The Chinese poem I chose for “West” is part of a dialogic pair that elegize a fellow Chinese detainee who committed suicide at Angel Island. While I only translate one of these poems, I used mirroring and linking as formal tropes for “West,” a poem that was commissioned by Utah’s Spike 150 Committee to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental’s completion. 

Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction and seven books of poetry, including Nightingale (2019), Appropriate: A Provocation (2021), and, most recently, West: A Translation (2023). She is the editor and creator of the digital archive projects West, Mapping Literary Utah, and Mapping Salt Lake City. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes, the Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and various state arts council awards. The former Utah poet laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah where she directs the American West Center.

Immigration questionnaire given to Chinese claiming to be former US residents, or for Chinese entering the country during the Chinese Exclusion Act

Have you ridden in a streetcar?
Can you describe the taste of bread?
Where are the joss houses located in the city?
Do Jackson Street and Dupont
run in a circle or a line, what is the fruit
your mother ate before she bore you,
how many letters a year
do you receive from your father?
Of which material is his ancestral hall now built?
How many water buffalo
does your uncle own? Do you love him?
Do you hate her? What kind of bird sang
at your parents’ wedding?
What are the birth dates
for each of your cousins; did your brother die
from starvation, work, or murder?
Do you know the price of tea?
Have you ever touched a stranger’s face
as he slept? Did it snow the year
you first wintered in the desert? How much weight
is a bucket and a hammer? Which store
is opposite your grandmother’s?
Did you sleep with that man
for money? Did you sleep with that man
for love? Name the color and number
of all your mother’s dresses. Now
your village’s rivers.
What diseases of the heart
do you carry? What country do you see
when you think of your children?
Does your sister ever write?
In which direction does her front door face?
How many steps did you take
when you finally left her? How far did you walk
before you looked back?

Artist Reflection

My digital poem “West: A Translation” links the building of the transcontinental railroad with the Chinese Exclusion Act by using a poem carved into the walls of Angel Island Immigration Station as its formal “spine” to examine the transcontinental’s cultural impact on America. Exclusion and the railroad are paired events, since the Chinese were eagerly recruited to build the railroad, then, after its completion, legally excluded from entering the country.

The Chinese poem I chose for “West” is part of a dialogic pair that elegize a fellow Chinese detainee who committed suicide at Angel Island. While I only translate one of these poems, I used mirroring and linking as formal tropes for “West,” a poem that was commissioned by Utah’s Spike 150 Committee to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental’s completion. 

The individual poems themselves are a hybrid of the documentary and the speculative, the imagined and real. Hybridity occurs when the language of poetry must extend from the limitations of fact, in essence, completing what the original historical texts I relied upon leave blank. Rupture and loss might be seen—from a historian’s point of view—as flaws in the record. But for the poet, they offer opportunities to create alternative texts to both poetry and history themselves. 

West is also a book recently published from Copper Canyon Press. The book splits into two parts: the first the collection of poems on the site, the second part a series of short historio-lyric essays that function as notes for each of the poems. You can read all the notes as one long essay, or you can read each note only against its accompanying poem. Either way, the reader is forced to see how different texts mirror and speak to each other. Though I do not translate both Chinese poems carved on Angel Island’s walls, in effect, I reproduce the *presence* of both poems, since the site and book, note and poem, each formally call to the existence of another connecting text.