Paisley Rekdal
Genre
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Appropriate: A Provocation
3 editions
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published
2021
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Nightingale
3 editions
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published
2019
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The Best American Poetry 2020 (The Best American Poetry series)
by
5 editions
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published
2020
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The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In
9 editions
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published
2000
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Imaginary Vessels
by
3 editions
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published
2016
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Animal Eye (Pitt Poetry Series)
5 editions
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published
2012
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West: A Translation
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Intimate: An American Family Photo Album
4 editions
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published
2012
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The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (Pitt Poetry Series)
4 editions
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published
2007
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The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam
3 editions
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published
2017
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“Writers take and remake everything we see around us: we metabolize the details of our loved ones, alter time and memory, shapeshift our personal and physical differences into transformative images that, when done with care, can create a world that feels more than accurate, but real. Doing this requires that we watch and listen to one another with great attention, something we’re generally discouraged from doing lest we come off as stalkers. From the time we’re children, we’re taught it’s rude to stare, nosy to eavesdrop; you can’t just root around in other people’s journals and closets and minds. I can’t ask my colleagues what they really think and feel about their marriages or children, because that’s private, and privacy requires that I pretend to believe what both strangers and loved ones tell me. Being polite means, ironically, paying less attention to the people I want to be close to, bypassing their foibles and idiosyncrasies and quiet outrages in the name of communal goodwill. But writing requires we pay attention to others at a level that can only be classified as rude. The writer sees the button trailing by its single thread on the pastor’s shirt; she tastes the acid sting behind a mother’s compliment. To observe closely leads the writer to the radical recognition of what both binds her to and separates her from others. It will push her to hear voices she’s been taught should remain silent. Oftentimes, these voices, and these truths, reveal something equally powerful, and profoundly unsettling, about ourselves. I want to end this letter to you by proposing something that some critics and sociologists might reject out of hand, which is the possibility that White people, too, might, by paying close attention to the voices around them and inside themselves, be able to experience double consciousness. If double consciousness is in part based on the understanding of the systemic power of Whiteness, and if it is also the realization that one’s self-regard can never be divorced from the gaze of others, then the practice of double consciousness might be available to everyone, including those who constitute the majority.”
― Appropriate: A Provocation
― Appropriate: A Provocation
“Language doesn’t heal terror and if it brings us closer to imagining the sufferer’s experience, this too doesn’t necessarily make us feel greater compassion, but desire for further sensation. If we cannot articulate pain beyond inspiring in the listener a need for revenge, we only speak of and to the body.”
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“If I could not have made this garden beautiful
I wouldn’t understand your suffering,
nor care for each the same, inflamed way.
I would have to stay only like the bees,
beyond consciousness, beyond
self-reproach, fingers dug down hard
into stone, and growing nothing.
There is no end to ego,
with its museum of disappointments.
- Happiness”
―
I wouldn’t understand your suffering,
nor care for each the same, inflamed way.
I would have to stay only like the bees,
beyond consciousness, beyond
self-reproach, fingers dug down hard
into stone, and growing nothing.
There is no end to ego,
with its museum of disappointments.
- Happiness”
―
Topics Mentioning This Author
topics | posts | views | last activity | |
---|---|---|---|---|
21st Century Lite...: 2014 National Book Award | 27 | 178 | Nov 20, 2014 07:59AM | |
The Book Club: Books and Authors in the Media | 71 | 107 | Jan 14, 2015 01:36PM |
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