SHADOW NARRATIVES
Paisley Rekdal says writing her sixth poetry collection, Nightingale, out in May from Copper Canyon Press, was “like trying to conduct a whirlwind.” The result is a stunning book about transformation that will change the way we read violence, silence, and the stories handed down to us.
Paisley Rekdal says writing her sixth poetry collection, Nightingale, out in May from Copper Canyon Press, was “like trying to conduct a whirlwind.” The result is a stunning book about transformation that will change the way we read violence, silence, and the stories handed down to us.
ON THE day we are trying to carve out time for a conversation, Paisley Rekdal is juggling her teaching schedule at the University of Utah with a morning speech at a philosophy conference on social pain and memory and a late-afternoon meeting to chair a graduate student’s oral exams on ekphrastic poetry. This is in addition to the swirl of workshops, lectures, readings, and other projects related to her 2017 appointment as poet laureate of Utah, including assembling a digital map of the literary population of her home state. “It’s getting to an almost comical level of busyness,” she says, then adds, “It’s totally self-imposed.”
Which isn’t entirely true, but such are the demands of a writer whose range and reach of activities extends to poetry, memoir, essays, and long-form journalism. Rekdal has published five books of award-winning poetry since her first collection, A Crash of Rhinos, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2000. Subsequent volumes include Animal Eye (University of Pittsburgh Press), winner of the 2013 Rilke Award, and Imaginary Vessels (Copper Canyon Press), a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Individual poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry anthologies of 2012, 2013, 2016, 2017, and 2019. This year’s selection, “Four Marys,” appears in her new book, Nightingale, forthcoming in May from Copper Canyon Press. Rekdal has also
published three nonfiction books and along the way received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and both the Wyoming and Utah State Arts Councils. As a Fulbright Scholar she taught for a year in Chonju in South Korea, and she has lived in Paris and Hanoi through the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship.
Paisley Rekdal works on the move. Born and raised in Seattle, she received her undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto and studied in Dublin for a year. She contemplated a graduate degree in medieval studies, which appealed to her because, she says, understanding a medieval text involves seeing it through the prism of multiple sources—law, ecclesiastical manuscripts, art history, music. But when she found herself turning these sources into poems rather than scholarly articles, she says, “I realized I wouldn’t be any better than a thirdrate medievalist, but maybe I could at least become a second-rate poet.” So she went to the University of Michigan for her MFA in creative writing, taught at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, lived for a brief time in Atlanta, and settled in Salt Lake City, where she directs the University of Utah’s creative writing program.
But she has hardly settled for being a second-rate poet, says poet David Baker, both mentor and colleague to Rekdal. They met while she was working on her graduate degree in Ann Arbor. Even then he recognized a “poetry of complexity,” notable in the work of such a young writer. “One of the things I find remarkable about Paisley’s work is the complexity and brightness of the questions—her ability to bring mythology into personal memory, science into family stories, trauma set alongside beauty and devastation alike. Nothing is ‘easy’ in her poems, whether that might be a polyphonic form or voice or a museum of battered skulls or the invention of the kaleidoscope,” says Baker, the poetry editor of the Kenyon Review, whose latest book, Swift: New and Selected Poems, was published by Norton in April. “She does her homework, but she also does her spirit work.”
Homework and spirit work, activist and memoirist—juxtapositions woven into the fabric of Rekdal’s writing, adding to a tapestry she started with her first nonfiction book, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In, published by Pantheon in 2000, ten days before A Crash of Rhinos was released. In a brilliant blend of personal essays and travelogue— Rekdal traveled throughout Southeast Asia during the writing of the book— she explores her mixed-race identity as the child of a Chinese mother and Norwegian father. “I am half Chinese, and through time and public scrutiny of my appearance, at heart I have come to believe that I am and always was fully Chinese,” she writes in an essay titled “A Tempest.” Later in the book, however, in the essay “Traveling to Opal,” Rekdal resists falling victim “to a monolithic, constructed idea of race.” She writes, “I cannot choose one identity without losing half of myself.” Untroubled by irreconcilable conflict or even paradox, today she simply points out, “What intrigues me about identity is both how fluid and how fixed it is.”
From her earliest work Rekdal has offered alternative stories. In the essay “Bad Vacation With Tasady Tribe, or How My Grandfather Acquired the Laundromat,” Rekdal recounts the family myth of how her maternal grandfather “bought” a laundromat for $1 from its Japanese owner who was about to be sent to an internment
camp during World War II, built the business during the man’s absence, and then returned it to him. It was total fabrication—an American-dream fantasy that Rekdal’s mother, a highly successful teacher of gifted students and an administrator in the Seattle Public Schools, preferred to the real story. The real story, Rekdal’s grandmother told her, is that her grandfather tired of his job driving a taxi and decided to use his savings to open his own business; he bought the laundromat from its Chinese owner and was successful enough to open a second one. “I will never know how my mother came by the story of the laundromat, though I understand why so many people in the family—myself especially—want to believe it,” Rekdal writes. “It follows all the rules of multicultural mythology.”
At the same time, even in these early pieces, Rekdal reveals a lighter touch, maybe influenced by her father, an intellectual with a PhD whose hope for an academic life never materialized beyond short-term teaching posts. In the essay “Hunters and Gatherers,” also in The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, she recounts asking her father how he and her mother met. He replied that it happened in a college English class, where her mother “threw something at him to get his attention, a sharp comment, a book, he can’t remember,” she writes. “Whatever it was, my father says he’s still trying to catch it.”
Throughout her nonfiction, Rekdal attempts to define what her mixed-race heritage means. In her hybrid memoir Intimate, published by Tupelo Press in 2012, she describes sitting with her father at the hospital where her mother undergoes surgery for cancer. But that’s only one of the narratives running through the mix of personal essay, historical documentary, and poetry. In the book, subtitled An American Family Photo Album, Rekdal interrogates the definition of “American family” through the early-twentieth-century photographs of Edward Curtis and his translator Alexander Upshaw. While some read these photographs as evidence of the dignity of Indigenous Americans, a tribute to people whose way of life was being destroyed, others see them as romanticized, inauthentic images staged to make a point. Again offering multifocal narratives, Rekdal writes poems that respond to Curtis’s iconic photos. She sifts through bits and pieces of her parents’ courtship and memories of growing up (debate, she observes in Intimate, was “my father’s form of exercise”), positioning them alongside photographs and historical documents with an archaeologist’s eye for discerning connections. Yet, in Intimate, as in The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, she resists definitive conclusions: “When I turn my face one way, I look like my father. When I turn my face the other way, my mother appears. Straight on, someone completely different slips into view. Each option both false and true.”
Rekdal wrote her third nonfiction book, The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam (University of Georgia Press, 2017), at the same time she was working on the poems that would become Nightingale. While this book-length essay may seem a departure from previous work, the fundamental issues of emotional and physical violence have always been on Rekdal’s mind, if not always in the forefront. She uses a 2012 attack in Salt Lake City—a homeless Vietnamese refugee stabbed two white men while shouting, “You killed my people!”—to initiate a journey to Vietnam and a meditation on trauma.
Lan Cao, an author and law professor at Chapman University whose books include the novel Monkey Bridge (Viking, 1997), about the war in Vietnam and its impact on a young Vietnamese American girl, praises Rekdal for “exploring dislocation as experienced by all afflicted by the war, not just the usual suspects.” Cao, who came to the United States from Vietnam in 1975, says that what really speaks to her about Rekdal’s work is the exploration of “intergenerational trauma—the idea that trauma can be passed on biologically as well as emotionally.” In The Broken Country
Rekdal interviews veterans and refugees, delves into a history of the conflict, visits war memorials, and reflects on her family’s experience in the war (her father and uncles served in Vietnam). Left with more questions than answers, she arrives at only one certainty: “Memory disorders time, and trauma disorders memory.”
SO IT seems that for a long time Rekdal has been writing or preparing to write Nightingale, a collection of poems drawing on the Metamorphoses, the Latin epic written by Ovid in 8 CE. Not interested in a one-to-one retelling of these
myths in a contemporary setting, Rekdal explains that what’s important to her is “getting to the core of Ovid’s ideas about change.” Fragmentation, violence, transformation, silence, and memory are subjects that she has approached from different vantages— in earlier poems she has reimagined mythical figures such as “Baucis and Philemon,” for example—but in the new book she brings a ferocity that derives from her firm belief, she says, that “the paradoxes Ovid writes about regarding change are both very contemporary and very personal to me.”
The time seems to be right. Earlier this year the New Yorker published a review of the novel Daphne by Will Boast under the headline “Reading Ovid in the Age of #MeToo,” which author Katy Waldman claims “is the perfect time to reread the poet.” Rekdal has a slightly different perspective, particularly on the popularity of contemporary takes by women, such as Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, Madeline Miller’s novel Circe, and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, which centers on women captured during the Trojan War. “My own, and utterly speculative and possibly indefensible, argument is that we are responding to the massive political and social changes of our moment by going back to times and periods that recall, if distantly, our own,” Rekdal says. “[These works] all speak to war, and the surprising and long-term effects of violence. The U.S. has been at war for eighteen years now, a war that is and is not visible to the vast majority of Americans…. I think it’s one of the reasons we’re turning back to texts and retellings of texts that focused on the effects and aftereffects of the one of the longest wars in literature: the Trojan War.”
In Nightingale Rekdal goes deeper than handing a classical figure the mic; she reconceives the myths in strikingly different contemporary contexts. In her poem “Io,” for example, she draws on the story of Io, one of Zeus’s mortal lovers, who is turned into a heifer to conceal her from the jealousy of Zeus’s wife (and sister), Hera. In Rekdal’s poem, Io is a woman who becomes a quadriplegic after a traumatic bike accident: “Her arms / she can barely lift past her sides, her legs / are gone, the spinal cord severed / from when the car behind her clipped a tire / sending her face-first into the pavement.” The speaker mourns the sex she enjoyed with her partner, Jane, now that “Her body / is no longer the source of pleasure but constant pain.” Just as in Ovid’s version of the myth, Rekdal’s Io remains trapped in another body, but while the ancient Roman poet presents this transformation as comic,
Rekdal sees it differently: “For Io it’s deeply upsetting because the core of her memories and sense of self haven’t changed,” she says. “In ‘Io’ the speaker is continually gaining and losing her identities simultaneously.”
Nightingale includes poems of sheer beauty and startling connections. One of them, “Four Marys,” inspired by Piero della Francesca’s fifteenthcentury painting Madonna del Parto, links a pregnant Virgin Mary with Mary Shelley; her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft; and the biblical Mary Magdalene. Interweaving four narratives as though their connections were obvious and time was suspended, the poem originated, Rekdal says, during her residency at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, where she worked with poet and art historian Dana Prescott. She also drew on her experience teaching Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein off and on for twenty years and her deep interest in the visual arts.
Again, Rekdal brings her own brand of humor, what Baker describes as a “knife-sharp wit and playfulness” to the material. Another poem, “Pasiphaë,” reflects the story of the immortal daughter of Helios, who gave birth to a Minotaur after having sex with a bull. In Rekdal’s poem, a woman falls in love with her late husband’s grieving dog. The poem is punctuated with her mother’s practical advice as she watches her widowed daughter become increasingly enamored of the dog, to the point where she gladly shares its fleas: “You must get rid / of that animal, her mother declared / one night at the kitchen table, horrified / by her necklace of bites, her wolfish / eating habits.” With humor both sad and sane, Rekdal pushes the limits of transformation. “I would like to go on record that, while I very much love dogs, I do not love dogs,” she tells me, verbally winking with droll assurance.
At the heart of Nightingale is a section consisting of the poem “Philomela” and its companion, “Nightingale: A Glass.” In Ovid’s telling, Philomela is a story of rape and forced silence. Tereus, a Thracian king, marries Procne, an Athenian princess. Missing her sister Philomela, Procne begs her husband to bring her to live in Trace. Once he meets Philomela, Tereus, overcome with lust, rapes her; when she threatens to reveal this violent act, he cuts out her tongue, rapes her again, and imprisons her. Unable to speak, Philomela sends her sister a tapestry that she has woven revealing the violence Tereus has visited on her. Procne’s revenge is to kill their son and feed his dismembered body to her husband. The sisters flee to escape his rage, and Philomela is transformed into a nightingale, Procne a swallow. (The basics of the plot alone may explain why a group of undergraduates at Columbia University recently petitioned for trigger warnings to be attached to the teaching of Ovid.)
Rekdal’s contemporary Philomela centers on a young woman whose grandmother leaves money to a distant cousin, a sculptor. The woman goes to see the work, staring “a long while at what she thought / was a tree blasted by lightning.” Realizing that it is a woman being assaulted, her own memories of a rape flood her mind. Later, when the young woman receives her grandmother’s sewing machine, sent as a hoped-for wedding gift, she “considered sewing a quilt with it, / onto which she might embroider shooting stars in reds and saffron,” but instead puts it in on a shelf, “where she told herself it could wait.” In this retelling, the woman chooses not to speak, neither to seek retribution, nor testify to the violence.
Some time after “Philomela” appeared in Narrative magazine, one of many periodicals in which these poems were first published, including the American Poetry Review, Fairy Tale Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and Willow Springs, Rekdal decided to write “Nightingale: A Gloss,” seventeen pages of explanatory notes arranged in sections. Or at least that is one way to describe this mixture of reflections, memories, speculations, revelations, and fragments of poetry (Ovid, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Keats, Eliot, Lowell, Miłosz, Chaucer). Although Rekdal has hinted about a “violent incident” in her past in various writings, she never before disclosed it directly: the horrific details of a sexual assault that occurred while she was a college student traveling in Scotland.
“I couldn’t say everything I wanted to say in my poem,” she says. “My gloss is meant to be an additive text, something written alongside the poem itself, in that it’s like the gloss one finds in Alice Oswald’s long poem “Dart” or Coleridge’s marginal gloss for “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” In it she traces the literary history of Philomela and the language used to describe violence against women, especially “how one of Western poetry’s own originary symbols is born out of a narrative of sexual violence, trauma, and the unspeakable,” she says. “Poets over centuries have turned the symbol of Philomela and the nightingale into one of beauty, imaginative power and the language’s ability to transform experience. But it also carries that shadow narrative as well, one we can’t forget.”
Rekdal does not forget. After informing the reader that female nightingales do not sing, “Nightingale: A Gloss” ends on two simple yet powerful sentences. “I stand in the field. I whistle back.”
AS HER state’s poet laureate, Rekdal is developing Mapping Literary Utah, a digital project about writers who live or have lived there. In a 2013 nonfiction course at the University of Utah, she and her students developed Mapping Salt Lake City, described on its website as “a community-based archive of Salt Lake City’s neighborhoods and people that documents the city’s changes through art, creative and critical literature, personal maps, and multimedia projects.” Mapping Literary Utah will expand from conventionally published works,
Rekdal hopes, to include oral histories, poems from First Nation tribes, and work by Japanese Americans interned at the Topaz War Relocation Center during World War II. It’s a big job, multidimensional, involving significant research, text selections, and site design and maintenance. Since the poet laureateship in Utah is a nonpaid position, she’s looking for grants, community resources, and collaborative efforts to make the project a reality.
If cartography seems a natural fit for the restless traveler, Rekdal credits Infinite City by Rebecca Solnit as her true inspiration for these mapping projects. “Solnit reawakened me and many writers and institutions to our love of place and maps,” she says. “I know that her project brought me back to one of my own early adolescent loves and taught me that mapping itself is an inherently narrative practice.” Rekdal adds that as a teenager, she “dreamed of becoming one of the National Geographic cartographers.”
Rekdal also works with Poetry Out Loud and visits schools around the state while writing, some might say, with a touch of disruption. As part of the state’s celebration of the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad, the Utah Arts Council and the Spike 150 committee have commissioned her to write a poem. West: A Translation is (so far) a sixty-page poem slated to be performed at an event in May along with David Henry Hwang’s play The Dance and the Railroad. And the laureate, who is politically active in her local community, once again presents that shadow narrative. On the one hand she’s unconcerned: “Frankly how many people really care what a poet thinks about politics?” she asks rhetorically. But she also acknowledges that she remains suspicious about how institutions use art to implicitly bolster a political agenda, and believes it is incumbent upon her not to settle for a monologue but to initiate a conversation. “Someone has to point out that unification did not and does not unify everyone equally; someone has to be there to remind us that the unification of one nation meant the destruction and removal of other, native nations,” she says. “Someone has to point out that the transcontinental, as incredible a technical achievement as it is, had long-lasting effects on our ideas about race, nation, gender, the environment, and labor that are both positive and negative.”
Apart from this project, Rekdal has two more nonfiction books in the works. Appropriate: A Provocation, under contract with Norton, reexamines the meaning of “cultural appropriation.” She’s also writing a series of critical essays about poetry and war that focus on how “poets across time and cultures have used poetry to express what, at heart, may be inexpressible about violence and survival.” “Super-light subject matter, right?” she says, all too aware that it’s a heavy load even for someone as energetic and productive as she. It’s no wonder that she and her husband, Sean Myles, a computer programmer, live in separate apartments in the same duplex, the only comfortable option, she says, for two people who both work at home.
IDON’T know if I’ll return to poetry for a long time,” Rekdal says, acknowledging the emotional toll of writing Nightingale, a book that “felt on all levels like trying to conduct a whirlwind…. The core of [the book] is about delving into memories that are unsettling, unresolved and unresolvable—and painful.” But she has accomplished what she set out to do in these poems: “to change the way we read the original texts and point out that all these bits and pieces together create another narrative that hovers outside of official or canonical narratives.” And Rekdal may have succeeded on an even deeper level by reminding us that, as she writes in the gloss, “language is the first site of loss and our first defense against it,” and encouraging us to break whatever silences threaten to diminish us.