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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Let the Record Hide

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, Let the Record Hide. In 2018, the poet Paisley Rekdal was commissioned to write a poem. It was meant to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad, which means Paisley had roughly a year to write it. So she started reading. Then she read some more and started taking trips along the line. She even talked to the few people she could find whose ancestors dug and blasted passageways through every imaginable landscape to put down those tracks. So maybe unsurprisingly, the research portion of the project got a little out of hand. The anniversary year came and went, as did the next year, and the year after that. But now, five years later, Paisley Rekdal is finally done. She wrote a book titled West. And the book is not so much about the railroad as about the people who built it, most of whom were Chinese-born migrants. And I should note that Paisley Rekdal is of Chinese heritage too, although her family had nothing to do with the railroad. The backbone of the book is a poem by an unknown hand. It was scratched into the wall of the Angel Island detention center, right off the coast of San Francisco, where, after the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882, Chinese immigrants were “processed,” as they say, but really, languished, often for months, in some cases, even up to two years. The poem that was scratched into the wall goes like this:

(RECORDING PLAYS, alternating Cantonese speaker and Rekdal reading translated lines in English)

[Cantonese]

Sorrowful news indeed has passed to me.

[Cantonese]

I mourn you.

[Cantonese]

On what day will your wrapped body return?

[Cantonese]

Unable to shut your eyes, to whom can you tell your story?

[Cantonese]

Had you known, you never would have made this journey.

[Cantonese]

A thousand ages now hold the sorrow of a thousand regrets.

[Cantonese]

Missing home, you face in vain home gazing terrace.

[Cantonese]

Your ambitions unfulfilled, buried under earth.

[Cantonese]

Yet I know death can’t turn your great heart to ashes.

Helena de Groot: In her book West, Paisley Rekdal uses the words in this poem to title each of her own poems, just as a way to organize the material she amassed over her years of historical research. So before we talked about her new collection, I wanted to know how Paisley got so interested in history.

Helena de Groot: You know, in almost every book that you’ve written, it’s clear that history is something you’re drawn to, and you have a degree in history, in medieval studies.

Paisley Rekdal: Yes.

Helena de Groot: So I was just wondering, like, how did you get onto that path and what is the furthest back you can go where like, little Paisley was drawn to that?

Paisley Rekdal: (LAUGHS) Well, I think the earliest time I can think about where I was thinking about history—and this sounds incredibly geeky, but when I was a child, I was obsessed with maps. But maps of the classical world, because I was raised effectively by wolves, which is that I was left to myself for hours. But they gave me all these incredible recordings of Greek and Roman myths and also the Norse myths and things like that. And they were on, they were on these albums, so I played them over and over, and I just became really fascinated with these worlds, and I just wanted to know about the worlds themselves. And so, I ended up getting these old atlases my dad and mom would give me for Christmas, and I would just sort of copy out the outlines of these countries and sort of draw in like all of the things that I thought were happening. And I mean, I think those are some of my earliest memories of being a child is coming up with these elaborate sort of maps that were sort of fake, but also real histories at the same time, because they were based on sort of geographic places. And then from that, I just kind of kept going with those kinds of questions about other countries, other histories, and other stories, which I was always very interested in. But when it comes to some of the work that I’m doing now, like thinking about the 19th century in particular in America, that’s something that’s also kind of interested me a lot. I think I’ve spent my life in the West, whether it’s the Pacific Northwest or living in Wyoming and Utah now for about, oh, close to 26 years. So I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a Westerner, and to be in the West is a place where your history, your fabricated history, is always like in front of you. I think we have such a fascination with the American West, the ideas of borders and frontiers, the ideas of the unknown places on the map. And to a large extent, politically, culturally, imaginatively, I think the West still lives in those places. And so I think it’s really something that still calls to me. I was like, what is the real history of the place in which I live? Because I’m always presented, whether it’s Yellowstone or it’s the newest cowboy movie coming out, I’m always presented with a fake or an incorrect version of the history in where, the place I’m living.

Helena de Groot: It’s so interesting that you describe being as a kid drawn to these maps and making up stories about them, and that now you’re kind of moving in the opposite direction where it’s like, Look, I’m being fed all these stories, let me actually figure out what the real history is.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that we first come to any interest in anything via the imagination, our sort of fantasy of the thing. And there is something really powerful about narrative. There’s something so powerful about poetry that way too, because we’re telling ourselves these kinds of ancient stories that are both true and false. And, you know, there’s something if you dig down into like the Greek myths, say, it’s not that those things are completely fake. There’s some human truth that they’re actually getting to, whether it’s jealousy or the desire for change, the fear of change. There’s just so much that that these stories do tell us. So we’re always kind of writing into the fake and the real simultaneously. But the more you care about a place, the more you start thinking it’s important to know where you are in time, who you are. Then you have to care about real histories.

Helena de Groot: I think one of the things that we’re seeing now, especially as we’re going through this new wave of censorship of history books and history classes and critical race theory being off limits, is that students often now have to go to school and see like a disconnect between what they know from their family history and what they learn in school is true, right? And so I wonder if there was a similar thing for you. Like, was there ever a moment that you remember that your family history or the things that you knew, that they clashed, what you learned in school?

Paisley Rekdal: Yes, it’s a great question, because that also presupposes the idea that the family history is going to be more accurate. And one of the things that really struck me when I was writing The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, which is my first collection of essays, was that, in fact, some of the st—I will call them stories—in some of the histories, the stories that I grew up

with in my own family were actually fake. There’s a story that I was told by my grandmother about how my grandfather, my Chinese grandfather, got the family laundromat. And the story was that a Japanese American neighbor who owned a laundromat came to him right before the Japanese internment and said, “I know that they’re going to take everything. I’ll sell you the laundromat for a dollar if you just take care of it. When I come back and, you know, give it back to me for, you know, you keep all the profits in the meantime, but just hold it for me.” And so this was a story that we kept for forever, because my grandfather held that laundromat for forever. And then supposedly the Japanese businessman came back and he sold it back to him for a dollar, but kept all the profits. But, you know, it turns out that none of that was true. It was a story that I think we loved to tell in our family because it told a particular story about Asian

Americanness at a time when Asian Americanness was the thing that was being debated. Because the reality is that, you know, my grandparents saw themselves as Chinese first, American second, and they didn’t have any concept of being Asian American. And so that story, that story was really invented, I think, by my mother and my uncles out of, you know, not in any malicious sense, but in I think a sense of their own longing for a kind of identity, longing for an understanding of where they fit in America. And though, you know, my parents were growing up at a time when Asian American was just starting to come into a kind of vogue, I think that they were creating that for themselves, my mother and her brothers. They were creating this idea of political identification, and it may be ahistorical, it may be fantastical, but it doesn’t actually to me, matter in some respects, because I understood that that was another kind of truth that was being forged, which is knowing that we’ve been sheared off from our particular cultural backgrounds with our particular language or particular histories. How is it that we are either forced to or encouraged to and desire to see ourselves as similar to others?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Paisley Rekdal: So I mean, that’s not a story you’re ever going to find in one of these textbooks. And it’s, you know, it’s incorrect in all these ways, but I think it’s a slightly better lie than the ones that I think that we want to tell ourselves now, in which there’s absolutely no conflict, there’s absolutely no reason or no problems to demarcate differences and things like that. I mean, the reality is my grandmother was rabidly anti-Japanese. You know, Popo is not somebody who would have wanted to see sort of cross-cultural differences. And that’s a difference between her and her children. And that’s certainly the difference between my mother and my uncles and me. We have very different ideas down through history about what it means to be Chinese American, what it means to be Asian American.

Helena de Groot: And so just to make sure that I get the story exactly right, you’re saying that, like, probably this is apocryphal, or this didn’t happen because there was no solidarity per se between Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans, is that what you’re saying?

Paisley Rekdal: There was no Japanese businessman. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Oh, interesting.

Paisley Rekdal: That’s what I was discovering, yeah. It’s a good clarification to make because, you know, I think, I think at the end, my grandfather had like a business partner, but it wasn’t because of Japanese internment. It wasn’t any part of that. So there was no actual incarceration narrative that was attached to the story. So it was fascinating, though, that my, that the family sort of came up with this. And when I asked, you know, how this story kind of evolved, no one can identify where it came from. And in fact, when I published the essay, it came out in The New York Times magazine, my mother was furious because she thought I was calling her a liar in the national press. And I didn’t want to say that. I wanted to say that this is a fantasy that I think all of us wanted to buy into. I mean, why would we all sort of swallow this story, you know, hook, line and sinker? Because we’re all invested in it. We all want that story. You know, I say it’s a sort of Disneyfied version of Asian American history, too. And so it also has its sort of nostalgias, it also has its sort of problematic kind of fantasies there. But, you know, it is contextually grounded for me in other respects.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah, right. Like it’s revealing in other ways.

Paisley Rekdal: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: But it is interesting, right, the ways in which we, we want to, especially after the facts, we want to be a part of the great sweep of history. You know, like, sweep? Swoop?

Paisley Rekdal: Sweep, I’ll say the great sweep of history. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Okay. It’s kind of the way that people want to have something to do, like, I don’t know, I don’t want to equate that, right, because, like, this is your story and I don’t want to equate it with what some other people do, but, you know, the way that some people want to associate themselves with like being victims of the Holocaust.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Though maybe they got out before, you know what I mean? Like way before, like 19th century, you know?

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah, there is something to do with trauma narratives and history. I think people—one of the things that I think about with history all the time is I can think of myself simultaneously as a victor of history and a victim of history, though I don’t even like those terms. Like, I think they’re too simplistic. But let’s just say I’m of a beneficiary of certain forms of history as well as I could see my family and myself as not suffering, but certainly having to endure some of the difficulties of history, too. And I think it’s just, I think a lot of people ask themselves these kinds of questions, and especially in the last, you know, half decade, I think a lot of people have asked themselves, like, “What side of history am I standing on? Am I letting something slide?” I can’t help but sometimes look at the news and think, “Am I one of those people”—and going back to the Holocaust thing—“one of those people like in, you know, 1938, 1939 Germany, who’s not seeing what’s right in front of me?” You know, am I the dumb person who’s not getting out? Or am I the person who’s, you know, not fighting hard enough? Am I the person who’s—and it’s so much better to imagine yourself as being able to see so clear eyed all the things around you, to see that you would not be on the wrong side of history. But I kind of know that I’ve been on the wrong side of history. I know that my own ideas about race have changed quite dramatically over the course of my life, and I think my ideas of gender and, you know, identity have changed quite dramatically over the course of my life. So what does that make me? I mean, like I think all of us are in that situation. I think that’s why so many people are so terrified of being called a racist right now. They think of it as like a pure moral stain that’s, that encompasses their whole being versus, you know, the reality is most of us have been a person or been in a sort of political moment we now no longer hold, we now no longer agree with. And there’s something about wanting to find a kind of pure narrative around history. Like, “I know I’m not, I’m not taking advantage. I know I’m not on the wrong side of history.” It’s much easier to imagine yourself as sort of a victim than it is to imagine yourself as somebody who’s participated in it. But the reality is, I think we’re all doing a little bit of both.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Paisley Rekdal: Dark. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: It’s very dark! (LAUGHING) I was gonna say like, I need to take a beat. You’re so right and I think about this all the time. There was this one interview once that I heard with Ta-Nehisi Coates, and he said something like, it’s very easy to think of yourself as a good person when the boot is on your neck.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: But who would I be if the boot was mine? Would I still be such a good—would I still be able to see myself, you know?

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: What does it even mean to be a good person, right? Like, if, if you have power, that’s when it’s really kind of tested, right? Like, if you don’t have power, like, you know, you can only do as much, you know?

Paisley Rekdal: Exactly. And as an American, I think that we have a very blinkered way of seeing victim/victimizer because, you know, one could sort of say, in America, I’m the one with the boot on my neck, but globally, I’m the one with the boot on everyone else’s neck. You know, if you are an American of a certain class, you know, you have the boot on the neck of many, many millions of people. You may not see that, but climate change, I think we can all agree, is real. And the fact is that some of us affect climate more than others. And I, you know, I think about this and going back to West for a moment, that’s one of the reasons why I have a letter written by a Chinese migrant named Norman Asing in there. And he’s writing, you know, a pretty, a pretty delicately scathing letter to Governor Bigler, who is the governor, the Democratic governor of California at the time, who wanted the Chinese out. And the letter begins in a way that I think all of us right now would want to agree with and identify with and say, you know, he’s right. You know, Asing is right. This is, these policies are racist. These, you know, this anti-Chinese sentiment is terrible. But I included something in the letter that I think oftentimes gets written out whenever Asing’s letter is quoted in Asian American kind of literary studies classes. Asing makes another point, which is, we’re not like Black people. We have culture. You know, we are assimilable. We are more like white people than Black people. And he makes that case. He triangulates race in those ways. And I wanted that there in order to sort of say like, your sympathies are going to switch somewhere in the middle of this letter. You’re going to go from pro-Chinese to like, wait, this guy is making a terribly racist argument in favor of, you know, turning a racial blind eye to Chinese migrants. And I think that’s important. And it goes back to what you were just saying, which is, you know, whose boot is on whose neck. And I think that that boot is constantly getting switched out.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I was wondering if we can get to that poem. I think it’s called “Learn”, right?

Paisley Rekdal: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: So yeah, that’s the letter by this restaurateur, right?

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah, I can read it if you’d like.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And I don’t know what you want to say before you read. Is there anything else that you want to say about, like, how you found the letter or, you know, who this person is before you read it?

Paisley Rekdal: There’s not much known about Norman Asing. He was a restaurateur, and he sort of pops up in the record with this very famous letter. And this is from 1832—1852, excuse me. So it’s earlier than exclusion would start in 1882. But there were exclusionary policies constantly being enacted. This was just a state policy, not a federal one.

Helena de Groot: Right, like, like crazy taxes and stuff.

Paisley Rekdal: Crazy taxes. They were miners, you know, foreign miners taxes. So the Chinese had to pay $3 extra for all sorts of things. There were lots of things that they couldn’t do, like they couldn’t walk on certain parts of the street. They couldn’t marry, you know, people. They were not allowed to bring women in because they were afraid that they would, quote-unquote, “breed.” So there are lots of different large and small kinds of acts, federal and state acts that made it impossible for Chinese to sort of successfully migrate to the country. And this letter basically is one of the responses. So Norman Asing writes this to Daly Alta California in May of 1852, and it’s titled “To his Excellency Gov. Bigler.”

(READS POEM)

Learn

Sir: I am a Chinamen, republican, lover

of these United

States. I have learned

of your recent

arguments to exclude

Chinese workers from entering

this State so as,

you say, to enhance

its wealth, a thought which forgets

population, too,

is wealth: that once you looked

for immigration

and it came, and made you great

throughout the nations

of the earth. I am sure

you will recognize your own

familial origins

in this story as

your Excellency, like all white men,

would never boast

of having a red man

for a father. I am sure

the Constitution does not admit

asylum only

to the pale face, even as it holds

the Negro here

in forced servitude.

As far as the aristocracy

of skin is concerned, Sir,

ours compares

with the European

races, though the framers

of your declaration, I believe,

never argued for an aristocracy

of skin. Sir, we are as allied

to the African and red man

as you are.

We must remind you

that when your nation

was a wilderness,

we exercised the arts

of commerce, science: we grew

a civilization while your own one

languished, helpless,

in the dark.

We will not be reproved now

for pursuing any work here

you consider degrading

to a man’s character, or accept

your condemnation except

you consider labor

degrading for itself.

We, like you,

make our own way

into the future.

We have learned to trust

in law’s distinctions even

as we daily see how law

is bent here to fit

a changing prejudice:

one day soon, such prejudice

may benefit us.

I hope you take this message, Sir,

in all the spirit

of candor. I have the honor to be,

Norman Asing,

Your Excellency’s

obedient servant—

Paisley Rekdal: So I did change, I did change a couple of things. Most of this is exactly what he said. But there are implications for some of the things that he adds in there that I sort of strengthen. So when I suggest that, you know, “one day soon, such prejudice / may benefit us,” that’s something that I insert because I think that’s one of the things that he’s, he’s trying to play along with the laws. He’s trying to use the same logic that Bigler and racists are using, which is, we can’t have Chinese in here because they have no culture, and they can’t be assimilated, and they’re not human. So he’s using some of their same language. But there’s something else that really struck me as I was researching a lot of the history is that many Chinese migrants use the law in order to resist. They saw the courts as something that could help themselves. And I’m fascinated by that, you know, again, as a third or fourth generation, you know, person of Asian descent, which is that there’s been many ways in which I think laws have been designed, again, to sort of drive a wedge between particular communities of color. You know, like we want to make sure that some people benefit and some people don’t. And I think affirmative action is a perfect example of that debate and how these things come across. Which is sort of saying like, you know, “We should have meritocracy and, you know, Asian people, shouldn’t you care about meritocracy because of this?” And, you know, a lot of Asian Americans have fallen for that ruse. So I think that there’s something about that line I wanted in there to sort of say, laws can benefit us, but these laws, if they come out of, you know, these very racist beliefs and institutions, will also work to separate us and continue to hurt us.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, because I just want to make sure that I understand this correctly. You know, in the letter, Norman writes, “Sir, we are as allied / to the African and red men // as you are.”

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Is—what is he saying? Is he saying we are as racist towards them as you are or what?

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah. And it’s a good, it’s a good question. I mean, I think what he’s trying to imply consistently is sort of like, you know, “If you don’t see yourself as like them, we don’t see ourselves as like them either. We see ourselves as like you.” You know, he’s trying to have his cake and eat it, too. He’s sort of saying, you know, “Your Constitution never argued for an aristocracy of skin.” And that’s a direct quote. However, he goes on to sort of say, that said, (LAUGHS) we are still more like you. So he still wants to make that very, you know, that race-based distinction.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: I wanted to ask you about your research, because, you know, this book is about stuff that happened long time ago, you know, 19th century. And so, most of what you would use for research comes out of, you know, books and sort of that kind of historical record. But you also went out and talked to people, you know, descendants of these Chinese, you know, workers, freight hoppers, people today who have like a kind of, you know, different relationship with the train and with exclusion.

Paisley Rekdal: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And so I’m wondering, you know, like, what was your approach with this project? And like, what specifically are you looking for? Like, what is a good day, a good research day, where you’re like, “Oh, man, now I found something,” you know?

Paisley Rekdal: (LAUGHS) Yeah. I mean, I just wanted to go in with as open a mind as possible, which was easy for me to do because I, I knew nothing. I knew nothing about this history. And I found myself just asking one question continuously, which is, “Who else used the train? In what other ways was the train being used?” And the thing about the train, at first, I thought, this is going to be such a geeky, stupid project, because it was really going to be about a train. But it

turns out that trains as technology and as metaphor really changed culture, just human culture, everything from time to our concept of our human bodies. The ways in which gender roles became shaped around train travel was incredibly fascinating to me. Labor obviously puts so many people in in communication and also contest with each other. I found myself looking at anything I could: etiquette guidebooks, maps, and like you said, lots of oral histories. I also went to a lot of ghost towns along the transcontinental line because I lived close to it. So going and walking the transcontinental was actually really mesmerizing, and seeing the environmental impacts of it. The ways it cuts through the landscape, the way it literally changes the Great Salt Lake. Half is basically red in certain sunlight, when the sun hits it just right, it looks red on one side and then it looks green on the other, because it divides the lake. And, you know, these halophytes can’t travel back and forth. You know, there’s just amazing amounts of sort of obvious and not obvious connections that the train has with everything. And so, I mean,

a good research day for me looks like I would just find something that not only did I not know about, but I could feel, I could feel a poem. I mean, I don’t know a poem, I feel it, you know, before it happens. I can—it’s like a heat (LAUGHING) in my thorax. It really is. I’m just like, “Oh, there’s something there. I don’t know what it is.” And then I start with an image and I just go with it. And that heat has almost never been wrong. And so oftentimes it’s like, if I know what I want to write about, generally speaking, the poem is dead. So, for me, it was always like, What do I not know? Who have I not thought about? And especially since so many of the workers were, I guess, historically, or I should say, archivally rendered voiceless because they didn’t leave documents, especially the Chinese, we have no written documents, it was always about trying to find, can I get a trace of that voice when I know that there are no voices that they themselves left? So for me, the greatest day was, you know, it was like a complete and obvious thing, which is I was like, what about phrase books from the 19th century? You know, like a lot of these workers didn’t speak English, so they would have bought phrase books. So what did this phrase books say? And when I opened up these phrase books, it was just incredible because, in fact, they were telling you exactly what they were experiencing every single day. You know, we go and buy a phrasebook and it’s like, “This skirt is too big.” Or, you know, “How much is the gelato?” You know,

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Paisley Rekdal: You know, “Can I get a refund?”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Paisley Rekdal: And theirs are all, theirs are all like, “Where’s the police station? This man, you know, stole all my goods. This man cut my head. Don’t arrest me. That woman is a prostitute.” You know, like it was really, “This person committed suicide.” That’s a line from a phrasebook, you know, that they assumed that the average worker would need to know. And when you put those together, you’re just like, oh, wow, no, they were speaking across time. We know exactly what they’re experiencing and it’s not a good story.

Helena de Groot: You’re right, it is wild. You know, when I read that, I was like, oh, wow, this is so unvarnished in a way.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: You know, like, I don’t know if you would have a more honest account if someone would actually write about it.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And so who made those phrase books? Was that like the government or like, who made them?

Paisley Rekdal: That’s another question— would love to know that, too. There’s a guy named Sam Wong, and he basically worked for—I guess Wells Fargo actually paid for these books to be produced. So I think they are very much attached to labor banks, you know, money, basically. But I think there’s a great essay to be written and I’m sure someone has written it—I remember now, something’s burbling in the back of my mind, there was an article I came across. Somebody was asking the question like, who was Sam Wong? But maybe I’ll go and write a poem about that now. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

Paisley Rekdal: I’ll go and see if I can find it, who is Sam Wong? Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And just to kind of like, really get to the bottom of this, so you just thought of this? Like, Oh, I should actually go look at phrase books or, like, how

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah, it just came to me.

Helena de Groot: I would have never in a million years thought of it.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah, I know. Because I would say that this—I was very lucky with this project because there was something that was very inspired all the time. When I was given a commission to write a poem about the transcontinental railroad, I think that they thought I was going to write some janky little sonnet about, you know, “Oh the rails, the sound of the rails, the sound of America uniting itself.”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Paisley Rekdal: And they were, you know, I knew they were asking for a work of soft, you know, propaganda. And I knew I didn’t want to do that, but I didn’t know what to do. And so I sat down, I just decided to read everything I could from the 19th century, around that time period. And I thought, “Well, okay, then I’ll write a cento. So I’ll write a cento that is composed of all of the poems ever written about trains.” (LAUGHS) So I read all the poems in English I could find

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING) Oh my god, Paisley.

Paisley Rekdal: about trains. It was horrifying! And so I tried that. That was just a mess. It just was lifeless. And then I had gotten this book Island in the mail, and it’s basically all of the poems that have been carved at the walls of Angel Island, and they were translated. And I was going for a run. And I just thought, “What if I was going to take a poem and translate it and use every character as an opening into another poem about the railroad?” And then I was like, that helps me, because that allows me to actually contain all the stuff I was finding. You know, because one of the problems with this poem when I was trying to write it was I had to have a throughline I thought, I had to have a narrative. But everything I was reading was sort of, I mean, it was history, which, in a weird way, history doesn’t actually have a clear narrative. It has voices, it has narratives, it has fractal radial connections, but it doesn’t have a single throughline. And the thing about a translation of a poem that would create a spine with all these openings was that would allow for all these histories to exist, to branch off from each other, but also to go back to the idea that they are all speaking towards something that pulls them together.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Paisley Rekdal: And then, you know, the other thing that was really lucky about it was that when the poem, when I discovered that, the poem I chose, I chose solely because it had one word in it: Terrace. And Terrace is the name of a ghost town on the transcontinental that I had visited that actually has a Chinese section that I was able to sort of see, sort of with the state archeologist.

Helena de Groot: I would love to get to the poem “Terrace”. I thought it was an extraordinarily moving poem. It’s on page 97. And yeah, you already said that one of the things that you did was like, you know, physically go to this ghost town called Terrace. So can you tell me just about that visit or that day? Were you alone, you know, what was it like?

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah, it was, it was amazing because I went out there with a state historian and an archeologist and some journalists. And strangely enough, I think the communications director for the governor. And we were all just kind of wandering around and they were driving us, you know, for hours out there, basically near the West Desert. And Terrace is a total ghost town. It’s one of the largest ghost towns along the transcontinental, the deadline, where you can see outlines of some of the old railroad. They call them the, I think the outbuildings or something like that, the barrows and things like that. The Roundhouse. Sorry, that’s what it’s called, the Roundhouse.

Helena de Groot: What’s that?

Paisley Rekdal: Well it’s, yeah, I’m still trying to figure it out too. It’s basically a place where you would drive a train in and it would click in and it would sort of wheel it around so it could put it on a different track. You know, you could see parts of the older town. And there’s a cemetery there where you can see graves, memorial plaques and things like that put up for former workers and people who lived in Terrace. But what’s also interesting is that, you know, the place is still sort of divided, segregated. Even 150 years on, you can feel that segregation through the archeological fragments that you’ll find. So if you go to certain parts of town, you’ll be like, this is where the white people lived. And you can tell because of the dishes and you can tell because of, you know, the structures of the houses. And you can tell where the Chinese lived because it was close to the dump and all of the Chinese dishes and, you know, bits of opium pipes and certain workers’ buttons that, you know, the Chinese would have worn with their clothes, they’re all found in that area.

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Paisley Rekdal: So it’s a place where the earth itself just sort of carries that history. So one of the first things we were doing, the archeologist said like, “Go and just start sifting around in the dirt with your fingers.” And he said, “And whatever you do, don’t take anything. Pick it up, look at it, and then put it down exactly where you found it.” And of course, the very first thing that some journalist did was take it and then walk away with it to show other people. And archeologist was like, “No! no! You’re terrible people!”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Paisley Rekdal: I just want everyone to know that I did not take anything. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Paisley Rekdal: But I do write about these fragments a lot, so. So this is “Terrace”.

(READS POEM)

Terrace

Of this town once built from redwoods trekked

from the Cold Sierras, nothing’s left. Just bits

of aqueduct lost by the roundhouse, an outline

ridge of knuckled barrows, glass chips violet

from a century of sun. Fists of clinker,

and on the berm’s west side, the ghostly hollows

of Chinese dugouts whose perimeter I trace

according to the wreckage. Shattered

whiskey bottles. Bone dishes ground

into a culvert where I find, thin as a baby’s

fingernail, this metal trouser button: its edges

crimped, eyes scrubbed clean of earth so that,

when I peer through its slits, I catch a whiskered glimpse

of jackrabbit, moving so fast, not even time can catch him.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. I mean, one thing—maybe this is a very silly question, but I had it as I was reading this poem. You know, I’m European. I’ve seen my share of ruins.

Paisley Rekdal: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: And things were just little shards in the ground. And that’s, you know, you go there and there’s a perimeter around it and you can’t touch anything. But, you know, the point is that you imagine all these lives that were, lived there.

Paisley Rekdal: Mm.

Helena de Groot: And I have to say that I’ve always had the biggest—I’ve always had trouble with that.

Paisley Rekdal: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: You know, I stand there and I think, “Okay, let’s feel something big. You know, here I am on the on the actual place where the Romans had their baths or whatever.” And I feel nothing. I can’t imagine it. So can I ask you, like, did you feel stuff?

Paisley Rekdal: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Paisley Rekdal: Did I fake that poem? Yes. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Sometimes the feeling comes, like, in the thinking about it later, right?

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah. I think it does. It’s, you know, that’s funny where you—it’s not a silly question at all, because one of the, one of the things I struggled with the most, just in the research of this book, was something similar to it, to what you described, which is, when you go to a place and you see nothing but fragments—and the reality is, especially when you’re dealing with histories that are nothing but fragments, because there are no archival records or there are so few archival records, you’re left with almost nothing—when you have the fragments, you’re sort of stuck with a couple of desires. And it kind of goes back to something that Saidiya Hartman was writing about in her own scholarship, which is that one, you might want to start writing in as fast as possible what you think happened. You know, you’re going to want to assemble the real Roman structure out of this thing, you know, because—and there’s a risk of doing that because you’re, you’re going to maybe Disney-fy it a little bit or you’re going to be, you know, getting something wrong to satisfy your own emotional urges, or you’re going to write a very—or imagine a very presentist kind of history about that past. So, one of the tensions I had was sort of like saying to myself, Could I let the fragment be the fragment? Could I let the untranslated stay untranslated? Because it’s true, I’m not going to have the full emotional experience. I’m not going to have that full identification. But I don’t know if I would have had it anyway. Like, I mean, it would be a fantasy for me to sort of say, like, if somehow miraculously I could go back to like 1869 and meet some of these Chinese workers walking off like the completed transcontinental and get a translator and say, like, “What’d you think?” And it would be a fantasy for me to think that they would want to talk to me, that they would have anything to say to me that would resonate emotionally with me now, in the ways that I want that kind of resonance. It’s not to say that they wouldn’t have anything important to say. They absolutely would. It’s just that I might have a very sentimental notion of what they thought of their lives and how they experienced their work that they wouldn’t have. And I might be, you know, I, I might be fabricating so much in order to resuscitate something. So going back to this, like, where did I feel something? I felt very powerfully moved, actually, in this place called Dove Cut, which is a nothing wasteland place. There is nothing to look at. It’s just miles and miles of desert. And you’ve got this enormous kind of grade that’s been cut into this hill. And you just see nothing but transcontinental and sagebrush for miles. It’s utterly exposed. It’s barren. It’s visually not very attractive. And it was cold that day. And I remember just thinking for one second, I could sort of sense what it would have been like to have had to spend every day, like hours of every day cutting that stuff out by hand, you know, exposed to all of this element. Nothing to relieve any of this labor, nothing esthetic to relieve it. And then the sheer monumentality of that physical work. It really struck me. It really, it really kind of bowled me over. Because I was like, “Oh, my God, people made this.” (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Paisley Rekdal: And they had to do it by hand! And, you know, it’s very easy to sort of sit in an armchair and go, “The transcontinental was a terrible capitalist thing,” you know. But it’s another thing to kind of go out there and say, “Wow, this, this is insane what they did. It’s incredible.” That there is something important about honoring that labor, even as you can sort of see how dehumanizing it was. So I really wrestled with that. Like, I want fragments to stay fragments, I want things to be untranslated, but I also want people to sort of feel the exhaustion of it. And I think that’s partly why this book is so long. You know? Like I want people to have this, to recognize like, this was not just a few days in a few people’s lives. I mean, this was years of effort, and people died doing it. And it was, it’s just incredible when you, when you see it and feel that monumentality.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I love that, that you were able to, even for just an instant, bring it down to the level of an individual worker who feels that wind, who feels that desolation.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And feels also like almost the, the Sisyph—how do I say it,

Paisley Rekdal: The Sisyphean?

Helena de Groot: Yeah, Sisyphean nature of that task, right?

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Because like, once the transcontinental railroad is finished, you can see it as a whole. But for an individual worker, it must have just been a hopeless task almost.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah, it would feel never ending. Because all you’re seeing is more railroad. More and more and more railroad. And Sisyphean is the perfect word, because as soon as you’ve built the railroad, you have to build it again. It’s like the San Francisco bridge, you know, like you paint it and then it immediately like, you have to turn around and start painting it again because it takes so long to do it. And then you’re like—and the sun and weather and everything that that—. So, you think of a railroad as like, oh, it’s finished, it’s complete, the infrastructure’s done. But in fact, you know, track degrades, you know, nails pop out. You’re constantly rebuilding.

Helena de Groot: I want to get to a poem that is sort of the polar opposite of this one. So in this one, you lef the fragments be the fragments: buttons, whiskey bottles. And then you have this other poem called—give me one second. “What Day”.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah. This is exactly the opposite, right? Yeah, where I’m trying to actually imagine workers. This is the most violation kind of a poem, right? So let me read this one.

(READS POEM)

What Day

On this seventh day

of the seventh month, magpies

bridge in a cluster

of black and white

the Sky King crosses

to meet his Queen, time tracked

by the close-knit wheeling

of stars. I watch. You come

to me tonight, drunk on wine

and cards, nails ridged black

with opium

to ease the pain

of work. We are

all men here. Any

body can be a

bridge, little raven,

your eyes squeezed shut

but not from pain.

We are

a trestle, a grade

we build together.

What matter if you say

you’d never choose

me, were there

women willing

in this desert. I

chose. I choose

the memory we share

of rivers, your hair

of smoke and raw,

wet leather. A man

in another

man’s hand makes himself

tool or weapon, says

the overseer, as if a man’s use

to another is only one

of work. Pleasure

is our only chosen

future. You

are the home

I briefly make, the country

I can return to. Here

where the moon wheels

its white shoulder

in the dark as you push me

to the earth, slip

my whiskered tip

of hair into your mouth.

Paisley Rekdal: So this one, obviously, I imagine quite a lot. I imagine, you know, two men, one who seems far more comfortable acknowledging the sex that he’s having than the other. And there’s a couple of reasons I did this. One was, again, going back to that Dove Cut thing. And in a weird way, this is a poem that does respond to Dove Cut, because when I was there at that place, all I could see and think about was pain. Just like this sheer pain of making that railroad. And one of the questions I had that I couldn’t get answered was sort of like basically the queer railroad, which is, you know, we’ve got 15,000 around, about Chinese men working on the line. I’m certain there was some sexual contact, you know, between some of the, right. And, you know, we don’t know, we don’t know anything about that. We don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about LGBTQ lives on the railroad. At least I didn’t find much in the criticism. And it really struck me that, you know, there’s a way in which sexual pleasure, a sort of erotic pleasure that these men could have with each other would be, in a way, a way of resisting some of the work that they had to go through. You know, this is a pleasure that was only for themselves and it didn’t have economic value. And there’s also a way of thinking about that moment of sexual intimacy as one of a kind of return back to China, weirdly, for some of the workers, because, you know, a lot of the workers didn’t want to come and stay in America. They saw themselves as sojourners. They were going to make money in America and go back. But there was a real risk that they could die in America, they knew that. And so, you know, this moment of intimate contact is a way of sort of like reestablishing almost a bridge, a link back.

Helena de Groot: Mm. I mean, one question I had about this poem and about this, like, imagining of things that have not been documented is, yeah, that question of appropriation, of speaking for others. And you wrote a whole book about that.

Paisley Rekdal: (LAUGHS) I did.

Helena de Groot: Titled Appropriate. (LAUGHS) Which was before this one. So you have, you know, you went into this book already having thought about that deeply and having researched and written about it. And one of the things that you write in that book, “like many writers today, I believe writing in the voice of someone outside my subject position surely crosses a line. But which one exactly?” The fact that you wrote a whole book already implies that you kind of complicated a lot of the notions that we associate with appropriation. What constitutes appropriation and when it is something you do even while knowing that it is appropriation.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And so, you know, and so here, I feel like this is a really interesting case where it’s like, well, there was, there is literally no other record.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: We’re not writing over someone. You know what I mean?

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: We’re not telling their story for them while they actually could perfectly tell it themselves, like, no, they didn’t and they won’t because now they’re dead.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And so can you tell me, like, how you approached that as a contemporary woman with absolutely no relation to the railroad? How did you approach that?

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah, it’s a great question because, you know, obviously when you write a book about cultural appropriation in literature and then you write a book that is entirely appropriative, you’re like, “Well. Okay, (LAUGHS) let’s put this into practice.”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Paisley Rekdal: One of the first things I thought was, with Appropriate: A Provocation, which I wrote, the last chapter talks about what are the upsides of appropriation? And there are some and some of them have to do, I think, with, again, questions of a kind of historical reclamation and also community solidarity, I would say, which is, when we have an archive that is so skewed towards certain kinds of voices, right, you’re inviting people to have to kind of write into the fragments of the archive. And it’s only, sadly, through appropriation that we’re going to get those. Whether it’s through the found poems that you get through those voices or it’s through kind of imaginations that come out of the research from those fragments. And you do have to ask yourself, like, is it better to quote-unquote “stay in my lane” so that the 19th century Chinese man can be resuscitated and finally write a story? Or do you think it might be important to actually start doing that work? Understanding that what you’re doing is an approximation. I mean, I think one of the things that that sets people off is, whether you’re on the left or the right on this kind of issue is that there’s an idea that there’s an authentic experience, there’s an authentic voice, and that there’s a way that you’re going to get it perfectly right. But the reality is, the more you know about identity, the more we know about each other, we understand that we share patterns, but we are rarely the same. And so, when we’re talking about building characters that are believable, building worlds that are believable, we’re already talking about approximations based on, what are patterns that are recognizable, similar, believable, but also not reductive? I think that where we get work that’s appropriative is where we start to make insistent arguments that this racial identity is going to mean these kinds of things. You know, going back to that letter by Norman Asing, that is an example of that kind of racist thinking, which is sort of like, you know, Chinese and white people have culture and someone who’s not Chinese and white does not. That sort of equation. And so I think that when we start getting away from these kinds of reductive ways of thinking about identity and race and how they would have to be connected to particular virtues, particular kinds of activities, particular kinds of beliefs, I think we free ourselves up to actually see what the historical record has to offer. With something like “What Day” where I’m really just truly imagining this kind of interaction I can’t prove didn’t exist or did exist, you know, I have to sort of say like, what is the humanity that I’m trying to imagine on display here? What do these two men want? And it’s not about trying to perform a particular idea of racial identity. It’s about understanding, how can a moment of intimacy provide a kind of relief that the economic conditions of the rest of their lives wouldn’t give them? And that’s what that poem is about.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I want to just stay with that a moment longer, because from everything that we’ve been talking about, it’s so clear that you’re like an extremely thorough researcher. And then I wonder, like, what do you have to do inside yourself to kind of switch modes and make yourself free of that to allow for that imagination to blossom?

Paisley Rekdal: I think for me, this goes back weirdly to my training as a medievalist. When I was starting out, one of the medievalist scholars that I loved the most was Caroline Bynum. And she wrote these incredible books where she would move between art history and church history and, you know, church rituals and literature and what things she could find, the very few documents that she could find from about, you know, average people’s lives and stuff like

that. And she would compile these things together and create this incredibly imaginative way of re-seeing certain kinds of religious rituals, reimagining the ways that women saw their own bodies and desire and hunger. And reading her work taught me so much about the ways in which historical scholarship, any kind of scholarship is actually really creative. I think we forget that. We think, oh, it’s just a dry interpretation. But scholars who are really good are doing something similar to poets, which is sort of like, why is this fact drawing me to that story when they have nothing to do with each other? Why is this image calling to that, you know, bit of material that has nothing to do with that? And it’s that bridge of metaphor. You start, you know, connecting the dots and you start having a greater and maybe more capacious understanding of how a world can be built out of the conversation between these fragments. And that was something I wanted to do with West, too, which is to sort of say, like, all of these different things, I don’t think of history and poetry as separate. I think of them as doing very similar kinds of work. They’re translating forms of experience, multitudes of voices and identities and expressions and infusing them into something that feels like a whole, even as we know it’s really not that. You know, the poem is not real. At the same time, it is speaking to truth. And the histories that we read are not ever 100% accurate, even as they are very close to representing movements that we can recognize as true.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: I was just wondering, like when you look at, you know, your family members, you know, people maybe who have already passed on or who, you know, will someday, do you ever think about things that you want to preserve of theirs?

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I do. There’s sort of two answers to that question. One, if you go on the website, there’s a poem called “Heart”. And in the book it’s called “Not Ash”. So there’s a difference. But you’ll actually see a document that my grandfather, Gung Gung, produced where he had had this amazing photograph album of all of these—he was a really good looking guy, Gung Gung, was when he was young, and he got around, let’s just put it this way. So there’s photograph album entirely of these young, attractive women he was dating. But around them, and he drew these amazing, like dragons and opera singers and Chinese poems and all sorts of stuff, this filigree of text and his own images that he designed around that photographic album. And in a way, I’ve always wanted to produce a document just like that. It’s just such a marvelous thing. And I want to preserve that. And in some ways, some of my writing, I feel like I think theoretically and formally, I’ve been trying to produce my grandfather’s photo album my entire life. Like, how can I, how can I do exactly that? Like, there’s this photographic record and this imaginative, like, filigree around the side. But I’m also working on a new book of poems very slowly. And it’s sort of, it’s like the Mean Girls burn book almost,

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Paisley Rekdal: which is a terrible thing to say, but I’m like, there are some things about my family life and my own personal history that I’m like, this does need to be recorded. Not because it’s important in an historical way, but it’s a very important thing for me to get out emotionally. I feel like as you get older, you become more aware, obviously, of your own mortality and you just want to say like, what are the last things I want to say before I go? It’s not like I’m on death’s door, I’ve probably got about 50 more years, but I mean, I, I do think that there’s a kind of honesty that I want to get down on paper. And so I’m writing some pretty brutal poems now, about myself, about my family, that I do feel like I want those to be part of the archive, too. But I also know that I kind of want people to be dead before that book comes out. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Paisley Rekdal: You know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And it’s interesting what you say, you know, what are the last things that I want to say, that can go so many directions, right?

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Like I’m thinking about just stories of what happened, it can be like an indictment, like, “You know what? I never liked you!” You know, whatever.

Paisley Rekdal: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Or it can be a kind of deathbed confession.

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah. No, I, yeah, I know, it makes it sound like I was like, “And I always hated that tapioca pudding!”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING) Yes.

Paisley Rekdal: You know, like, that’s not where I’m going out with it. It’s more like this was, I want to be—I mean, I think everyone in a family knows what I’m talking about, which is, how is it you can be so intimately, deeply connected with people you love and watch people that you love hurt each other so much? And you hurt other people too. And you accept and you forgive all of those things simultaneously. At the same time, you’re furious. You know, I guess I want to, what I want to preserve is the honesty of what it means to be in a family. And that’s a really hard thing to do, as it turns out. And that’s kind of what I want to get down is sort of like, who were my parents? Who am I? Who were we together? That seems really important to me.

Helena de Groot: And in that case, how do you approach just having your vantage point? Like, you know what I’m saying, right? Like, it’s like when people write a memoir, and then the family members that are inevitably in there, they’re like, “You didn’t portray that correctly,” or like, “I feel—”

Paisley Rekdal: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Which is, you know, par for the course. And so I’m wondering, while you’re slowly, slowly writing these poems, is there a part of you that goes into research mode again, that is like, “I should interview my mom about,” you know, or do you just really want to hew close to your own subjectivity?

Paisley Rekdal: Hm. In this case, I want to hew close to my own subjectivity, because knowing my mom, the evasions that will inevitably occur during the oral history—but that itself would be fascinating, actually. It might be a great poem is sort of like, you know, what she wanted to say, what she didn’t say, you know, (LAUGHING) kind of thing. But I understand that—and I think everyone who writes and who reads these memoirs knows that, of course, that vantage point is, is always fraught because as hard as you work to be as honest about yourself as possible, you can’t help but cast yourself as the protagonist. And so there is a kind of manipulative way in which I go back to the poems and sort of say, like, have I made my—have I been honest about my own ugliness? And so sometimes I catch myself. I mean, one of the things that, if there’s a tick to my writing that maybe is a problem or not is that I love beauty. I do, I love a well-turned sentence. I love, you know, a particularly polished poem. I’m not necessarily somebody who likes to write very direct kinds of poems. So even West was a departure for me because I’m writing in very direct modes in a lot of times because I’m using oral histories. But, you know, going back to this, you know, “Is my love of beauty actually making me dishonest emotionally?” is a question that I’m asking myself all the time in these poems. You know, like, what am I lying about? And am I lying in my own syntax? (LAUGHS) So it’s— I, it is, that’s why the poems are coming so slowly, because I am asking myself all the time, like, did I just make this too pretty to be true?

Helena de Groot: And are you pushing yourself away from beauty?

Paisley Rekdal: A little bit. But also, you know, I go back and forth on this. I’m just so divided because another part of me is like, why should we resist beauty? Because I think we’re in a point in time now where with our writing and in our art, we really privilege what feels like spontaneous, urgent expression, which I find also very compelling. But there is something about beauty that—the kind of beauty that I like also takes time. It takes a fair amount of consideration to produce. There’s something a little baroque about it. That’s what’s annoying about the beauty that I like, I think.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Paisley Rekdal: But I, I think that when applied correctly, beauty of intellect and thought I think is something that can move us towards, towards the good that we sometimes, you know, will accept an idea because it is also well formulated. And that isn’t something we should discount. Beauty is not just part of an argument. Beauty can be the whole argument. And I think when we’re asking ourselves, like, “Can we be good as humans?”, which I think is a good question to ask ourselves, “Can we be better humans?”, you know, beauty can be really part of that conversation. Can I persuade myself through my attraction to an idea, the way it’s phrased, can I persuade myself to then follow that as a better way of being in the world?

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Paisley Rekdal is the author of seven books of poetry, including The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, Animal Eye, a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize and winner of the UNT Rilke Prize, Imaginary Vessels, finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize, Nightingale, which won the 2020 Washington State Book Award for Poetry, and her latest collection, West, which also has an accompanying website with audio, videos, pictures, and poems. You can find that at

westtrain.org. She also wrote four works of prose: The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, Intimate, The Broken Country, and Appropriate: A Provocation. Paisley Rekdal has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, among many other honors. From 2017 to 2022, she served as Utah’s poet laureate. Paisley Rekdal is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, where she gets to go back to her old love of maps through community web projects she set up, such as Mapping Literary Utah and Mapping Salt Lake City. To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose and Eric van der Westen. I’m Helena de Groot and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.

(MUSIC PLAYS AND FADES OUT)