[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so- wow.
There are a lot of people here.
[LAUGHS] That's terrifying.
[LAUGHTER]
So thank you all for coming out.
Thank you for having me here.
I want a big thank you to the Poetry Center,
to Tyler, to Paola, to Julie, to everyone who's
made my time here so fun and rich--
and all the students I got to meet.
I really appreciate it.
I [LAUGHS] brought my own Halls Mentho-Lyptus relief
because I've already had two coughing fits from the dust
here.
And I had a cold, but it's not COVID.
So we're starting really, really great on this reading.
[LAUGHTER]
But I just want to warn you, if you
start seeing me like digging in this bag, it's not cocaine.
[LAUGHTER]
I had wine before this started, and I can
see that was a huge mistake.
But I want to talk to you today a little bit about this project
before I start playing it, and this
is a reading that's a little unusual because you're
going to tell me where we go.
So I was Utah's poet laureate, and during my tenure
as poet laureate, we were celebrating
Utah, the 150th commemoration of the completion
of the Transcontinental Railroad.
I myself am biracial.
I'm half Chinese, half Norwegian,
and I wanted to do that justice.
I wanted to think about the railroad's history,
not from the sort of traditional commemoration
as a triumphal moment of American modernism
and progressive values, but to think about the laborers who
actually built this railroad.
I wanted to see this also through the lens
of Chinese exclusion because basically
after the Transcontinental was completed, 13 years later--
1882-- the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed into law.
And it stayed in effect until 1943.
This is an act that affected all of the lives
of Chinese-American families on the West Coast.
I can tell you that.
And so I wanted to take a poem that
was carved into the walls of Angel Island--
a Chinese poem that eulogizes a fellow detainee who committed
suicide during his detention in Angel Island
during the Chinese Exclusion Act.
And I take that poem, and I translate
it character by character through the stories
of Transcontinental workers and also
the cultural impact of the railroad.