007 – Chatting with Paisley Rekdal
“Anything that looks like a kind of minstrelsy generally is…”
We’re chatting with Paisley Rekdal!! We’re featuring Rekdal’s performance of West: A Translation at City of Asylum back in September 2019, as well as a recent interview with Rekdal in support of her newest book Appropriate: A Provocation. We’re also talking The Ferrante Project, when it’s okay to wear a sombrero, and how not to be a jerk about appropriation.
Paisley Rekdal is an American poet who is currently serving as Poet Laureate of Utah. She is the author of a book of essays entitled The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In, the memoir Intimate, as well as five books of poetry. For her work, she has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including but not limited to a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship among others… She has been recognized for her poems and essays in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Tin House, the Best American Poetry series, and on National Public Radio, to name a few.
We’ll also get into country music, the epistolary form, using pseudonyms to write soft-core pornography, as well as what we’re reading, and some thoughts for the road!
A quick summary of what to expect…
- Intro/Welcome
- Rekdal’s Bio
- Episode Summary
- from the ARCHIVE: Paisley Rekdal introduces West: A Translation (CoA on 9/2/19)
- Karla and Adriana preview what’s to come
- The rest of Rekdal’s performance of West: A Translation
- An interview between Adriana and Rekdal (edited for clarity)
- Karla and Adriana debrief on appropriation
- What Are We Reading?
- Remedios for the Road
- Goodbye and outro
Episode Links
- West: A Translation
- Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson
- Appropriate: A Provocation
- The scandal over Anders Carlson-Wee
- Montaigne
- Dutch Cowboy Song from Eurovision
- Percival Everett’s The Appropriation of Cultures
- Backlash after Beyonce Performs at the CMAs
- Edward Banchs’s Heavy Metal Africa
- That Time Lionel Shriver Wore a Sombrero
- The Ferrante Project
- What’s going on with all the white scholars who try to pass as Black?
- Frida Kahlo Style
- Sabrina and Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
- When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through
- Look, a racist and problematic item that really exists:
How to Listen
You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on Google Podcasts, on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, on your favorite podcast app, or via the RSS feed at https://anchor.fm/s/51c8d038/podcast/rss.
Many thanks to Luis Alfonso for the music in this episode. Image credit to City of Asylum.
Thanks for listening!
