Hi.
Wow.
Yeah.
Just to say if you're watching this later on there's
a great crowd here and it's really nice
to look out and see all of you.
So we're so pleased to welcome Paisley Rekdal here tonight.
This is a visit that was delayed since spring 2020, I think,
so finally happening.
Paisley is joining us from Salt Lake City where
she's a distinguished professor of English at the University
of Utah as well as the director of the university's American
West Center.
From 2017 until earlier this year
she was Utah's Poet Laureate.
Her voluminous list of publications
includes seven books of poetry, most recently West:
A Translation and Nightingale, and also
four books of nonfiction.
West is just recently announced to be
on the long list for the 2023 National Book Awards.
So yeah.
Woo.
So we can all be cheering for that to win.
At the end of "Nightingale: A Gloss,"
a lyric essay at the center of her collection, Nightingale,
Rekdal writes, "I stand in the field.
I whistle back."
Rekdal is whistling back to a bird who
mimics human song that she encounters in an artist's
residency, but she's also whistling back
across the history of poetry towards Ovid's Metamorphoses,
considering the fragmented song of lyric time and the threat
of transformation, often violent,
always complicated, that runs through it.
Much of Rekdal as a writer is encompassed
by these two short sentences.
"I stand in the field.
I whistle back."
Across her poetry and nonfiction Rekdal
stands in the field of human life and culture.
Her poems spring from inquiry in Nightingale
into violence, language, and transformation
through Ovid's text.
In West: A Translation into American history and racism
through the Transcontinental Railroad
and the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Rekdal's investigations are both into fact and meaning.
Her poems inhabit complexity delving
far beneath the surface.
From her place there in the field of inquiry,
Rekdal then whistles back, her voice
on the page as nimble and musical
as the bird she encounters.
As a reader I'm drawn to the craft of Rekdal's poems,
sound and life and sentence all alive on the page.
I'm also drawn to the many voices through
and towards whom she sings, her song responding to myth,
history, and human experience.
Through her own engagement, she prompts
us to consider how we too might stand in the field
and whistle back.
So we're so fortunate to have Paisley Rekdal with us tonight
and I hope you'll join me in welcoming her.