Ambition—died on August 3, 2015, a
sudden death. I buried ambition in the
forest, next to distress. They used to
take walks together until ambition
pushed distress off the embankment.
Now, they put a bracelet around my
father’s ankle. The alarm rings when
he gets too close to the door. His
ambitious nature makes him walk to
the door a lot. When the alarm rings,
he gets distressed. He remembers that
he wants to find my house. He thinks
he can find my house. His fingerprints
have long vanished from my house.
Some criminals put their fingers on
electric coils of a stove to erase their
fingerprints. But it only makes them
easier to find. They found my father in
the middle of the road last month, still
like a bulbless lamp, unable to recall its
function, confused like the moon. At
the zoo, a great bald eagle sits in a
small cage because of a missing wing.
Its remaining wing is grief. Above the
eagle, a bird flying is the eagle’s
memory and its prey, the future
Hello and welcome to Words That Burn, the podcast taking a closer look at poetry. This week's poem is OBIT [Ambition] by Victoria Chang and it deals with one of life’s most difficult questions; how do we grieve something that isn’t a physical death? That is to say something that exists in the abstract?
For example here it is ambition, not the poet's own but someone else's as we’ll come to understand. This is a question, not only for this poem but indeed the entire collection that it’s taken from. Victoria Chang published OBIT in 2020 (“Victoria Chang, Poet, Writer, Editor”) and it is a collection of exactly that abbreviation, Obituaries. The book is quite unlike any collection of poems I’ve ever read, creating obituaries for a litany of things from a frontal lobe, memory, a clock, a priest and even the author herself.
Obit came about in a relatively brief amount of time, as much of Chang’s body of work does. (Molloy, 2020) It also came about at the end of an intense period of grief in the poet's life. She explained the exact circumstances of the work in an interview with the adroit journal:
When someone you care about dies, if they’re a big part of your life at least, which my mom obviously was, especially because she was so sick and my dad was sick too, everything dies. Then I went home and wrote these little obituaries where everything dies. Then I ended up spending the next two weeks in a fury, not doing much else but writing them. They just flooded out. (Seaborn, 2020)
So the collection was born out of a need to express grief in a way that made sense. When speaking about the intentional choice of the obituary form. Chang explained that traditional elegy, a poetic form traditionally used for mourning and lamentation (Gill, 132), simply couldn't encompass the width and breadth of her grief. (Seaborn, 2020). In its tendency towards honouring the memory of the deceased, the elegy couldn’t really sum up their totality. An obituary on the other hand did just that. I will quote the poet one more time here and I hope you’ll forgive so many direct quotations, but a work this personal deserves the author's own words to explain it.:
There have been a ton of amazing elegies, don’t get me wrong, but I couldn’t find a grief book in poetry that really spoke to me… I wanted to try to write the grief book, to write a book that would have helped me. Could I even describe these feelings? That became the challenge, and that was really, really hard. That’s what I set out to do. (Seaborn ,2020)
And so grief in all its forms, its abstractions, and its implications is explored by Chang. This poem OBIT Ambition I feel embodies so much of what the poet herself set out to to do.
Before we jump into our analysis of the poem, I’ve a favour to ask, if you’re enjoying the episode so far or if you’re a long time listener, please consider leaving a review for it on whichever platform you listen on. It really does get the podcast out to more people.
With that being said, let’s take a closer look. For the sake of convenience, I’ve split the poem into four sections for analysis. The first section, like so many obituaries, establishes the cause of death:
Ambition—died on August 3, 2015, a
sudden death. I buried ambition in the
forest, next to distress. They used to
take walks together until ambition
pushed distress off the embankment.
The word ambition is treated like a name and thus like a person. The death date chosen by Chang is no arbitrary choice. August 3rd 2015 is the date her mother passed away. (Seaborn, 2020) It coincides with the death of her ambition, this at first might seem a bizarre correlation; why would her own ambition leave with her mother’s passing? It is because her mother instilled ambition and a strong work ethic in Chang herself. Once again, she speaks about this in her interview with the adroit journal:
…my mission in life, my mother gave to me, was always to be really successful at whatever I did. Work harder than everyone else, do the best you can, and just go-go-go, mostly because itls a good thing to be ambitious, (Seaborn, 2020)
And so now in the wake of her mothers death, the mission as it were has changed. Chang continues the first section with the details of how ambition met its end. As it turns out, we don’t get to know that but we do get to understand that the poet herself has buried it. Next to distress, is a possible hint that in order to be successful, Chang felt she had to surpass any sense of upset or emotion: to be ruthless as it were. This theory is lent further credence when we discover that it is ambition who made destress meet its end, even though they had once been friends of a sort. I feel it’s very important to note that both ambition and distress have been anthropomorphised to some degree here and recognising that helps us to make sense of the surreal interplay of emotion. In that way, we can see that Chang is succeeding in her goal of communicating grief.
From there the poem changes direction sharply, shifting from the speakers innerworld to the a focus on other people in their life, in this case, their father:
Now, they put a bracelet around my
father’s ankle. The alarm rings when
he gets too close to the door. His
ambitious nature makes him walk to
the door a lot. When the alarm rings,
he gets distressed. He remembers that
he wants to find my house. He thinks
he can find my house. His fingerprints
have long vanished from my house.
Here, another’s living ambition is introduced. What’s more, a living form of distress is also present. The imagery of medical equipment and confinement are shown to us. The bracelet around the ankle of their father immediately conjures one of two images for the reader. One: the morbid image of the morgue, or two the imprisonment of an ankle monitor. The next line makes it clear which one it is: The alarm rings when he gets too close to the door.
We are not certain just yet of why he is confined. We do know that his ambition is alive and kicking however as he walks to the door a lot, each time hopeful that this time he will succeed. Unfortunately, upon each failure he is left more and more distressed.
From here our speaker gives us some clues as to what is really going on. He remembers he wants to find my house. He thinks he can find my house. The drive and hubris of ambition are on display in equal force. We are then met with a sentence that shows us that this ambition too is possibly dead:
His fingerprints
have long vanished from my house.
The speaker's father has not succeeded in his ambitions in some time.
This entire section of the poem is intensely autobiographical for Chang. Six years prior to the death of her mother, her father suffered a stroke and soon lapsed into dementia. (Javadizadeh, 2021) With this key piece of information the section makes complete sense. There is something incredibly tragic in Chang’s depiction of futile ambition, a constant drive that can never be acted upon by her father.
That sense of tragedy is only compounded by the next section, where the image of fingerprints is expanded upon to lead us onward:
Some criminals put their fingers on
electric coils of a stove to erase their
fingerprints. But it only makes them
easier to find. They found my father in
the middle of the road last month, still
like a bulbless lamp, unable to recall its
function, confused like the moon.
The inclusion of criminals here is a masterstroke from Chang. Firstly, it naturally evolves the imagery of imprisonment in the previous section. Secondly, it highlights just how unfair this disease is, not only on her father, but on herself as well. She has essentially been robbed of her father, he is present but not the man she once knew. He is alive but unknowing of her. His presence in her life, much like his finger prints in her home, and those of the robbers, has been all but erased. Upon reading or hearing that line, fingers on electric coals of a stove, the audience immediately imagines the immense pain that must cause and so get some sense of what the poet herself must be going through because of her erasure.
Following from that we see the fallout of what happens if her fathers ambition does succeed:
They found my father in
the middle of the road last month, still
like a bulbless lamp, unable to recall its
function
Once again, Chang effortlessly ties her imagery together, the electricity of the stove finds new purchase in the lamp her father resembles but this time he is bulbless that vital spark is missing. This obsolete imagery drives home how lost he truly is . We understand now just how many ways ambition has died in this poem.
The final simile of this section, confused like the moon is a little harder to decipher. My best guess is that it is a literary reference to another famous poet and given that Chang is very fond of allusions to other writers and poets (Wong and Chang, 2022), I feel confident in stating that it’s a reference to T.S. Eliot's Rhapsody On A Windy Night (Eliot, 2020).
It is one of Elliot's earlier poems and fittingly centres around a narrator who finds themselves on a surreal, almost nightmarish, journey in the dead of night. The parallels between this and the image Chang has constructed are clear. Chang is referencing this part in particular:
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
The poem is one of memory, erosion and loneliness and its hard to imagine a more suited source to draw inspiration from for Chang here.
In the final section, there is one more shift in imagery and Chang combines multiple images and themes from her poem into closing lines:
At
the zoo, a great bald eagle sits in a
small cage because of a missing wing.
Its remaining wing is grief. Above the
eagle, a bird flying is the eagle’s
memory and its prey, the future
It’s hard to imagine that Chang isn’t creating a metaphor for her father here. A once powerful man, at least in her eyes, who has been laid low by affliction.
Chang wrote a sort of follow up project to OBITS called Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. Containing, as you may have guessed, a series of letters to those the poet has lost. It is incredibly well written, poignant and frequently devastating.
In one letter to her father, she refers to his brain as a gilded frame (Chang, 2021). I think the grain of that image sits in the small cage mentioned here. The missing wing is an elegant stand-in for the missing mind of her father, while the other wing of grief is the loss of his wife, perhaps.
The bird flying above the eagle, is the memory just out of reach, something that all the ambition in the world will not allow it to catch once again. The further reference to it as prey, shows how dementia can twist the memories of the sufferer, warping them. Finally that bird is the future for her father, one he will never truly reach.
There is a tremendous weight to OBIT [Ambition]. Victoria Chang has succeeded in giving voice and form to her grief, at least to my mind. She perfectly encompasses the thousand little ways we can mourn and grieve someone or something in this poem alone. It is far from unique within the collection. Chang manages to find so many ways of expressing the loss of a thousand different things. Each time she does so it will sit you after you’ve read it.
In a world filled with beautiful elegy and poems honoring the dead, I feel that Victoria Chang is one of the first to actually grasp the myriad ways our grief can cut us. Not only for those who have left us but for those who remain as well.
What did you think of the poem? As always this is my interpretation and I’d love to hear yours. If you’d like to get in touch with me there are a few ways to do so.
You can reach me directly by email: wordsthatburnpodcast@gmail.com
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Words That Burn is written and produced by me, Benjamin Collopy.
Thank you once again for taking the time to listen to the podcast once again.
Works Cited
Chang, Victoria. Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. Milkweed Editions, 2021.
Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems: 1909-1962. Faber & Faber, 2020.
Gill, Patrick. “The Elegy.” An Introduction to Poetic Forms, Taylor & Francis Group, 2022, pp. 132-142.
Javadizadeh, Kamran. “Victoria Chang's Correspondence with Grief.” The New Yorker, 8 November 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/15/victoria-changs-correspondence-with-grief-dear-memory. Accessed 5 September 2023.
Molloy, Margaret. “Interview with Victoria Chang — Napkin Poetry Review.” Napkin Poetry Review, https://www.napkinpoetryreview.org/interview-with-victoria-chang. Accessed 5 September 2023.
Seaborn, Heidi. “Issue Thirty-One: A Conversation with Victoria Chang.” The Adroit Journal, 2020, https://theadroitjournal.org/issue-thirty-one/victoria-chang-interview/. Accessed 5 September 2023.
“Victoria Chang, Poet, Writer, Editor.” Victoria Chang – Poet, Writer, and Editor, https://victoriachangpoet.com/. Accessed 5 September 2023.
Wong, Jane, and Victoria Chang. “Victoria Chang.” BOMB Magazine, 13 July 2022, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/victoria-chang/. Accessed 6 September 2023.