Educator and poet Paisley Rekdal was pleasantly surprised to get a second chance to speak in Colorado Springs.

A distinguished professor at the University of Utah and Director of the American West Center, Rekdal gave a lecture at Colorado College on Wednesday after her originally planned speech at the Air Force Academy was canceled following criticisms of President Donald Trump. 

“I didn’t think I was going to be here,” Rekdal said to start her remarks to the audience of over 100 people. “This has been quite a long, strange couple of weeks.”

Rekdal thanked Colorado College for hosting the event and also thanked the Air Force Academy in not a “snarky way” because it was “brave of them to think about fighting me.”

The timing of her lecture was particularly poignant given the day’s events.

Rekdal told The Gazette after her speech that she made adjustments to her remarks just before starting due, in part, to the killing of Charlie Kirk, who was the CEO and co-founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, at Utah Valley University earlier on Wednesday. 

Rekdal described what happened as “horrifying” and removed the reading of a poem about a sudden act of violence. 

“We should be able to disagree with each other without resorting to murder. … Though I disagreed with what Kirk believed vehemently, I think what happened to him was a true tragedy and should have never happened,” Rekdal told The Gazette. 

Rekdal said the act “sent a little bit of a panic through her” but then was upset about being worried about it initially. She described this moment in history as “dangerous” because of pressures on both sides to “not express ourselves.”

“You cannot have a functioning democracy without having free speech and free access to ideas,” Rekdal said. “You have to have that, there’s no other way.”

Through her speech she covered readings from some of her books and spoke about how people’s values are changing or being complicit with the ways they wish or do not wish through the lens of war and memorializing it. 

“I just wanted to get people to think about how is it that we’re all attached to institutions, whether it’s educational institutions or cultural institutions, or historical memories that we do and don’t want to persevere,” Rekdal told The Gazette.

Several of the poems she read were from her book “West: A Translation” which has a series of poems made up from historically translated records and accounts about the Chinese experience of workers on the Transcontinental Railroad. 

From that book, Rekdal read a poem to the audience that she said she would not have done at the Air Force Academy, which combined different texts into one poem.

The contrapuntal poem titled “Sad” used a speech from President Andrew Jackson and Trump and together made sentences like, “but this is a country for white men, sorry, women, thank you for that big victory!” “I feel confident you agree to the same great doctrine, except for possibly Abraham Lincoln.” “If these are your tender mercies, God, trust me. There will be no lies.”