Roy Miki, Flow: Poems Collected and New, edited by Michael Barnholden

All Roy Miki’s collected poetry and critical writing swirls around one historical maelstrom, but without sinking into it, the general terms of which Giorgio Agamben pessimistically diagnosed as “the new biopolitical nomos [law, custom] of the planet” (176): the concentration camp. Miki lived through one specific form of its apparatus as a Canadian child, his family forcibly removed from Haney, B.C. to Ste. Agathe, Manitoba during the Second World War, the repercussions of which, due to displacement and financial loss, internment, and coerced racialized identity as Japanese Canadians, instigated a context and reality of social trauma for tens of thousands of people. Today, the optimistic legal outcome and renown of his social justice and cultural activism remain of precedent-setting significance for all, and in particular for communities still extricating themselves from Peacekeeping Canada’s sordid domestic history of conflating race with citizenship and democracy with unacknowledged racism. (Louis Cabri, “Floward”)

New in the series of “collected poems” editions that Vancouver publisher Talonbooks has been producing over the past few years (including collections by Fred Wah [see my review of such here], Daphne Marlatt, Phyllis Webb, Nancy Shaw [see my review of such here], Roy K. Kiyooka and Artie Gold) is Vancouver poet, editor, literary critic and cultural activist Roy Miki’s Flow: Poems Collected and New, edited by Michael Barnholden (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2018). Flow: Poems Collected and New encompasses some six hundred pages of work by Miki, covering all five of his published poetry collections—saving face: poems selected, 1976-1988 (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1991), random access file (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1995), Surrender (winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry; Toronto ON: Mercury Press, 2001), There (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2006) and Mannequin Rising (New Star Books, 2011)[see my review of such here]—as well as a healthy selection of uncollected work under the header “Cloudy and Clear (2018).”

SEAWALL NOTES

1

Cast line

    initiates

perambulation

Figures emerge

    ease of

permutation

Inclinations

    brought

to moment

2

Lone heron

    waives

breakfast signs

Flutter wings

    pose

take flight

3

Diffuse light

    low

hanging

Cloud lining

    fog hint

supple lens

Miki’s is a poetry that might have emerged through an interest in studying literature, but developed as an indirect means to articulate and engage with some of his other literary and cultural works, including his lengthy battle for redress from the Canadian government for Japanese Canadians. It becomes fascinating to see how Miki’s poetry, then, exists in parallel, or even in response to his other works, existing entirely in tandem with his critical and cultural works. In the introduction to his lengthy interview at the end of the collection, “Inter View,” editor Michael Barnholden speaks to what he calls the “multiplicity” of Miki’s work:

            Since then I have come to see that multiplicity is the key to all of Roy’s work: there’s a lot going on and Roy always wants to get it right. He’s also a public intellectual through his writing, editing, publishing, and teaching. A quick look at his bibliography suggests a seemingly impossible breadth and depth. Sure, there is the poetry, but there is also the scholarly work on William Carlos Williams, bpNichol, Roy Kiyooka, and George Bowering, a couple of volumes on groundbreaking literary criticism, activist archival, and political work, even a children’s book written with his wife, Slavia Miki. And to those accomplishments we must add editor of Line magazine, later merging with West Coast Review to become West Coast Line, and publisher of a chapbook series, pomflit, with Irene Niechoda. And of course there is his long and storied career as a teacher. A list of students he has influenced, who have gone on to accomplish much with his help and guidance, would be lengthy. I consider myself lucky to have been among that company. Oh yes, and when he retired from teaching full-time, he taught himself digital collage technique.

I quite like that the collection ends with an interview with Miki, a focus on his own words on his work that I appreciate, providing multiple insights and entrances into his writing and thinking:

M: Those early poems in saving face are connected to scholarship because they have an archival component. You are looking at an archival document, your parent’s internment ID card, and the poem begins to compose in ten parts. Once you find that method of composition, it seems to me that your scholarly pursuits lead to your poetic pursuits. They inform your poetic pursuits in many ways.

R: Yes, I’ve tried not to separate the two activities. Poetry as research and research for poetry have been mutual concerns. An obvious connection can be seen in the various poems I’ve written using found language from my archival research. Sometimes I’ve simply restructured some found text in poetic lines, as for instance, “higher learning,” albeit with the addition of a title. Other times I’ve inserted found texts in a poem.

What becomes clear very quickly, as any reader of Miki’s already knows, his is a poetry of syntax and politics, and one that engages with collage, overlap and collision, writing out short phrases, images and sketches intended to interact with and against each other. The perception of a single image is forced to shift in even the most subtle ways through the interaction of what might follow. Since his retirement from teaching, this collage-element has simply become more overt with his work in digital collage, something he has incorporated into his poetry, and are included as part of the collection. His work had long been grounded in image, even incorporating photographs from his personal archive in early works, but, over the years, the blend has become more complex, overt and far more subtle. Despite all of this engagement and multiplicity, there is something wonderfully understated about Miki’s writing, something that, unfortunately, has possibly caused his poetry fly under the radar of a wider Canadian readership, even against the fact that his Surrender won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. And yet, Miki’s poems are, in their own way, a forceful, consistent calm against a series of raging storms, and very much worth engaging, and sinking slowly into. “without reading,” he writes, in the poem “KIYOOKA,” “there is // no body[.]” The poem continues:

dis     sem      blance

paternal sputter

let the utter &

outer skin

to skin

Poetry Connection, curated by Fred Wah,

During his tenure as Parliamentary Poet Laureate, Vancouver poet Fred Wah curated a video series of twenty-one poets for the sake of teaching contemporary Canadian poetry to high school students. The videos and accompanying write-ups are now online, including one with my very own self, reading two poems from Songs for little sleep, (2012) off the back deck of our former Centretown apartment. Check out the entire series, below:

Poetry Connection
Link Up with Canadian Poetry

“One of my projects as Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate is to produce a series of short videos to help make contemporary Canadian poetry more accessible. These recordings illustrate a range of poetry that reflects the identity, places and modes of poetic writing in Canada.” – Fred Wah

Visit Poetry Connection on YouTube to view the Poet Laureate’s video series, and download the PDFs below to learn more about the featured poets and their work. The PDF files also include the text of the poems, as well as discussion topics and writing ideas.

Aisha Sasha John
Annharte Baker
Christian Bök
Colin Smith
Daphne Marlatt
Darren Wershler
Douglas Barbour
Fred Wah
Gail Scott
George Bowering
Jay MillAr
Joanne Arnott
JR Carpenter
Meredith Quartermain
Oana Avasilichioaei
Rita Wong and Larissa Lai
rob mclennan
Roy Miki
Sina Queyras
Steven Ross Smith
Stuart Ross

Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21st Century, Vol. 3, ed. Roger Farr

The proliferation of anthologies of “contemporary poetics,” in the Anglophone world, began some time in the late eighties, climaxed in the late nineties and early noughts, and is, judging by a search of major library holdings, currently in the midst of its dénouement. The cultural history behind this arc probably warrants its own book. From a distance, it appears to follow closely the rise and fall of “Theory” in the academy, with “poetics” apparently having a bit more tenacity than its more visible double. It is also the case, however, that in many circles, what passes under the sign of “poetics” today is not the same as what is regarded as “theory.” Although these modes of literary discourse share certain elements and features (meta-discursivity, a frequently defamiliarizing style, an abandonment of the liberal prohibition on “bias,” a secondary status in relation to “primary” literary texts, etc.), this collection, like many others, adds an important distinction: here, “poetics” appears to be a kind of para-discourse, or dopplegänger—one who walks beside. “Poetics” in this sense refers to a discourse about poetry made by poets themselves, which gives it a unique relationship to its “object of study,” if not always unique methodologies. While this distinction between poetics and theory can not, and probably should not, be universalized into a general principle, it is worth pausing on the fact that in the writing collected here, our attention is always drawn back to the poem itself—even if only to defamiliarize that object again and again. (Roger Farr, “Introduction”)

Roger Farr’s Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21st Century, Vol. 3 (Vancouver BC: CUE Books, 2013) closes a trilogy of texts of contemporary avant-garde poetry, following previous volumes Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21^st Century (CUE Books, 2008) and Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21^st Century, Vol. 2 (CUE Books, 2009). Deliberately built as a single unit made up of three works, the idea appears as an extension of literary readings, as Farr wrote to end the introduction for the first (and second) volume: “Between September 2008 and October 2009, the time measured by this volume of the Open Text series, the fifteen writers assembled here read from their work at Capilano University as part of our ongoing reading series. This is a record of what transpired.” The books and the reading series, it would seem, both provide an opportunity for dissemination, reading and conversation from a similar aesthetic and series of impulses, one as extension of the other. The first volume includes writing by Annharte, Oana Avasilichioaei, George Bowering, Rob Budde, Louis Cabri, Peter Culley, Jeff Derksen, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Maxine Gadd, Claire Huot & Robert Majzels, Larissa Lai, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Donato Mancini, Jamie Reid, Darren Wershler, Lissa Wolsak and Rita Wong, and the second includes writing by Ken Belford, Clint Burnham, Edward Byrne, Stephen Collis, Phinder Dulai, Emily Fedoruk, Christine Leclerc, Daphne Marlatt, Roy Miki, Fred Wah, Wayde Compton, Jordan Scott, Reg Johanson, Angela Carr, Kim Duff and Shirley Bear. It makes for an impressive list, and an enviable reading series, one I wish I lived much, much closer to. The third volume is used to close the trilogy through a collection of texts on writing from some of the contributors of the prior two volumes, as well as others. As Farr writes to end the introduction to the third volume:

So, included in this final volume of Open Text is an attempt to give some of the poets included in the first two volumes agency in altering the sphere in which their work is received. Put differently, it is an attempt to realize a limited form of self-valorization for both individual writers and the communities they identify with. What is at stake here is articulated differently from piece to piece; in all cases, however, I think it safe to say that “the point is to change it.”

What becomes clear is the insistence that work deemed “difficult” actually requires to be read on its own terms. I mean, it sounds so basic, and yet, this is a repeated mantra from readers and non-readers alike when approaching more challenging works, and the trilogy seems to hold this basic premise as its underlying argument. Farr writes in the introduction to the first volume:

The Open Text project is ambitious, however. When finished, it will consist of three volumes—two of poetry and one of poetics statements—and will be set apart from other anthologies of Canadian poetry in a number of important ways. First, it will bridge several generations of avant-garde writing. Some of the writers here were born before the Second World War, while others were born after Vietnam, allowing readers to trace lines of affinity and of difference across historical moments and cultural / literary movements. Second, it will include an unusually generous sampling of writing from the West Coast, a fact that only becomes significant when we consider that while much of this work is familiar in the US and the UK, it remains largely unacknowledged in Canada. This in turn may be an effect of the third point: the collection includes a significant amount of avant-garde work that treats formal innovation and experimentation not merely as aesthetic progress, but as extensions of specific political, ethical and social commitments.

Including a mixture of critical prose, interviews and poetry, the contributors to the third volume include George Bowering, Donato Mancini, Wayde Compton, Cecily Nicholson, Larissa Lai and Rita Wong, Ken Belford, Erín Moure, Danielle LaFrance, Phinder Dulai, Mercedes Eng, Roy Miki, Fred Wah (with Roger Farr), Stephen Collis, Louis Cabri, Jeff Derksen and Roger Farr and Reg Johanson. The works included in this third volume are offered to extend and even open a conversation about writing generally, and specific writing and writers specifically. A particular highlight is the piece “Circles of Intimacy: Translation, Corporality, Responsibility: Mi Versión” by Moure, writing on her past decade or more working more deeply in other languages, from her own writing to translating books from Galician by Chus Pato and from French by Nicole Brossard, among others:

Yes, when I translate, I am giving you, the readers and writers of English books, a book by someone not written in English, because I want you to read it and to feel similar things to what I once felt, reading it. It is affect that drives me to translate works, a corporeality, a relation.

In so doing I am able to share that part of my own corporeality that exists, no, thrives, in other languages, a part most often masked to my Anglo public, who do not see it, even though (maddeningly to me) it is part of my being. I perform this unmasking by translating between languages I know. By listening to the language of someone else as it enters my body.

In an excerpt from Vancouver writer and critic Wayde Compton’s enlightening essay “The Canadian Dub Poets, Aesthetic Conscience, and Donato Mancini’s Critique of the Discourse of Craft,” he suggests approaches to engaging with Dub and Indigenous works, writing that one should be “setting aside one’s own positional idiolect and its terms; by engaging with the experience that the poetry produces; by considering its own methods and procedures; by responding to the modes or registers of language that it deploys; and by reading or auditing it without resorting to the demand that it must decamp before you can admit that it is poetry at all.”

There has long been cultural chasms that the writers that Open Text champions have been caught up in (whether accidentally or deliberately), from purely geographical, to formal and even political. It doesn’t help that a particular formal consideration of poetry over the past few decades in Canada—the metaphor-driven lyric—casts a wide shadow, as does the series of publishers based in Central Canada, allowing for an entire series of other engagements to produce a literature that isn’t heard about much in these parts. Much of that is frustrating, and really showcases the downside of the arguments of Regionalism—many of our regions (and communities) don’t interact nearly as much as they really should, often existing entirely within self-contained bubbles of activity.

If the avant-garde has been characterized by such a dialectical oscillation between formal autonomy / experiment and commitment to causes reflected in engaged contents and expressive social affects, we may now be at a transition point where the pendulum is swinging towards commitment and expression once again—though this may ultimately also propel an experimental push for new forms pertinent to this social moment.

            Another way of stating this: we are in the midst of a return, in many communities, to a politicized practice that is positioning itself within the communist horizon—at least, within the field of struggle for broad and fundamental social change and a rejection of capitalism in its totality that is still perhaps best figured, in short-hand, as “communism.” (Stephen Collis, “Notes on the Death of the Avant-Garde (…once again, with feeling…)”)

I’ve long been fascinated in the histories that cumulated in the west coast to bring about such a combination of innovative language writing, and politics (language, social, political, cultural, etcetera), with the loose collective of the Kootenay School of Writing, if not at the exact centre of such, pretty damned close to the centre. There might be pockets throughout the rest of Canada of political writing, but the west coast manages one of the more ongoing and engaged centres for such (and I keep hoping that someone somewhere will write on the hows and the whys of such, in part so I can gain a clarification). We supposedly read for a variety of reasons, but one hopes that if you are reading this, your goals in reading (and possibly writing) include attempting to discover, as opposed to moving through what is already familiar, which alone make these three works absolutely essential.

I’m experimenting with different forms of artistic production. I want to create something that is more embodied and spatial than poetry produced for the page is, to look for more visually-oriented modes of expression. Still thinking in terms of text, moving simultaneously between word and image, one form I try is both: the sampler. A sampler is a piece of embroidery typically produced by girls and women as a demonstration of skill in needlework. It often includes the alphabet and figures to illustrate it, biblical quotes, decorative borders, or sometimes the name of the embroiderer and the date. But I’m interested in the subversive potential of this form. (Mercedes Eng, “Notes for a Subversive Sampler”)

The Capilano Review 3.20

LC: Is that a poetry credo emerging in a couple pages of In Flux where you step out of your critic’s role and explicitly write “as a poet” (In Flux 203)? It starts for me with “somatic markers” that when articulated in language, “we associate,” you say, “with the becoming of subjectivity” (203).

RM: Your question is not an easy one for me to unravel. You’re citing from an essay on Rita Wong where I focus on the body as a living organism. The body generates a complex of affects in our daily lives, and these often go unnoticed because it is treated as an object to be appropriated, glaringly so in violent confrontations, rather than as a complex life network of somatic processes.

            I’m approaching some very tricky areas of poetic thought here, but as a poet my understanding is that the normalized discursive frames through which the world makes sense to us, as well as for us—in other words, again, what-goes-with-out-saying—are enabled in the exclusion of somatic contingencies, including the finitude of organic processes. In our corporate capitalist culture of commodities the body becomes the target of so many discursive operations from seemingly benign advertising to the extreme violence of warfare, and in between these huge corporate interest in biotechnological knowledge.

            Language plays a crucial yet mostly transparent role in sustaining the normalization of dominant representations, but when language is rendered opaque or made otherwise non-transparent as a channel of communication, for instance in poetic texts, we begin to apprehend the processes of becoming that have the potential not only to expose the limits of normalization but to transform them, we hope progressively, so that they are more inclusive than they were before.

            Here I’m talking about the creative process in general, but in some instances the “becoming of subjectivity” emerges in a more shared sense when dominant representations are seemingly spontaneously exceeded or undermined by what is then a newly identified group. The term “redress,” for instance, constituted a Japanese Canadian group in creating a movement to seek justice for the past injustices related to mass uprooting, dispossession, and internment. Perhaps this is a way of thinking about the current Idle No More movement that has emerged through the coalitional action of young aboriginal activists who are motivated by the words Idle No More. By responding to the call for action in the phrase they have exposed the dominant representations of aboriginality as extensions of a colonial system with a history as long as the Canadian state’s existence. But then again, the shift from writing a poem to a social movement may be too far-fetched a move.

The Capilano Review 3.20 (spring 2013) opens with a small section on the Vancouver poet, critic, bibliographer, teacher and activist Roy Miki, including a new poem, “Please,” an interview conducted by poet and critic Louis Cabri, as well as a review essay by Cabri on Miki’s Mannequin Rising (New Star, 2011). Miki’s contributions to literature and culture have been explored and celebrated on more than a few occasions over the past few years, including through the recent anthology Tracing theLines: Reflections on Contemporary Poetics and Cultural Politics in Honour ofRoy Miki (eds. Maia Joseph, Christine Kim, Larissa Lai and Christopher Lee; Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2012). Where the anthology focused on where Miki was and has been throughout his work as writer, critic, teacher and activist, this small feature in The Capilano Review focuses more on Miki’s current work, and what lies ahead. Cabri writes in his essay:

Levelling and redundancy-in-abundance, being dimensions of a capitalist economy, are qualities of consumer culture that emerge in MR. Levelling arises when a thing or process acquires exchange or market value. Redundancy-in-abundance, the way I’m using this phrase, refers to conditions of labour (“surplus” labour, a structural feature of capitalism) and products of labour (overproduction; planned obsolescence). In the second line, leveling and redundancy-in-abundance emerge through a structural homology between economics and language, and elsewhere in MR in the figure of the mannequin.

The issue also includes a small section edited/translated/compiled by Montreal poet and translator Erín Moure, “A New Regard (Quebec and Acadia),” with pieces by Chantel Neveu (translated by Angela Carr), Steve Savage (translated by Erín Moure), Suzanne Leblanc (translated by Bronwyn Haslam), Daniel Canty (translated by Oana Avasilichioaei), Jean A. Baudot (translated by Angela Carr) and France Daigle (translated by Robert Majzels), as well as Angela Carr and Kate Eichhorn’s revealing piece, “A Gloss on The Writing Machine.” Moure’s explorations in translation over the years have been well documented, and her more recent writings on translation on Jacket2 are a must-read for anyone interested in the conversation between texts, and between languages. As Moure’s introduction writes:

Pre-eminent experimental writer Nicole Brossard has recently remarked in interviews (e.g. The Gazette, February 26, 2013) that, following a heyday in the 70s and 80s, experimental writing had left French-language poetry in Quebec in favour of “what was called The New Readability.” For a while, I and other translators felt this dearth in Quebec poetry of the type of experiments with forms, sounds, effects, meanings that writers such as Brossard had introduced into the culture. There were still experiments, of course, but they were much quieter in their torquings.

            In the last ten years, though, publishers such as the pioneering Le Quartanier, La Peuplade, and others have provided national (Quebec) and transnational forums for young writers who not only produce amazing risk-taking writing in French but collaborate across boundaries with Europeans, US Americans, and Canadians in English to produce further works, flows, excitements. Meanwhile, in L’Acadie in New Brunswick, across the Quebec border to the east, established writer France Daigle will soon see her monumental novel Pour Sûr appear in the English translation of Robert Majzels. I include her because what Quebec-Alberta writer Majzels chooses to translate is part of the endeavor of opening new possibilities in French, and thus in English. And one contributor, yes, is a ghost from where the past and future overlap: in the machine itself.

            The writers and translators (and one commentator) in this section are all worth watching, the writers in their own right and as translators, and the translators for their own writing as well. I feel privileged to work among them, and to lend my hand as translator in their midst. I hope you enjoy these foments and new directions in words from Acadia and Quebec—not the avant-garde but a New Regard.

Much of the work included in the section is quite spectacular, and breathes a new kind of life into the form of the Canadian prose poem, such as Suzanne Leblanc’s sequence, “P.’s House for Thinking,” that includes:

Choral V

It was an abstract house, a construction of the mind. I ordered my memory there by an ancient process of remembrance. My tongue sought its speech. My will was oratorical. I would be no less abstract than the discourse of the philosopher, whose oeuvre had convinced me, whose life I admired. I would be no less constructed than this memorization of my singular voice, where I had chosen to stay.

West servant’s room

First floor

Outside the features in the issue also includes new work by Toronto poet Lise Downe, “from Propositions.” New work by Downe is a rare occurence, and something worth noting, reading and almost celebrating. Another highlight is the collaboration by Ted Byrne and Christine Stewart, “from St Paul.” The second in her collaborations with Byrne, she has also published a recent title in collaboration with Toronto poet David Dowker, Virtualis: topologies of the unreal (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013). The cover to the new issue features a stunning Alutiiq mask, One of the Old Men (2003), by Alaskan artist Perry Eaton, and the issue includes a folio of photographs of others of his masks, as well as an interview conducted by Colin Browne:

Colin Browne: “Yellow Singer” has a very beautiful, quizzical look on his face, which, I confess, makes me see him as a poet.

Perry Eaton: I think I can understand that. “Yellow Singer” is a type of mask made to be danced, with a whistle that sends sound between the worlds.

CB: Please say more.

PE: I can only tell you so much. I’d heard stories about the wooden whistle that you hold in your mouth when you dance, but I didn’t appreciate how important the sound quality was. When you look at the masks in the Chateau Musée, in the Pinart collection, and when you turn them over, the back of the mask can reveal as much as the front. The insides of the round-holed singing masks are finished very smoothly in the mouth area, which suggests that the audio tone was very important. I think in a way these were tuned instruments, and the whistle used was a very controlled sound, but we’ve never found one so we don’t know. We’ve gone through the literature. You’ll read two hundred pages to glean a line. There’ll be one line that’ll give you a clue. You accumulate these single lines; you start to put them together and you get images.