Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka

Roy Kiyooka’s reputation as an artist has long been recognized. Such is not the case with his writing and poetry, even though his engagement with language as a medium of artistic consciousness had been a preoccupation all along. For Kiyooka the poet, the poetic text was not a supplement to his visual art, but a medium that he explored in the same spirit and imagination as that of his other work. His poetry reflects his life-long intellectual engagement with the aesthetics of experience and his artistry in transforming the elements of language into poetic texts striking for their care with words, syntax, and the multiform spaces of the imagination.

This publication makes evident his collective poetic achievements by bringing together all of his most important poetic works, including many that have only been available in very limited editions. Preparation of this publication had begun in the year preceding Kiyooka’s death. Editor Roy Miki and Kiyooka had planned a collaborative form for determining its design and content. With the Kiyooka Estate’s permission, Miki has continued with the editorial responsibility of seeing it through to completion. Included are editorial and bibliographic notes on each of the titles as well as an essay on Kiyooka’s life as a poet. The title, Pacific Windows, is Kiyooka’s own.

When Roy Kiyooka died, suddenly and unexpectedly, in January 1994, he left behind an artistic legacy rich in social, cultural, literary, and artistic significance. From the late 1950s until his death, Kiyooka lived his time intensely, as is evident in his innovative work and in the diversity of his concerns: as visual artist, as sculptor, as film-maker, as photographer, and of course, as a writer and poet. As a Nisei (second-generation, Canadian born Japanese Canadian) Kiyooka remains a singular and perhaps the most important figure thus far in the history of Japanese Canadian art, writing and culture. Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka (1997) is a collection of his poetic works.

His novella, The Artist and the Moose: A Fable of Forget, surrounding the mysterious death of Tom Thomson, was posthumously published by LINEbooks in 2009.

Roy Miki is an award-winning writer, poet, and critic who taught for many years at Simon Fraser University. He has written extensively on the work of bpNichol and edited Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka, which won the 1997 Poetry Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. His major bibliographic study, A Record of Writing: An Annotated and Illustrated Bibliography of George Bowering, won the Gabrielle Roy Prize from the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures as the best book on Canadian Literature of 1991. He was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for Surrender (2001). He is also the editor of Muriel Kitagawa’s This Is My Own: Letters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese Canadians(1985); Tracing the Paths: Reading ≠ Writing The Martyrology (1988); and Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol; and co-editor with Cassandra Kobayashi of Justice In Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement. Miki lives in Vancouver.