen it.
JC: It’s not Googleable. You have to go to the MLA bibliography… How has the fragment “evolved”? In so much of my work, I refuse to say what I think because I simply don’t know.
I love the word “remnant” because, etymologically, it’s related to “remains.” I am thinking about death and things that were once alive or things that were part of something larger. It is related to my fixation on the fragment. Lyric poetry is essentially constructed out of fragments. A fragment isn’t just about the brokenness of poems, which are broken by lines and broken because they’re inherently incomplete. A fragment gestures to a larger thing, a story; a life; a history. Also, within its smallness is an intensity, a beckoning towards a whole. Does that make sense?
Y: Totally. Oak and acorn.
JC: Oak and acorn. I love that. Trying to figure out what it means to be Asian and what it means to be American has been a lifelong meditation. Should I feel bad that my Chinese is terrible? Should I teach my children Chinese? Should I be eating more Chinese food? These really stupid questions are essentially about whether I am authentically Chinese. It also goes back to those early editors. Am I Chinese enough? So much of my “self,” my knowledge, and my life experience is fragmented because I have an American education. I’m from New Jersey. I went to this college, that grad school. I met this person, that person. There is no cohesiveness to a self. I’m really interested in the sense that the inherent fragmentariness of a person is reflected in the inherent fragmentariness of art.
There’s an essay by art historian Linda Nochlin about fragments from antiquity. Part of their beauty, she claims, is that you have no access to the whole. To me, that’s so illustrative of our relationship to history, a lot of which is conjectural, informed speculation. We just don’t know. I don’t know my native culture. I know that my actual culture is an amalgam of various things. Recently, I was talking to another woman who’s Chinese American, who said, “I’m not Chinese, I’m Chinese American.” I was like, “That’s right. I’m Chinese American, too.” She said, “ I’m just going to have a different culture from my parents.” So I’m a kind of mutant acorn. The kind of oak tree I will grow into will not be like my parents’ oak tree. I believe that everything is essentially incomplete. Everything’s a shard. A remnant. And that’s okay. Those Sappho lyrics are beautiful. Those broken feet from antiquity are beautiful. The marble feet, we have no idea what the body was like, but you know the feet are sexy and it’s a thrill to conjecture a body from that.
Y: This makes me think about the question that I had for you around friendship. You have two really beautiful poems to Daniel, whose last name is in the back of the book—
JC: DeWispelare.
Y: What a great last name. It sounds like the air. How does friendship figure in your poems? Your life in general?
JC: Oh, well, I will say that when I was first putting the manuscript together, I was going to dedicate the book to my chosen family. And I didn’t because I was worried. As I always do, I worry, “Well, if this is my last book, I need to make sure…”
Y: What do you mean it’s your last book?
JC: Oh, come on. Tomorrow’s the apocalypse. You never know. I could get deported.
Y: Fair. I’d probably be on the same plane. See you in Macau.
JC: Ah, Daniel and I were in Macau once. But friendship is the antidote to family. There is a creative aspect to friendship that I really treasure in that you get to actualize your own idea of family and community. I was talking about this with a friend just a couple of nights ago because I was talking about Daniel, who passed away in January 2024. We were talking about friends we had lost. Friendship is, I think, a kind of utopia. You never think it’s going to end, so it’s also a kind of eternity. There’s such sweetness. You always feel young in a friendship because, at its best, it’s creative and playful. Even when you’re being very serious together, there’s just so much—I guess the word would be freedom—because you’re choosing each other. You’re choosing time together. And that feels really special. It’s something I write about occasionally, at least I have in this book and the last one, because I’m realizing it’s an alternative to ideas about who you’re supposed to be and the life you’re supposed to live. Friendship takes you outside of the conventional ideas you grew up with.
Y: There are no identities that you are beholden to when you are in a relationship with a friend. There is only the utopia, to use the word, that you create together.
JC: You write so beautifully about friendship in The Year of Blue Water. That’s one of the things I love most about your book, the sense of making up your own rules. It’s an unfiltered happiness, unfettered happiness, that feels rare. My friendship with Daniel was delightful because we talked about books. We could be silly together. We took long walks. We had these endless late-night text exchanges that would verge into the surreal. It was magical. “Dead Ends” I wrote because we were texting and getting more and more morbid about death until he teased me, “You should write a poem called ‘Dead Ends.’” I think we were drawn to each other because we both felt these dark things but could be silly about it. He was a DC friend. When I left DC, he had such a finality to his goodbye. I was like, “I’m going to see you again.” And we did see each other again. I started working on that letter, “Letter to Capitol Hill,” because I missed him terribly.
This is a way to answer your question about what friendship means. In that poem, I’m still walking with him and talking to him. That happens forever. It’s specifically an epistolary poem because I want to talk to him in this intimate space of the letter, which is like the space of friendship. But I never got to show it to him because, as I was writing it, he passed away. The poem then became something totally different. I completely revised because—I don’t know. Either it had to be pulled out of the book or it had to be revised.
Y: I’m really sorry for your loss. How did “Letter to Capitol Hill” have to change in particular?
JC: I wrote about it in an essay for Poetry Daily. There’s this part in the poem where we walk to a statue and think about the weirdness of it. It’s specifically a statue of Abraham Lincoln, and it commemorates Emancipation, but the enslaved person next to Lincoln in the statue is on his hands and knees, looking very abject. Lincoln’s holding his hand over his head in a slightly menacing way.
So, I’m trying to figure out why the statue is in this poem about friendship? I think we shared an awareness of power, but also of the negative consequences of misreading or misrepresenting your story. The statue presents Emancipation as Lincoln’s triumph. That is not why we celebrate Emancipation, to celebrate Lincoln. Anyway, it wasn’t working; I didn’t understand the role of power in the poem. Then he died, and the poem had a kind of fiction that I could no longer abide by.
Y: Right. What you were saying was no longer true.
JC: What I was saying was no longer true. We will not grow old together. We will not walk these paths again. You know, we were both English professors, so we talked a lot about books and culture. I mean, we talked about stupid things too, but I wonder to what extent our lives as teachers and students, and believing that literature and history could explain things to us, prevented us from talking about our feelings or more intimate topics. That’s a kind of submission to power, choosing to talk about books over feelings. So the poem ends up realizing it’s too late: “Too soon, you died” is the turn in the poem followed by a parade of quotations. I quote Emerson and Joyce. It’s totally obnoxious with citations and allusions, and that was one of the ways we talked to each other. We pay so much attention to these monuments. Literature has always been a monument to me. I question that perspective even in a relationship that was as sweet and tender as mine with Daniel. Maybe we should have been talking about other things.
Y: That’s a very profound realization.
In “Children of the World,” your speaker’s son “cannot sleep / because he wants a story.” In “Dead Ends,” you write “I dream for you a sublime blizzard.” Dreams are received images and stories that come beyond rational logic, beyond the bounds of someone else’s dreams made our reality. How do they figure for you?
JC: One of my favorite definitions of lyric poetry comes from Theodor Adorno: “Lyric poetry contains the dream of a world in which things might be different.” That marries two of my passions: the desire for a different world and a habit of critiquing reality. Lyric poetry is a critique of the real. Poems are a kind of dream. It goes back to our discussion on freedom. This is what I wish could be. I wish there was space for interrogation with my father. I wish there was a social space for vast uncertainty. We live in a country where we’re not allowed to not know things. But not knowing is a kind of intelligence. Not knowing is an invitation to know.
Dreams don’t come easily for me in my sleeping life. When I do dream, the dreams are intense and coincide with terror or stress. When I was pregnant with my first child, I had a visceral dream about losing my first cat. I was clearly making a psychic connection between losing my cat and not being able to care for my child. I woke up screaming and crying. I have one of those intense dreams maybe once a year, and it’s always cataclysmic. I prefer not to dream, actually.
I’m suspicious of too much dreaming in a poem. It feels like an easy way out of the reality of the poem, even though I’m telling you that a poem is a dream. It’s a tricky balance.
Y: How did you come to the title of the book? What was the process like for figuring out what the book was about?
JC: The title came to the poem first. It never occurred to me to title the book An Authentic Life. I’d already been writing these poems about Socrates and how to live a good life, “an authentic life.” I heard that phrase in an interview with Louise Glück. She talks about being asked by a young person how to become a great writer, and her answer is that she doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary. She says: “Your work will come out of an authentic life.” The question was about greatness, but her life was about raising her kid, hanging out with friends, not living for art alone. I think it’s true. You have to live the life you want, that feels right for you. Greatness is not the intention. There’s no craft to living. I liked how the phrase resonated with Socrates.
The book came together by accident. Someone asked me to apply for a senior poet position and I told him that’s not me, I only had two books then and was nowhere near a third. He said, “Don’t worry, just put what you have together and call it your third book, and include it with the application.” I thought that was crazy, but I did it. At the time, I thought I had nothing. I’m a very slow writer. It took me nine years to write my second book. I was only in year three or four on this one. So, I put the poems together and on a whim titled it An Authentic Life. It sounded interesting. I didn’t get the job, but suddenly I had a manuscript, close to fifty pages. I was surprised. How did this happen? A lot of the stuff I was writing at the time didn’t even feel like poetry. They felt very fragmentary and loose.
Y: But I think that’s perfect, actually, after having this conversation with you and understanding a little bit more about how you formulate the self. I’m also in the camp of, “I’ve been working every single day for five years and haven’t written anything.” What would you say to other slow writers?
JC: First of all, it’s wonderful to be slow. Embrace it. Turn off the noise of speed. I also think you have to stop comparing yourself to other people. You can only be yourself. “Comparison is the thief of joy.” People think there’s a right way to be a poet: writing, publishing, being on social media. That constrains you. You should have the freedom to decide who you want to be and how you want to live your writing career. “Career” I use tentatively. It’s a life. You should be having fun and experiencing things. The poems come out of the life. You can’t rush that.
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Yanyi is the author of Dream of the Divided Field (One World 2022) and The Year of Blue Water (Yale 2019), winner of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. He runs the Asian American Literary Archive.