Date of Award
Summer 2025
Document Type
Open Access Thesis
Department
English Language and Literatures
First Advisor
Susan Vanderborg
Abstract
In 2018, Paisley Rekdal was commissioned to write a poem in honor of the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad’s completion. The result was the digital site West: A Translation. She later published the print version, in which a notes section is added following the previous poems. These lyric notes help us understand how Rekdal uses alternate documents, including private documents, memories, and nonverbal objects to compensate for the lack of documentation of Chinese railroad workers and fight anti-Chinese racism. Focusing on one of the citational poems in the West collection, “能 / Able,” along with its note, this thesis discusses how the West project expands Michael Leong’s idea of documental poetry.
Rights
© 2025, Jiaming Wu
Recommended Citation
Wu, J.(2025). Rekdal’s West: Blurring the Boundary of Documental Poetry. (Master's thesis). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/8407