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Like an artist's retrospective, Tracing the Lines marks a milestone in the life of an important public intellectual.
List of contents
Table of Contents
Introduction / The editors
Poetics
For Roy / Daphne Marlatt
Abdijection / Fred Wah
Abdijection 2 / Fred Wah
Voice / George Bowering
Love / George Bowering
Translation / George Bowering
The Hammer / Michael Barnholden
(in her ear) / Baco Ohama
"stuck in the acentred gesture": Disabling Roy Miki's Poetry / Nicole Markotic
Social Justice
Relations of Redress / Mona Oikawa
"Redress as a Gift": Historical Reparations and the Logic of the Gift in Roy Miki's Redress / Dave Gaertner
ASIANCY: Mapping the Literary / Phinder Dulai
Porous Praxis Script-in-Progress (a performance experiment) / The Sybils
Tottori City, 2009 / Cindy Mochizuki
Biotext
royologue / Ashok Mathur
homing / Ayaka Yoshimizu
Hono'uliuli Wire / Mark Nakada
Culturally Specific / David Fujino
The Daiso Stroll / Hiromi Goto
Institutions
An Open Letter: "Dear Generation"-Works and Days Tracing Roy Miki's Generational Literacy in The University and the City / Jerry Zaslove
The Public Intellectual / Susan Crean
"This thing called language": Reading and Writing in the Classroom / Alessandra Capperdoni
"i have altered my tactics to reflect the new era": Public Intellectuals and Community / Smaro Kamboureli
Interview
Between the Photograph and the Poem: A Dialogue on Poetic Practice / Roy Miki in discussion with Kirsten Emiko McAllister
Contributors
Index
About the author
Maia Joseph focuses on Canadian urban literature, urbanism and regionalism, the ethics and politics of artistic practice and the interdisciplinary theorization of space and community.
Christine Kim researches Asian North American literature and theory, contemporary Canadian literature, feminist theory, print publics and diasporic writing.
Larissa Lai is also a novelist and poet. Her first full-length poetry book,
Automaton Biographies (Arsenal Pulp, 2009), was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.
Christopher Lee is the author of
The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature (Stanford University Press, 2012).
Summary
Passionate critic, principled citizen, attentive reader and editor, and energizing teacher – Roy Miki is all these and more, a poet whose writing articulates a moving body of work. The two main areas of his passionate research and writing – social critique and poetics – inform each other in these essays, poems, and artwork compiled to mark a milestone in the life of an important public intellectual.
Contributors from across North America take Miki’s literary and artistic achievements as a starting point for analytical and creative reflections on key artistic, social, and political movements of the second half of the 20th century. Essays on poetics by Daphne Marlatt and George Bowering combine with original poems by Fred Wah and Michael Barnholden, among others, to explore topics ranging from voice, to love, to translation. Mona Oikawa, Dave Gaertner, Phinder Dulai, and Cindy Mochizuki write or create artwork on social justice, placing Miki’s redress work in relation to the politics and art of other historical reparations. Ashok Mathur, Ayaka Yoshimizu, Mark Nakada, David Fujino, and Hiromi Goto present various views of biotext. Jerry Zaslove, Susan Crean, Alessandra Capperdoni, and Smaro Kamboureli discuss the public intellectual’s relationship to institutions. The collection ends with an interview with Miki on interrelations between his photographic and poetic practices.
Miki’s history reflects that of the West Coast’s literary world. Not only did he found the influential literary journal West Coast Line, but he has researched and written works on poets Roy Kiyooka, George Bowering, and bp Nichol. Miki taught many of the poets and academics now working and writing on the West Coast.
