The band eventually proved too time-consuming for the studious lead singer/rhythm guitarist, so Miki’s gig with the Downbeats came unplugged. It paid for their amps and their cars, which gave them the mobility to be heard. Miki’s early career in public discourse wasn’t as cerebral as his later poetry, as densely researched as his activist journalism, or as visceral as “Roy Miki and the Downbeats,” the pop rock group he formed as an undergraduate at the University of Manitoba (United College), which gave followers and fans in the canteens in and around Winnipeg a dose of live medleys of Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, and other early rock and R & B acts. Poetic photosynthesis would now unfold and flow along nicely. Little did he know that he would become fascinated with the west coast Canadian poetry scene and like a healthy plant reach for the light. It would not be until the late sixties that he would go back to his roots, when he let his tendrils wrap around a Masters in English Literature at SFU. Part of Roy Miki’s cotyledon memory remained on the west coast. * Roy Miki as a boy with his father Kazuo. Art spent his career in public school education and, late in his career, became a citizenship judge. With a strong work ethic and belief in the power of education, Art, like Roy, got a B. Finally, in 1948, his parents bought a house in a tough but affordable (barely) part of Winnipeg when Canada finally revoked the War Measures Act and reinstated citizenship to Japanese Canadians. He spent the first three years of his life leafing out as a toddler in that shack on the farm before the Mikis moved to another Manitoba farm right after the war. Thus, at the time of their removal in 1942 from their west coast home and farm, Roy Miki was but a small, invisible bud on their family tree, his pregnant mother’s silent passenger on their three-day train ride to their version of internment. I recall that in November of 1942 my mother who was pregnant had to request special permission from the RCMP to travel to Winnipeg to have my brother, Roy. We lived in a four-room house with three families consisting of seven adults and three children. The harsh winter conditions, the terrible non-insulated housing and the short growing season made life difficult. They moved from owning and running their lovely Haney berry farm with a creek at the back, to being migrant workers living in a shack on a sugar beet plantation, as Art Miki recalls: The Miki family and friends at the sugar beet farm Agathe was a different kind of prison but a Siberia nonetheless. The Mikis were part of a small group of Japanese Canadians who opted to work on farms in the prairies rather than go to the internment camps in the B.C. In May, the family was taken by rail to work on a sugar beet farm in Ste. The Miki family remained at Tynehead until 1942, when the federal government ordered the removal of 22,000 Japanese Canadians from the west coast. Roy Miki’s mother Shizuko (left), pregnant with Roy, arrives in St. In 1935, Kazuo married Shizuko Ooto and the following year Art Miki was born at Tynehead. Their son, Kazuo, born in a logging camp in Tynehead (Surrey), was Art and Roy’s father. Her family had no males and Shintani, a naturalized Canadian, returned to Canada with a new bride and a new surname. The name Miki came from the boys’ paternal grandmother, Kiyo Miki, the second wife of their grandfather, Yukutaro Shintani. While absorbing this 640-page book and doing some background research of my own, I was stunned by Miki’s energy and dedication to themes not only in his literary output but, more importantly, his life.Īrt Miki, Roy’s older brother, has provided the Miki family’s early history in B.C. But the wondrous entanglements of Roy Miki’s life can be unravelled in this brief space without too many shortcuts thanks to anthologist, writer, and Miki’s longtime colleague Michael Barnholden, who does the major work and heavy lifting for Flow: Poems Collected and New, the well produced volume reviewed here. There is a singular impossibility in reviewing a poet/scholar’s life’s work that reminds me of finding one’s way through a labyrinth blindfolded. Reviewer Grahame Ware gives readers fresh insights into the man and his work with his review of Flow, Michael Barnholden’s definitive anthology of Miki’s poetry – Ed. By Roy Miki, edited by Michael BarnholdenĬondemned in utero as an Enemy Alien by the Dominion of Canada in 1942, the scholar and poet Roy Miki (born 1942) emerged as a pioneer of the Japanese-Canadian redress movement of the 1980s.

Miki endo your name