Opulent, Judgmental, and Downright Dirty

Michael Chang’s Almanac of Useless Talents is the book I wished I read before getting an MFA, then trying to be a “serious poet.” Because as Chang shows us, nothing in po-biz really matters. That’s not to say poems can’t have significance, that they can’t make all the difference, because any avid poetry reader knows they can. However, to write poetry, to be a poet—the dailiness of a poet’s life should be subjected to all the jokes, all the Derridean deconstructions you can muster. If poetry were to be this or that, and not everything all at once, we wouldn’t have voices as scintillating as Chang’s to bask in the I-don’t-want-to-ever-look-away glory of.

With Chang’s Almanac of Useless Talents fresh on my mind, all I can think of is breaking genre boundaries, allowing yourself to write how you want, when you want. Chang’s collection, for instance, beautifully breaks three cardinal rules I had hammered into my head in poetry school: (1) Don’t rely too much on pop culture, as you want your poems to be timeless. (2) The weight of a poem should be balanced—you don’t want all the punch to come at the beginning or end. (3) Every line in a poem composed of monostichs should be equally important.

We see Rule #1 broken in literally every poem within Chang’s collection, but my favorite is “香格里拉 SHANGRI-LA,” in which Chang name-drops queer daddy of poets D.A. Powell, Percy Jackson twinkboy actor Logan Lerman, and Phil of the Future (any younger millennial who’s anything should’ve watched this) all in one poem. Chang even time-travels to the ostensible birth of “great American poetry” by fucking with Walt Whitman: “Read abt Whitman ‘self-ghosting’ & when I say I have a new kink—.” The opulence of this poetry emerges from the pop-cultural catalog from which their book was birthed, but perhaps of greater significance is their work’s simultaneously earnest and downright vulgar treatment of culture. We can have Paris Hilton epigraphs alongside invocations of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, sadboy yearning for fuckboys alongside Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality. Here’s a standout cross-cultural moment in “MARCO! POLO!”:

Lines like these demonstrate their author’s deep knowledge of the poetic “tradition” (whatever that means—and a word I’m sure the poet would question themselves) through the various shout-outs of individuals and cultural phenomena, all while sassily throwing them under the bus. Does this poem pay homage to Terrance Hayes’ golden shovel form, or is Chang shitting on it? Do they like Jericho Brown’s duplex, or is the form all sex and games to them? Maybe the multitudes of Chang’s work cannot—and should not—be untangled, much like the specter of Daddy Whitman the poet calls upon earlier. Poetry is play in Almanac of Useless Talents, and as a reader, I want to entangle myself in the orgiastic fun.

Rules #2 and #3 fall apart in poems like “Carnal Flower,” in which (spoiler alert) the beloved is revealed to be Satan. Chang successfully relegates the poem’s big reveal to the very last line through a process of syntactical tug of war, varying their line lengths in an ebb-and-flow pattern. The “u vegetable” opener builds up to the “he treats me right, makes me hot chai, knows better than to call it ‘chai tea’” of line seven, then the poem recedes to begin the process again. Because this poem is also composed of monostichs, each one-line stanza takes on an air of importance, leading readers to view the beloved as some God-level figure in relation to the speaker—one who could push and pull the speaker’s body like a wave on a coastline—and they’d be right for the wrong reasons.

We love Chang for this trickery and can’t help ourselves from slapping our thighs in laughter. Every poem is a roller-coaster ride: you don’t know what you’re going to get or where you’ll land, but you want to continue reading to find out. Chang’s poems may also be described as a Pandora’s box behind an oversized trench coat—who knows what’s underneath, but you always gleefully pull back the fabric.

Returning to “Carnal Flower,” lines like “u smell like sheep” appear alongside “frowns upon senseless state-sponsored violence,” both descriptions of Satan but of different weight. The former line introduces a playful irreverence, characteristic of Chang’s dominant tone throughout their collection—of course they’d outrightly tell a beloved they smelled. That’s Chang’s bailiwick. However, the latter line emerges from the political gravity of our contemporary social-justice consciousness. As somebody who annoyingly prides themselves on being woke, I would love to discuss such political matters with a beloved, especially when they’re as steamy as Satan. And who’s to say an ovine, anti-violence lover can’t exist?

Perhaps that’s the joy in the unevenness of “Carnal Flower”—it doesn’t have to always take itself too seriously because it knows its message, audience be damned. Satan-as-lover can smell like sheep while also hating the military-industrial complex because as readers, we’re already in love with Chang’s voice. The fun becomes earnest and vice versa in Chang’s oscillations between high- and lowbrow language, text-speak and full-length sentences—this time, what’s underneath the trench coat just happens to have horns.

Ultimately, it’s this register-breaking voice that wins me over in Almanac of Useless Talents. Narrating the collection is a speaker aware of themselves and what games they’re playing, all while weaving in currents of queer yearning and much-deserved critiques of hegemonic cultural institutions. Chang may be the queen of obvious—“subtle is not in my vocabulary,” they tell us in “AREA CODE 886”—but this clarity adds layers of meaning and purpose to the collection’s poems. Like the po-biz Chang makes fun of, poems themselves need not be obscure or too “academic.” While many of Chang’s poems are delivered through jokes or one-liners, their poetry truly comes alive in moments like the end of “帶走你的垃圾 TAKE OUT YOUR TRASH”:

I read this poem as a lament for a deceased ex-lover, perhaps, more specifically, an ex-lover who was experimenting with their sexuality with the speaker. Through the poem’s humor, we can see a speaker deeply aware of their emotions—the lasting effects the deceased has had on them. I want to engage in hours-long conversations with this speaker about dumb boys, Asian representation, and poetry-world gossip, us being judgmental, sentimental motherfuckers the whole way through. I want to hold the speaker’s hand while they laugh and cry through ex-loves, experiences of fetishization, and run-ins with racist assholes.

Maybe another way of describing the singularity of Chang’s voice as a poet is “the lit friend you never knew you needed,” one to give you real talk and get you through your MFA workshops with all the fuckboys writing about their oppression as white men. Chang’s poetry is like the friend who keeps you from dropping out of your MFA, the one who tells you, “Fuck them all.” Because in the end, Chang’s rule-breaking and unforgettable voice prove that through all po-biz’s drama, reading and writing poetry are worth it.

I usually bristle when people call marginalized poets’ work “necessary” or “urgent,” but what is necessary about Chang’s poetry is the mirror it forces upon readers: “Look at yourself, lighten your load,” it says. “Don’t take yourself too seriously.” And, dear reader, I hope you pick up a copy of Almanac of Useless Talents and join me on this journey of lightening.