Contributor’s Marginalia: Lena Moses-Schmitt responding to Victoria Chang’s “Agnes Martin, Fiesta, 1985″

I love the quiet party of Agnes Martin’s painting Fiesta, 1985, and how Victoria Chang quietly enacts it in her poem of the same name. Doesn’t the painting look like a fresh sheet of notebook paper? I like thinking of the blank page as a party—a fiesta. Of course Agnes Martin’s “Fiesta” isn’t blank, it’s delineated by horizontal bands of graphite. But if it were actually blank blank, devoid of marks altogether, we wouldn’t associate it with the kind of paper that exists to be written all over. And this is the kind of party only Agnes Martin could portray: calm, interior, orderly until you press your nose up close to the paper to see the storm of hand-drawn marks inside the rigid lines.

Six thick graphite lines, the space between them divided by twelve slim graphite lines—these thinner lines are the lines that Chang’s speaker “can’t stop looking at, because of their silence, their near disappearance.” I like the idea that one can look at silence. And it’s true that when I screw up my eyes at my screen, I can no longer see the thinner stripes. Visually, Chang’s prose poem looks like something one could write on top of the Fiesta canvas, neatly filling out its lines. I’m reminded of the workbooks where I used to practice my handwriting as a child, how I filled them with wobbly cursive balloons, softly bumping up against the pale blue ceilings.

There was that whole chunk of 2020 and 2021 where, like many others, I daydreamed for entire days about parties: candlelight in a bar, my body squeezing in between other bodies to get to the bathroom, grazing shoulders with strangers. The first party I attended again, in June 2021, I held myself rigidly, a thick graphite line. I didn’t remember how to merge myself with other people, even though I desperately wanted to. I only remembered how to hold myself apart. I had spent most of my free time in the last fifteen months writing, making the blank page into a party, because it was the closest I could get.

There’s a calm certainty in Chang’s poem that embodies the resolve of Agnes Martin’s graphite lines. Partly, it’s that the poem and the painting mirror one another aesthetically, and partly I think it’s Chang’s declarative sentences, which build on top of one another, and are striking in their rhythmic repetition: “Once something is written, it disappears. Before anything is written, it is completely possible. Once the line is drawn, the light narrows to a pinhole.” There’s also a revisionary quality to the lines, as if with each sentence Chang is getting closer to what she is trying to say, and with great conviction—we’re watching her circle and narrow the pinhole. (I often get this thrilling feeling when reading Chang’s poems that my vision is constantly sharpening and re-clarifying; her attention breaks images and ideas down, defamiliarizing them until they’re transformed into new ideas and metaphors.)

The object of art might be freedom, as Agnes Martin believes, but as Chang seems to imply, the work of attention (making art, writing, even just looking) is to be engaged in a state of absorption so complete it alters the world, causing that freedom to slip further and further away: “What is art but trying to make something resemble what it was before it was made, when it was still unknown and free?” When Chang’s speaker thinks she sees a thick rope out the window, and later, checking again, finds that it’s gone, it’s almost as if the rope vanished because she looked at it, the way that staring at the thick lines of Agnes Martin’s Fiesta cause the more thin ones to fade, the way “once something is written, it disappears.” What disappears? The thing you wanted to write about, which exists perfectly only as an untouched idea in your mind. What also disappears: emptiness, blankness: possibility.

Chang gets at this when her speaker says she spent an entire year writing, only to look up and the ocean was dry, men had signed more treaties, and the moon was sold at auction. I can imagine the speaker, looking up, experiences the illusion that she caused these things to happen simply by writing, and perhaps also by removing her attention from the outside world and directing it toward the page. But conversely it also gestures toward the supreme disconnect between the making of art, where the object is freedom, and the world at large, where that same art seemingly has no impact, and the ocean dries up no matter how much you write.

Whenever I write prose—whenever I fill up too many blank lines—one of my big fears is that I will suffocate the reader, that there will be too many words, too much extra meaning, the way I once had a house party that was so full of people I couldn’t think; I could only feel the floorboards bow. This must be why Agnes Martin named her quiet painting “Fiesta”—by not letting any of the lines touch, by gesturing toward a blankness only lines can indicate, she depicts the kind of freedom one can only feel with all possibilities still open. The promise of genius exists, if only we can reach it. Silence lets something crucial stay alive, even if it’s a light that “narrows to a pinhole.”

I’m ironically narrowing that pinhole even further by writing about Chang’s poem, explaining it to myself. I still feel as if I am struggling to articulate what I wanted to say, that the exact, most satisfying and concise way of saying it hovers beyond reach. I keep wanting to write deeper into the poem; I know I haven’t yet struck the the core what Chang is doing, or why I find it so interesting, but I also think that’s what makes her poem so good, so delightful to chew on: it has some ineffable, mysterious core, a pinhole I’ll never be able to blot out with a graphite line or an explanation.

I think of how the happiest I got in those pre-vaccination pandemic months was whenever I could attend the party between me and a poem, between me and the page. And also how frustrating that experience can be, how sometimes, the more I work on a poem, the more it dies out, the original idea wilting the harder I try to grab on. All the time and all the work that goes into something so short—just a handful of lines. Chang’s poem, and Agnes Martin’s painting, get at both: the satisfaction of this absorption, the frustration at the futility of it all. How can a painting, how can a poem, be so sad and so joyous at the same time? I don’t know. But I love to think about it.