there is no first draft of a life
An evening with Victoria Chang & Bianca Stone

Reading
Talk
Poesiefestival Berlin 2026
Kuppelhalle, silent green
← / →

Victoria Chang © Jay L. Clendenin

Bianca Stone © Daniel Schechner

We wish for everyone to actually be present in the space with the artists and each other. So in order to help everyone fully focus on the poetry, we kindly ask you to switch off your mobile phone completely during the event. Photography, video recording, and audio recording are not permitted. This pertains to evening events on May 24, June 2 and 3 and during evening events from June 9 to 12, 2026. Thank you for your support.

Two outstanding poets from the United States, Bianca Stone (born 1983 in Vermont), Poet Laureate of Vermont, and Victoria Chang (born 1970 in Detroit), who serves as the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech, will read from their most recent collections and speak with Ryan Ruby about their writing.

In her poetry collection With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2024), awarded the Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection, Victoria Chang – starting from a commissioned project for the Museum of Modern Art in New York – enters into dialogue with the abstract, geometric paintings of the artist Agnes Martin (1912–2004). The poems are largely directly related to individual works by Martin and bear their titles; however, they are less ekphrastic descriptions than translations into poetic means, at times mirroring the grid structures or visual markings of the paintings. Chang tests and interrogates the ordering principles of the paintings – their grids, fields of color, and lines – in which she recognizes her own depression, “a group of parallel lines that want to touch, but never can,” as well as a sense of fragmentation, a repetition of gestures that can never reveal the larger whole: “No one tells you that you’ll never see your own painting because you’ll be dead.”

“I want to get it not right, but near.” – In her two most recent collections, The Near and Distant World (Tin House 2026) and What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House 2022), Bianca Stone repeatedly returns to the question of how meaning can be asserted when every attempt to grasp something fully – whether theoretically or linguistically – is not only doomed to fail but may even increase the distance between us and things: “My greatest fear: / to be condemned to theory. / Without song, without my trash, / my weird ottava rima, my pointless point.” In contrast, she proposes a poetics of approximation, “infinite in its never-wholeness,” which offers consolation precisely because it does not seek to subsume everything into itself. Within just a few lines, Stone shifts registers in a dizzying and highly entertaining way. Countless mythological, philosophical, and religious references can be found – including appearances by Jesus and Rilke – as well as a conversation with an internet technician about the nature of poetry: “something with lungs / and no face, the immortal freak / of language you haunt and haunt.”

The poems were translated specifically for Poesiefestival Berlin.

Moderation Ryan Ruby

The event will be held in English without interpretation.