“I’m Not Constrained by the Language of How Other People See Me”: A Conversation with Paisley Rekdal
by Lynnell Edwards, poetry faculty
Paisley Rekdal’s extraordinary career spans four books of nonfiction, eight collections of poetry, and multiple awards for her work, including a Guggenheim, and NEA and Fulbright Fellowships. Her 2023 collection West: A Translation won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Prize and the Utah Book Award in poetry, and in 2026 the Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature. She is Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, where she teaches in the Creative Writing Program and directs the American West Center, which specializes in oral history work. Currently there she is working with K-12 students in rural and indigenous communities in dark-sky regions to create video poems that “celebrate the night sky.”
Her most recent collection, Heritance, pivots from the public and documentary history of West to intimate, lyric narratives about her life as daughter, artist, and partner, as well as what it means to wrestle with “the conundrum that is a hybrid identity.” In our fall 2026 conversation, we discussed the work of these new poems, sometimes prompted by the problem of a “complicated man,” as well as larger questions of how we respond to and are shaped by the forces of history, art, beauty, and “an ethical commitment to the very true and painful facts of the world.”
Lynnell Edwards: To begin with the very beginning, I’m always interested in epigraphs and the work they can do to provide context, establish a mood, or create texture in a poem or book. Would you say a little about your choice of book’s epigraph from Homer’s Odyssey: “Tell me about a complicated man.”
Paisley Rekdal: The collection is filled with various men who people might consider personally or aesthetically “complicated”: a manic-depressive neighbor; a morally dubious art professor; Ansel Adams; and my father, who suffered from anxiety and alcoholism late in life. I think most of the institutions I’ve been attached to could be described as “complicated” paternalistic structures as well—academia, the archive, the writing and art world. It’s not that I don’t have respect or even love for many of these men and institutions, it’s just that my relationship with them over time may best be described as “enthusiastically ambivalent.”
LE: A specific occasion of your relationships to “men and institutions” is the “morally dubious art professor” at the center of the extraordinary long poem “Whistlejacket.” The poem explores a fraught summer spent studying, as assigned, the well-known painting by George Stubbs of the horse by that name. The poem engages several themes that thread the book, most notably what it means to be an artist and how you understood, finally, “the true / power of beauty” of art as revealed by your long study of the painting. It’s both a very philosophical and incredibly personal poem. There’s a lot to say about it, but could you talk about your process of writing such an exemplary long poem: the choice to engage this subject as well as the research, the drafting, the revisions as the form and themes of it took shape?
PR: In many ways, the choice to write any poem isn’t mine. A poem starts with an image or a scene and a question that compels me to write. “Whistlejacket” is a picture that personally haunted me, largely because the painting is “about” its unfinished backdrop as much as it is about the horse it realistically depicts. I found myself writing and rewriting over the course of eight months. Frankly, I wasn’t even sure it would ever come together. It finally did once I admitted why I personally was attracted to the painting, which brought in the question of beauty and what we mean when we say a painting is beautiful, and how the term “beautiful” itself has often been weaponized to dismiss the art of women artists and writers. I’ve had one or two reviews of my work that have made snide comments about my work being “too pretty” (their words, not mine), and that charge has always interested me. What does it mean for a work of art to be beautiful, and does that mean that the work of art must be fundamentally dishonest or old fashioned in its representation of the world since it also privileges aesthetic pleasure? Oftentimes, I think we agree with an idea or are moved to empathize with a person we normally wouldn’t because the characterization of the idea or person is attractive to us. In that case, beauty has a useful moral component to it. The poem I wrote is really me wrestling with and defending my own aesthetic and purpose as a writer, and that wrestling is reflected in the tercets I chose to write in: to me, there’s something unbalanced and unfinished about a three-line stanza. In any case, I am committed to beauty, which I don’t see as frivolous but an ethical commitment to the very true and painful facts of the world I’m often writing about. Beauty allows you a space to look at and feel pain, to share in it, and if handled well these depictions aren’t voyeuristic but a way to validate pain’s existence and reality. That is what I understood the poem to finally be about, and it took ages of drafts and conversations with friends to help me realize it. I couldn’t have written this poem without time and space to keep considering it.
LE: Heritance in many ways continues your career-long exploration of identity, race, and history, or as the subtitle of your first collection of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (2000), puts it: “Observations on Not Fitting In.” I dipped back into that book as I thought about this conversation and was particularly intrigued by how your characterization of your mother has changed from your perception of her as a young woman since those essays frequently center on experiences in your twenties. What other ways do you see how your thinking and writing about those themes has . . . evolved? Changed? Expanded?
PR: As I get older, and as I find myself encountering what surely were similar frustrations to those my mother faced, my empathy for my mother has grown. I hopefully have expanded my thinking about the complications and nuances of biracial identity in America. I don’t think one ever “solves” the conundrum that is a hybrid identity, but the questions that arise when living through and inside of all these worlds certainly deepen. I wanted this book to tackle the many layers of feeling that continue to evolve from my relationship to myself and to my mother and her sense of self.
LE: West: A Translation documents in very public ways the intersections of identity—of the individual, of the community (particularly in regard to aspects of race)—with history vis a vis the building of the transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century. There are, though, glimpses, notably in the companion short prose pieces, of your own family’s history. Heritance, however, consists chiefly of longer, lyric poems, often addressing your relationships to family history and identity. It’s an intensely personal book, and perhaps not surprisingly, the words I found occurring often include “rage” (or “rages”) and “desire.” It’s not at all an angry book, but definitely unflinching. How do you see it in conversation with West and/or your other work?
PR: West is almost entirely persona poetry: the language (outside of the lyric-historical essays and three poems) comes from oral histories and archival documents. In many ways, the poems really don’t sound like me or what I would consider aesthetically pleasing, though I worked hard to make them sound good as I read them out loud. I think Heritance arrived quickly because I was finally able to write in a language and rhythm that was, inherently, my own, and so the book became an odd by-product of West and the desire to break free of its documentary constraints. That said, I think West was/is as much about this moment of time as the late nineteenth century, since so many issues around immigration, race, disease, environmental change, and executive overreach remain the same or similar. The transcontinental was also, I argue, a strange symbol of biracialism: it infrastructurally linked two halves of the nation together while also promising to link America to China through increased trade. It also was meant to heal the nation after the Civil War. Naturally, this got me thinking again about how the true complexity of any bi-whatever identity is having to live realistically between the various social fantasies that purportedly comprise each “side” of ourselves, and which often get weaponized against us. We are whole, even as we are still imagined to be divided. I wanted to explore the ways those divisions get—whether through family life, through art, or through social media—activated and exploited.
LE: “Memento” is one of those poems in Heritance that really gets at how, in this case, popular cultural artifacts force this examination of a divided identity. What is a Jamaican man doing with a “cast - / iron Aunt Jemima doll,” which is part of a greater collection of such items? The poem pivots to your own memory of a well-intended but misplaced childhood gift of Japanese dolls and your continued, complicated relationship to them. “Brawl” also considers the role popular/social media artifacts play in forcing difficult self-examination. Both of these poems seem to be asking questions about responsibility, guilt, and/or shame that we feel, inevitably, as consumers of this kind of highly public artifact. Both poems end on difficult, personal revelations that took me by surprise. Can you say more about those poems and perhaps the consequences of those “activated and exploited” artifacts?
PR: What I was interested in with both these poems is exploring the ugly, even instinctual attractions we might have to the very objects that dehumanize us, or which we collect even as they dehumanize others. On the one hand, when a Jamaican man or my Black biracial friend collects Aunt Jemima dolls, it is a comment on possession and ownership: by turning them into ironic objects they collect and display, purportedly they then can control the feelings of racial shame and social pain that they represent. They can stand outside of these images that supposedly “represent” them. But can they? When I as a child have geisha dolls gifted me by my white grandmother, do I also come to see myself in them, even as I learn to reject them as an adult? And how does living with and among these racist objects—years later—prime me for automatically granting humanity to the white woman and not Black men in an interracial dock fight I watch on social media, even as I recognize my emotional response is wrong? I think it’s comparatively easy to write a poem about racism when you are the victim of its language and violence—I am the one dehumanized, thus the sympathy of the reader should reside with me—but it’s much harder to admit that you might be part of the problem. As someone who might be read by many people as white, I have been primed my whole life to see at least part of myself as “other” to other people, even if I am not “other” to myself. I reject that self-objectification which tends towards self-hatred, even as I know that it’s also been acculturated in me outside my conscious control. We can’t control all our thoughts and emotions at the moment we feel them. But at the moment we feel them, we have to ask ourselves why and how these feelings have occurred. When I automatically reach for the racist keepsake to collect, when I find myself wincing in sympathy at seeing a white woman (who is clearly in the wrong) struck in an interracial fight, what am I finally expressing about myself, my loyalties, my sense of self and my cultural inheritance? Also, am I moved by the white woman’s race or her gender or both identities simultaneously? I’m aware that I inhabit at least three important identity positions simultaneously, and thus my sense of history and the world is refracted. It makes for discomfiting realities and admissions, and even more discomfiting poems. If I come across as an unlikeable speaker at times, it’s because I am. I know I am.
LE: West asks questions about how public history has been or can be written, as well as what the consequences of any one recorded and privileged history might be. But history is also a persistent subject in Heritance. Surely another one of those problematic men might be “Thucydides, father / of history, father of elegies” in the title poem about your father. Just preceding that in “The Choice” (also prompted by a memory of your father) you write: “history and family each / are games of chance.” From “Dulce et Decorum” (which considers, in another poem about your father, the truth and the lie of that Wilfred Owen poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”): “Where does history end and art begin / in the great sweep of our forgetting, / preserved inside a handful of facts . . .”. What did you discover (or hope to show) in Heritance about personal history as an identity-shaping force that is different from the documentary approach to writing a shared, public history? Is the fact that all of these quotes I’ve chosen come from poems about your father a coincidence, or is there something uniquely paternal about the force of history?
PR: I think history is always a narrative act, and whether that is done via autobiographical lyrics, documentary poetry, or conventional history writing, we are always artfully shaping how we see people and events through the use of figurative language. The only real difference is in the attention we pay to the language being used to write history. Documentary poetry usually and implicitly asks readers to examine how institutions (via the people who represent them) create the types of language through which we “see” the events and people being documented. That language usually constrains the agency of the documented, and also our imagination of the documented. Lyric poetry allows for the historicized/documented subject to speak for herself, and so with Heritance, I wanted readers to pay attention to the nuances of psychological expression that my lyric voice allows for. Of course, the language I choose to write in is deeply important, but because I’m not constrained by the language of how other people see me, I’m freer to express how I see the world.
History writing, in comparison, is meant to be “invisible” stylistically: it’s merely statements of objective fact. But those facts have been syntactically shaped, narratively connected, personally selected, and often even figuratively represented. Still, the conventional assumption that history is objective and lyric-narrative poetry like Heritance, say, is subjective speaks to your final question about whether there is something paternalistic to our ideas about history. When I was in graduate school for medieval studies, it really struck me how many of the History majors sneered at the English majors in the program, using words like “emotional” and “subjective” to describe our reactions to the ecclesiastical texts we were close reading. Interestingly, almost all the History majors were male, almost all the English majors were female. You can see where I’m going here. Myself, I don’t believe that history writing or the field of history is inherently “male” (and it is rarely “unemotional”), even as I suspect we have aligned it stereotypically with certain aspects of self we have selectively imagined are male. I think this is another reason we should always question how histories are produced. What are we acculturated into believing are “objective” perspectives and why? What documents do we give more weight to and why? What kinds of language do we treat with the most authority and why? And as we all live inside of history and consider the force of history upon our lives, what stereotypes do we instinctively keep alive because they have—whether we like it or not—become embedded within us? It takes a lot of conscious work to decide what familial and social values we want to keep and to reject. We’re all historians to some degree or another, and all participating in history. Even as we speak only as ourselves, we are together creating a shared public history.
LE: Heritance is newly released but I imagine you’ve already had opportunities to share the work at public readings and in classrooms. What has surprised or pleased you about readers’ responses to the book or to particular poems?
PR: I’ve been pleased that people like the two long poems, “Dulce et Decorum” and “Whistlejacket”: that surprises me. I’m also surprised, however, when someone says the poems are shockingly revealing. I don’t find them to be that way, but perhaps because I haven’t written so openly about myself before, they come across as too intimate.
Lynnell Edwards is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently The Bearable Slant of Light (Red Hen Press, 2024). She serves as faculty in poetry for the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing as well as book reviews editor for Good River Review. Read her review of West: A Translation at Good River Review. More about Lynnell and her work at https://www.lynnelledwards.com.