Roy Miki: The passionate poet
With a body of work that possesses a strong sense of both the past and the present, British Columbian Roy Miki has been hailed as one of today’s most original and powerful contemporary English-language poets.
His 2001 book of poetry, Surrender, described by publisher Mercury Press as a “brilliant intermixture of the lyrical with the political” and a “tour de force of clarity and beauty,” won the 2002 Governor General’s Award for English poetry.
Surrender explodes the notion of the documentary by infusing it with luscious imagery, poignant memory and social wit, and serves as a response to our times through political, intellectual and emotional word play. This collection of poems challenges and disturbs, upsets and disorients official language and history relating to the internment of Japanese Canadians in the 1940s — a subject that holds personal meaning for Miki.
Though he grew up in Winnipeg, Miki was born in 1942 on a sugar-beet farm in the Manitoba town of Ste. Agathe, where his second-generation Japanese Canadian parents were forcibly settled during the Second World War.
The treatment his family and others from the Japanese Canadian community experienced in their own country moved him to actively lobby the federal government for a redress agreement, which was eventually signed in 1988 by former prime minister Brian Mulroney and Miki’s older brother, Art Miki, then-president of the National Association of Japanese Canadians.
Roy Miki has also focused on the issue in his literary endeavours. In 1991, he co-authored (with Cassandra Kobayashi) the book, Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement, and seven years later, Mercury Press published a collection of his essays entitled, Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing, which explore the issues of history, memory, displacement, redress, race and language.
As Miki once said, “You often see the most passionate kind of literary work — not just in poems, but in creative writing itself — coming from writers who have seen themselves as “minoritized” or beleaguered, or some ways in struggle with dominant power.”
A professor in the English department of Simon Fraser University (SFU), where he teaches contemporary American and Canadian poetry, Miki is considered a specialist on the work of fellow poet, the late bp Nichol. He also edited Roy K. Kiyooka’s Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka, which won the 1997 Poetry Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.
Miki’s annotated and illustrated biography of his close friend, fellow Governor’s General Literary Award winner, SFU professor emeritus and Canada’s first poet laureate, George Bowering, entitled A Record of Writing, won the Gabrielle Roy Prize for the best English-language book-length study in Canadian and Quebec literary criticism from the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures. He also served as editor of the literary journal, West Coast Line.
A resident of Vancouver, Miki holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Manitoba, a Master of Arts degree from Simon Fraser and a Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia — all in English literature.
Believing that poetry can help break norms, habits and patterns, Miki masterfully uses words to look at the world and, as the title of one of his poems in Surrender states, perhaps “make it new” too.
- Christopher Guly