Poet Paisley Rekdal discusses her book WEST: A TRANSLATION
(Description courtesy Copper Canyon Press): In 2018, Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal was commissioned to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad. The result is West: A Translation—an unflinching hybrid collection of poems and essays that draws a powerful, necessary connection between the railroad’s completion and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882–1943).
Carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station, where Chinese migrants to the United States were detained, is a poem elegizing a detainee who committed suicide. As West translates this anonymous Chinese elegy character by character, what’s left is a haunting narrative distilled through the history and lens of transcontinental railroad workers, and a sweeping exploration of the railroad’s cultural impact on America.
Punctuated by historical images and told through multiple voices, languages, literary forms, and documents, West explores what unites and divides America, and how our ideas about American history creep forward, even as the nation itself constantly threatens to spiral back.
West is accompanied by a website (www.westtrain.org) that features video poems and encourages self-exploration of the transcontinental railroad’s history through an interactive, non-linear structure. Pairing this urgent book and innovative website, Rekdal masterfully challenges how histories themselves get written and disseminated. The result is a tour de force of resistance and resilience.
Interview by Isabelle Sakelaris
On westtrain.org, you offer two entry points into the collection. Readers may watch an introductory video, including a reading of a poem carved in a wall at Angel Island, or they can skip the video and view the original text in full. This way, the reader must acknowledge the poem and its history before exploring more of the website. Would it be fair to call West: A Translation a kind of memorial? What should a good memorial do? What should a work of poetry do, especially one using archival materials?
I would call it an elegy, rather than a memorial: a memorial I see as a static and institutional work of art, whereas I’m hoping to create something more dynamic, interactive, something that allows people to come away with their own interpretations. Memorials tend to highlight “acceptable” or at least politically approved virtues—they are meant not just to elegize but to reify the social values that the lost supposedly represent, which is why memorials tend to be highly public events or artworks. But elegies are more private, and even as they engage with history, they allow for more ambiguity, complexity, and even critique, which is what poetry should do, especially when it uses archival materials. The point isn’t to replicate, but to interrogate and explore.
What was your experience like working on a multimedia project? What did you learn about your creative process and sensibilities? What advice do you have for an artist who is interested in working in a digital medium for the first time?
I learned that I was an extraordinarily conservative visual person! As I worked on the videos, I came slowly to understand that you could have visual material, sound, and montage work that didn’t merely replicate the poem’s textual meaning, but highlight other sensual experiences that the poem didn’t articulate in words but which also spoke effectively to the poem’s tone. I also liked that the videos could pick up on visual repetends across the whole site, drawing the project together.
So my advice to someone working in a digital medium for the first time is to ask these two questions: How does the digital expand an audience’s reading experience? What other senses can the digital engage that the material text can’t? Not every project should be digital just because it seems like a good idea. Also, we don’t read digitally the same way we read books: our attention span is MUCH shorter. People get bored after 5 seconds of looking at or hearing anything, so it takes a lot of visual media to make a single short video interesting.
As a poet laureate and educator, do you feel yourself wanting to “teach” in your poems? And if so, do you resist or lean into that desire? Is it difficult to separate your didactic and artistic impulses?
This is the one book where something “teachable” might exist, simply because I’m engaged with so much historical material, thus some level of explanation is actually necessary. That said, I want people to have their own interpretive moments with these historical facts, so I try to create human narratives around them, so that we aren’t just looking at what certain people in history said, but why they might have said them. By personalizing history, I think it allows the didactic to separate from the artistic impulse.
The railroad was, for lack of a better term, revolutionary in the United States. Politicians, journalists, and businesspeople have made similar claims about more recent technological advancements, such as the personal computer, and now artificial intelligence.
Has working on West: A Translation changed the way you think about technology? Do you think the same issues marginalized people faced when the railroad was completed remain? How have they evolved?
One reason I wanted West as a website is because the internet, as a technological infrastructure, has a culturally analogous relationship to the railroad: there is literally no part of our society that it hasn’t changed. Both the internet and railroad changed our concept of community, commerce, time, even identity. I don’t think West changed the way I think about technology, it simply sharpened my awareness about how we cannot separate technology from our concepts of humanity.
The distressing thing is that we continually talk about how technology is in service to humanity, but then we actually make the human be in service to technology. You see this over and over in the rhetoric about the transcontinental, which is described in physical, bodily human terms—the “spine” of our nation, our “nerves and veins” of public life—while we described the railroad laborers as bodies that can’t feel pain, that are automatons, that are basically machines themselves.
We thought of the train as a space that could make Americans out of everyone, but the train quickly became a racialized, gendered space where people became separated into legally and socially reinforced categories. With the internet, we thought we would enter a space where identities didn’t exist or could be played with; instead, we find out that algorithms are coded around white experiences and bodies, and women and young children get sexually targeted.
No technology leaves behind identity, since we are the ones who code and create tech, thus it essentially represents and reiterates our own prejudices, fears, and desires. We’re doing the same thing now with AI, I believe – we keep talking about how we can control it, but technology always reveals and, at work, reinforces our own real-world marginalization. The ones who will pay the highest cost for tech are those who are already paying the highest cost for everything.
In the second poem of the book, the line “some approximation of American. ‘We cannot fail’” stood out to me (5). The words are a fragment of a quotation attributed to Brigham Young, but within the poem, the line changes tone depending on who the speaker of “we” is (and to some extent, whether the reader identifies with that speaker). Who do you imagine as the audience for this poem? For the project? What do you hope they will take away from it?
There are many different “we”s in West. Honestly, everyone is an audience for the book, even as that “we” becomes coded differently poem to poem. In this particular poem, Brigham Young meant Mormons with his “we,” but the audience reading this poem probably are thinking of “we” as correlating with anyone contending with ethnic and racial assimilation into America in general. Me, I think that “we” is meant to be pointed and ironic. I don’t identify with that “we,” and I hope the audience will start to question what the cost of any “we” might become.
In the notes/lyric essay section of the book, you write about appropriation (you’ve also written an entire book on the topic). Would you please tell us about what differences in responsibility (if any) exist between an archivist’s responsibility to “archived voices” and an artist’s? To the archive’s patrons and artist’s audience?
An archivist has the responsibility to preserve the voices that her institution has chosen to preserve as physically carefully and as ethically as possible. A good archivist will push her institution to include more voices, to be more expansive and historically representative, but an archivist is always constrained by the institution she finally works for, and also by the kinds and types of materials and community members she works with. Oral histories must be conducted with consent at every level—including whether or not the oral histories themselves are made publicly available.
I direct the American West Center at the University of Utah, and we have an incredible collection of oral histories with many Indigenous nations across the West. Some of these cannot and should not be seen by the public at large because they are owned by the tribes and reflect their own history: these oral histories were undertaken with the explicit consent of sovereign nations, and they have been given back to them, even as we preserve a digital copy ourselves as additional storage support.
These voices are, in that sense, silenced from a larger historical record, though that history (one might argue) is finally meant for a very particular community, for very important reasons. The artist’s responsibility is far more selfish, in that sense: the artist’s responsibility is to make the publicly available archived voices heard, but with the understanding that these voices are also there to explore questions that perhaps only the artist is interested in asking.
For me, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to preserve the specificity and nuance of particular voices, understanding that I would hew closer to those specificities when the archived voice is rare. That is, for those with no other record but a letter or an oral history, I stayed extremely close to their stories, rhythms, diction, and pacing. For those with an extensive record, I could take more liberties with voice, though not with overall meaning.
The railroad is a revealing symbol in West: A Translation. It helped me see time in terms of both a series of events (in a linear fashion, similar to the idea of a train moving from one stop to the next), but also in a cyclical fashion, in the same way that trains are meant to run on a reliable schedule (the note section takes this up as well, through discussion of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, for example).
Did your conception of time or distance change at all working with all this archival material? Do you feel any more or less hopeful about the future having worked on this project?
My concept of American historical time was shaped by this project in the sense that I found myself asking one question repeatedly: Is modernity finally marked by ideas of forward-moving progress and completion, or cyclicality, as in the Spiral Jetty. It’s a bit of both, I think.
I feel more hopeful about the future after West because I think the cyclicality of our national problems—around race, around technology, around nationhood itself—is actually a reflection about how committed we are to solving them. We could see it as a doom cycle, or we could see it as a gesture of commitment. Realistically, racism will never entirely disappear. But we are working to combat its structural and interpersonal effects, and we’ve been doing that for generations. We are, I believe, getting better in the fight, even as we understand that the fight can never truly and totally be won.
West: A Translation is available now.
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Isabelle Sakelaris is an art writer and aspiring poet who lives and works in New York City.
