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The Swan, No. 3 (Hilma af Klint)

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Victoria Chang

Copyright © 2025 by Victoria Chang. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 9, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets. 

Victoria Chang
Photo credit: Anne Fishbein
Victoria Chang is the author of With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), as well as the titles The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022) and Dear Memory (Milkweed, 2021). The recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, she is currently the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and the director of Poetry@Tech.
About Victoria Chang
Themes
Audio
Beauty
Birds
Death
Existential
Thought
Visual Art
About this Poem

“I’ve been writing a few poems about a swan that died of avian flu. I’ve also been writing poems in conversation with many artists for several years now, of which one of those artists is Hilma af Klint. This poem is in correspondence with her series, The Swan, a group of twenty-four oil on canvases made between 1914 and 1915. This poem is specifically in conversation with No. 3, where the swans are entangled and embrace. At this point in the series, af Klint’s work is still representational. I found [that] engaging with af Klint’s work allowed me an interesting place to explore whatever it is I was feeling at the time related to love, death, transformation, and all the big philosophical topics.”
—Victoria Chang

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More by this poet

Barbie Chang Got Her Hair Done

Barbie Chang got her hair done for
     the school auction

she was afraid sick of the Circle since
     she heard of their

shopping for matching dresses so out
     of the nest she flew

into the auction thinking she could
     outmaneuver her

Victoria Chang
2017

Tree of Knowledge, No. 7B

I was supposed to be looking closely at the
paintings. How the rainbow-colored trunk looked

like a train track. How af Klint made these eight
Tree of Knowledge paintings in 1913, after

four years of not working, after 193 Paintings for
the Temple. How the rainbow track was different

Victoria Chang
2026

Dear P.

Someone will        love you     many will      love

you         many will brother you   some of these

loves will        bother you   some   will      leave you

Victoria Chang
2017
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