Not too surprising that a leftist feminist poet would disparage the Commander in Chief of the military, but really the question is, why does a military warfighting academy need to bring in poets to speak to cadets? Also let’s face it, there are not many conservative, pro-military poets out there so the cadets would only be hearing from left-leaning ones.
By Mary Shinn | Colorado Springs Gazette
Air Force Academy officials have canceled an upcoming annual lecture after discovering the speaker’s online history of disparaging President Donald Trump, prompting serious concern from the donor who supports the series.
Academy alumnus David Jannetta started funding the series in 2008 to bring in writers and artists that have contributed to the understanding of war and encourage critical thinking among cadets.
When Superintendent Lt. Gen. Tony Bauernfeind called Jannetta on Friday to tell him that the school had decided it was not appropriate for University of Utah professor Paisley Rekdal to speak as scheduled in September because she had made disparaging remarks about Trump, Jannetta said he was disappointed and taken aback.
Jannetta said the superintendent told him that while Rekdal had a right to express her opinions, it was not appropriate for her to appear at a military academy.
“I won’t support a lecture series, where again, the author has to pass some muster of a litmus test for political reasons,” said Jannetta, who planned to discuss his charitable giving further with the academy’s Association of Graduates while visiting in September.
Jannetta said he was inspired to start the series after seeing Joseph Heller, the author of “Catch-22,” appear at the school while he was a cadet. “Catch-22” is a satire of modern warfare and bureaucracy set during World War II.
“It was striking to me … how much this institution must have confidence in itself to bring a book like this to the cadets and have them study it,” he said.
In the past, a speaker’s politics have not played a role in planning the series and, Jannetta said, he won’t support the lectures if that’s the case going forward. But the academy said Tuesday it was canceling the speech in an effort to remain apolitical.
The academy said in an official statement that it canceled the lecture because of Rekdal’s comments about the president.
“While we welcome and will continue to invite speakers who encourage vigorous debate on a variety of subjects, we have chosen not to move forward with this engagement consistent with the U.S. Air Force Academy’s non-partisan obligation.”
The academy went on to say the Jannetta Lecture Series has been a valuable component of the school’s offerings by bringing in writers and artists to contribute to the intellectual development of cadets.
“We are currently reviewing our speaker selection process to ensure it is consistent, thorough and aligned with our standards, and we look forward to hosting an iteration of the lecture series at a later date,” the statement said.
As part of the speaker series in 2014, the academy hosted Roxana Robinson, the author of “Sparta” who grew up in a Quaker community and questioned whether war was moral, Jannetta said. It was a tough conversation for some cadets.
USAF 2nd LT: “It’s thanks to the Air Force Academy that I currently have an anti-war stance.”
“The more cadets are challenged, the better leaders they are going to be,” said Jannetta, who has attended all the lectures.
Rekdal had planned to discuss how wars are memorialized using portions of her book, “The Broken Country,” and her poetry. Some war memorials can simplify the conflict, focusing on the reason for the war. Others, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a black granite wall listing the names of the fallen in Washington, D.C., ask the visitor to consider how they “stand in relationship to the enduring wounds of war,” she explained.
American artist and architect Maya Lin designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and listed the names of casualties by their date of death to give visitors a sense of the timeline, Rekdal said.
“She was thinking about the nature of time and grief.”
Rekdal’s book explores the legacy of the Vietnam War and the psychological wounds it inflicted. It covers the story of a Vietnamese man, Kiet Thanh Ly, who stabbed several people in a grocery store parking lot in 2012, and explores how that crime fits more broadly into the war’s trauma, according to the official summary of the book.
Telling the stories of the Vietnamese broadens understanding about those who were our allies and who immigrated to the U.S. to become Americans, she said.
“History is better served when we hear more people’s stories,” said Rekdal, who comes from a family with many service members.
The academy representative who informed Rekdal her September lecture had been canceled did not give her the official reason, she said.
In a public post on social media, Rekdal said she was told by a faculty member that high-ranking military supervisors at the academy Googled her, found something out about her, her book or her poems and ordered the lecture to be canceled.
An earlier post on Rekdal’s Facebook feed references the president and executive orders: “If you care about free speech at all, Trump’s newest EO targeting student protests and—effectively—all international and/or undocumented students is not just unconstitutional but one more move towards authoritarianism.”
After finding out about the cancelation, Rekdal said in her public post, she was unsurprised by it, noting it is happening to more and more speakers.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression tracks attempts to block lectures on college campuses and has found they have been happening more frequently for about a decade, said Sean Stevens, chief research adviser for the group. Attempts to block events dipped in 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic when fewer in-person events were held.
“We are very concerned with the increasing number of attempts and the sheer volume of them — there is roughly one every two to three days a week now on a campus somewhere,” Stevens said.
The U.S. Naval Academy is among the institutions that have canceled a lecture. The school canceled Ryan Holiday, a best-selling author, because he refused to remove slides from a presentation critiquing the school for removing almost 400 books.
Following the Air Force Academy cancellation, Jannetta said he planned to personally apologize to Rekdal.
First published in the Colorado Springs Gazette
Rekdal’s response
USAFA Department of English & Fine Arts
War, Literature, and the Arts Lecture
Endowed by U.S. Air Force Academy graduate David L. Jannetta, the Jannetta Lecture brings to the school respected writers and artists who have contributed to our understanding of war.
Past lectures have included:
- Sept. 16, 2024 Maj Gen Jason Armagost, author of Things to Pack When You’re Bound for Baghdad
- Sept. 13, 2023 Luke Mogelson, author of The Storm is Here: America on the Brink
- Sept. 7, 2022 Poets Brian Turner and Dunya Mikhail
- Sept. 8, 2021 Elliott Ackerman, author of Places and Names
- Sept. 10, 2019 Dan O’Brien, author of The Body of an American
- Sept. 19, 2018 Suzan-Lori Parks, author of Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3)
- Sept. 12, 2017 Sara Novć, author of Girl at War
- Sep. 13, 2016 Alex Kershaw, author ofThe Liberator
- Sept. 8, 2015 Brian Turner, author of My Life as a Foreign Country
- Sept. 9, 2014 Roxana Robinson, author of Sparta
- Sept. 10, 2013 Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
- Sept. 12, 2012 Doug Stanton, author of Horse Soldiers
- Sept. 13, 2011 Mark Bowden, author of Blackhawk Down
- Sept. 14, 2010 Benjamin Busch, actor, writer, film maker and photographer
- Oct. 13, 2009 John Balaban, author of twelve books of poetry and prose
- April 30, 2009 Brian Turner, author of Here Bullet
- April 3, 2008 Tobias Wolff, author of In Pharaoh’s Army
Few of her poetry books
Nightingale
“Here, Rekdal translates pain into redemption, so that a loss is not an ending but a transformation, in this riveting poetic alchemy.” ―Publishers Weekly, starred review “Nightingale explores what few writers since Ovid have reminded us: metamorphosis is a violent act, requiring dismemberment, silence, and fragmentation before we can become something new.” ―New York Journal of Books Nightingale is a book about change. This collection radically rewrites and contemporizes many of the myths central to Ovid’s epic, The Metamorphoses, Rekdal’s characters changed not by divine intervention but by both ordinary and extraordinary human events. In Nightingale, a mother undergoes cancer treatments at the same time her daughter transitions into a son; a woman comes to painful terms with her new sexual life after becoming quadriplegic; a photographer wonders whether her art is to blame for her son’s sudden illness; and a widow falls in love with her dead husband’s dog. At the same time, however, the book includes more intimate lyrics that explore personal transformation, culminating in a series of connected poems that trace the continuing effects of sexual violence and rape on survivors. Nightingale updates many of Ovid’s subjects while remaining true to the Roman epic’s tropes of violence, dismemberment, silence, and fragmentation. Is change a physical or a spiritual act? Is transformation punishment or reward, reversible or permanent? Does metamorphosis literalize our essential traits, or change us into something utterly new? Nightingale investigates these themes, while considering the roles that pain, violence, art, and voicelessness all play in the changeable selves we present to the world.
(STARRS NOTE: Marxism’s end goal is to create chaos and violently destroy (society, civilization, family, etc) in order to build anew.)
A Crash of Rhinos
“In A Crash of Rhinos reason and the uncensored disclosures of excited speech coexist with astonishing intensity. The American language seems suddenly, single-handedly revitalized. The poems are passionate, sexual, demonic. They are ceaselessly inventive. They are beautiful.” — Mark Strand ― former Poet Laureate of the United States
Appropriate: A Provocation
A timely, nuanced work that dissects the thorny debate around cultural appropriation and the literary imagination. How do we properly define cultural appropriation, and is it always wrong? If we can write in the voice of another, should we? And if so, what questions do we need to consider first? . . .
West: A Translation
“Through these poems, readers are asked to wrestle with the complex, layered histories of race, creed, class, and gender that are all too often overlooked in monolithic presentations of America’s past and present. Elegiac and shot through with righteous anger, this essential collection demands a national reckoning.”—Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
Six Girls without Pants
“Paisley Rekdal’s poems are so gleefully omnivorous! From Caravaggio’s eye to the politics of Iraq, from the passions of St. Theresa (pierced by ‘God’s slick mystery’) to an impromptu nude summertime swim . . . her poems are smart, audacious, funny, angry, sexy, urban, pastoral, feminist, intimate, public, creative in form, and painstaking in language. The result is a delight.” (Albert Goldbarth)
The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam
With subtlety and insight, with precision and passion, Paisley Rekdal explores the consequences of the Vietnam War for Vietnamese, Americans, and herself. The result is The Broken Country, a moving and often gripping meditation on the fallout of war, from violence and racism to melancholy and trauma. — Viet Thanh Nguyen ― author of The Refugees
More from her Facebook page:
This event featured a drag queen reading.
The Air Force Academy doesn’t need this.
Leave a Comment