Air/Light Issue 8 launches with Victoria Chang, Matthew Zapruder, Michelle Bitting, and Pearl Abraham
Dear Readers,
We’re thrilled to bring you the first week of Issue 8. We’re starting off with a bang: poetry by Michelle Bitting, a story by Pearl Abraham, and a special package from Victoria Chang, which includes new poetry, Chang’s 2023 Chowdhury Prize acceptance speech, and a conversation between her and poet Matthew Zapruder.
This is an embarrassment of literary riches, but we’re not embarrassed—we’re psyched to give it all to you, the readers!
✌️
The Editors
“Falling Blue, 1963,” “Untitled # 10, 1990,” “Grey Stone II, 1961” by Victoria Chang
“Falling Blue, 1963”
“Community Is My Poetics: the 2023 Chowdhury Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech” by Victoria Chang
Because it is what I do, I believe that writing can change the world, can make a difference. It was Audre Lorde who said, “Poetry is not only a dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” I think poetry and writing aren’t just about memory, about our private and/or public pasts, to paraphrase Annie Dillard, but about mapping out the imagination of the future.
“Attuning Yourself to Yourself: A Conversation with Victoria Chang” by Matthew Zapruder
Matthew Zapruder: I think all language—every word really—has both a public and private aspect. Language is our shared wisdom, so poets can tap into it, like some deep underground river of history and knowledge, and draw things out (images, ideas, sensory impressions, connections, observations, single words) that in the new context of the poem explode with significance. So you don’t ever need to try to make poems relate to everyone’s experience. That’s inherent in the material. But there is a personal aspect to the use of any language as well, so a poem vibrates with that intimacy, if that is not too vague a way to put it.
Does that sound right to you?
I think a place like Twitter flattens all language and turns every use of language, including questions, into a reductive statement. Does it feel that way to you? And how do you find a different use for language in your poetry? Like, how have you done that in the poems of Obit or The Trees Witness Everything, or how are you doing that right now in your newest poems, which are incredible, the ones about Agnes Martin?
Victoria Chang: I like what you say about language being our shared wisdom, yet also how there’s a personal aspect to the use of any language. I think both are true for me as a poet. I want to read poems that are alive, that ricochet, that vibrate. But I don’t want to be in a vacuum, meaning I like to read poems (and try to write poems) that don’t already know what they want to say before they’ve started.
“Dummy Ventriloquist” by Michelle Bitting
I smell leather and cowboy boots.
Red trim transmitting ire inside
a deep-seeded ear. My crying bust
of a child. You can fear it.
You can dead hare and a falcon in the niche.
I’ve got my fingers carved into pinewood
with gems around the neck—my
mannequin pedestal.
“Fluxus on Pulver” by Pearl Abraham
A sofa appeared in the cornfield on Pulvers soon after harvest. Nubby beige, a two-seater, it faced roadside and, when the afternoon sun set the field on fire, stood apart, refusing to glow. Among the rows of cut stalks that give these late autumn fields their singular color and texture, the sofa was a surrealist absurdity, but by my third or fourth drive-by, I started thinking of it as the plausible contents of a Hopper farmhouse done in somber blues and blacks. A request for something noir had arrived in my inbox and I was in search of plot, though I was living in the countryside where little happens.