The front and back covers of Transcanda Letters show a multi-coloured illustrated map of the country, overlaid by black and white snapshots of the east and west coast that are clasped in the left and right hands of the artist (fig. 13). The map’s swirling amorphous shapes hold out the promise of an expansive psychedelic geography, as if one might “trip” through altered states of consciousness into another sense of place. The two snapshots confirm Roy Kiyooka’s presence on both edges of the continent at a specific time and location. A tiny figure perched on the craggy rocks directs our gaze towards the crashing waves and swirling tidal pools of the ocean. But the expansive visual field of the photographs is displayed alongside a grid indicating measurements of longitude and latitude. A scattering of notations anchors the meaning of the colours to the “rational” explanation provided by the legend of the geological map. “Cratonic Regions” designate rock formations across the continent, which have been enumerated (and therefore
commodified) according to the soil quality and exploitable natural resources contained within Canada’s geopolitical borders. But on this book cover Kiyooka has placed this grid between his hands, thereby turning the national territory into a material form that the artist can use to construct an imaginary space.
Roy Kenzie Kiyooka was Nisei, a second-generation Japanese Canadian, a visual artist and a poet.200 Transcanada Letters reproduces approximately 250 items of
correspondence addressed from Kiyooka to an array of family, friends and colleagues between 1966 and 1974. Individual photographs are inserted between the pages of text, notably family portraits, while there is also a multi-page collection of 576 photographs from his travels that are arranged in a conceptual grid.201 Within Transcanada Letters, a
conceptual “aesthetics of information” is present in the typographic grid underlying the arrangement of letters on the page, in the seriality of photographs printed in halftone patterns, and in the “informational genres” Kiyooka chooses as the form for his texts, such as grant reports or event programs. As John Guillory has observed, this
200 Roy Kenzie Kiyooka was born in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan, 1926; died in Vancouver, 1994. 201 Roy Kiyooka is credited with the design of the book alongside his publisher, David Robinson. Like Coach House Books in Toronto, Talonbooks was known for its unusually close engagement with writers and artists in matters of book design.
appropriation of “nonart” informational genres makes them comparable to high art, when all media are considered to be forms of communication.202 In Transcanada Letters, the
play between image and text, or content and typographic arrangement, introduces
multiple semantic registers to the book; it also indicates Kiyooka’s awareness of how the technologies of book publishing use an invisible typographic grid to structure all visible marks (both text and images) on the printed pages.
Dates and return addresses included with each letter are a collection of temporal and geographic coordinates, which track Kiyooka in his travels east- and west-ward through multiple geographic locations across Canada, southwards into the United States, and westwards across the Pacific Ocean to Japan. The “transcanada” narrative thus begins with a description of the artists’ first visit, in his late 30s, to Japan. Curiously, the personally transformative travel experience is conveyed as if the reader were
eavesdropping, as the details are filtered through an interim report on his activities filed with the Canada Council for the Arts. Kiyooka’s next geographic displacement is signaled by a letter without an addressee, perhaps a draft of a poem, sent from Montréal, Québec. The final letters of the book are sent from a cabin at Qualicum Beach, British Columbia, where Kiyooka observes “the circling the eddying” of birds between the different environmental conditions of the sea, the earth and the sky. As if to compliment his own body’s movement between complex cultural environments, the visual qualities of the text printed on the pages of Transcanada Letters reflect Kiyooka’s attention to the arbitrary and conventional nature of the linguistic sign. Notable are the unusual choices he made for word- or line-breaks in prose; these linguistic code-switches are also present in pages of concrete poetry; or in his mimesis of formatting required for project budgets and reports. Likewise, a series of citations throughout Transcanada Letters attests to Kiyooka’s eclectic reading habits in which multiple cultural references converge – biographies of Tom Thomson, artscanada, Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy, Playboy, Herbert Marcuse, Walt Whitman and William Blake are some examples. His colourful language, unusual syntax, and a deliberate disregard for capitalization and other rules of English grammar resonate with deeply personal (and strikingly ambivalent) views upon family matters, aesthetic theories and shifting political positions. Tangled
narrative threads chronicle the collaborative development of several projects with small publishers such as Talonbooks and Toronto’s Coach House Press, as well as with respected museum and gallery directors – but also reveals the nomadic conditions imposed by his employment in teaching positions scattered across the country.
The disjunction between the “imaginary” world mapped out within the pages of the book through fragmented references to “real” geo-political sites is one aspect of what makes Transcanada Letters a comparable work of conceptual nationalism to Joyce Wieland’s book-work, True Patriot Love/Véritable amour patriotique, and Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Also shared between these books is a preoccupation with technologically enhanced perception and altered consciousness, which intersects with the mapping of a locality emerging from a utopian desires shared between Kiyooka’s social world of friends, family and colleagues. Throughout
Transcanada Letters, Kiyooka revisits his personal experience of racialized identity as it was formed in relation to a national culture, as he continues to engage with symbols of the Dominion of Canada in which he grew to maturity. Kiyooka plays with the shifts in signification for the national flag, the landscape paintings of the Group of Seven, and the heroic figure of Tom Thomson, which were reinvested with new meanings in Canada’s Centennial period. This semiotic play occurs with an acute awareness of the role of visual arts and literature in the shaping of a national imaginary. In this sense, Kiyooka uses the book as a material form, which he recognizes to be imbued with ideological properties. For instance, a letter addressed to Phyllis Webb describes the psychoanalytic theme of Margaret Atwood’s Survival: A Thematic Guide to Literature as a national imaginary constituted “via mainline W.A.S.P. eyes.”203 Significantly, in the same letter, Kiyooka
counter-proposes a west coast “shamanic spirit” and the poetic principle of polis to offset Atwood’s national imaginary. Atwood’s thematic guide emphasizes Canadian author’s use of Indigeous peoples as symbols of “something in the white Canadian psyche” – usually a fear of their own victimization, or the wish for acces to natural or spiritual realms that surpass civilization.204 Neither of these positions account for Kiyooka’s
203 Dear Phyllis, Vancouver, BC / ’72, Transcanada Letters, np.
204 Margaret Atwood, Survival : A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1972), 91.
combination of a reference to First Nations spritual practice with an ideal for democratic community based on the model of the Greek city-state. His “shamanic spirit” is not a symbol, but rather the transcription of a lived experience, specifically that of his
participation in Vancouver poets’ adaptation of Charles Olson’s principles of projective verse throughout the 1960s to their local context.
As will be further discussed below, many Vancouver poets generated personal mythologies in relation to an acutely localized experience of place and poetic community. This experiential relationship to place and poetic community was mapped in relation to the pages of magazines such as Tish (1961-1969), and to publications issuing from Talonbooks and Coach House Press. This poetic practice of localism negated the abstract symbolism that sustained national cultures (exemplified at the time by Atwood’s thematic approach); nonetheless, Kiyooka also acknowledges in a letter to Frank Davey that by the early 1970s, the regional marginalism expressed by the Tish poets, or publishers such as Talonbooks, had become an integral contribution to a national imaginary constituted by the post-Centennial body of literary criticism that defined a canon of CanLit: “you shiT- Poets are getting shoved into Can/ Lit – / where you damned well deserve to p-e-e-r.”205
Transcanada Letters shares a similarly ambivalent affective relationship to the
mythology of Canadian nationhood, as a work of conceptual nationalism that uses both the poetics of localism and conceptual photography to explore the affective expereince of belonging to a larger social formation.
Transcanada Letters was published in 1975, marking Kiyooka’s returned to Vancouver following a period of travel and itinerant teaching positions. He was a sociable individual with a gift for gathering friends around him in each city where he took up residence. Transcanada Letters testifies to the textured terrain of a world made up of multiple connections between family, friends and colleagues, which signify through complex levels of disidentification with official forms of national culture, and also with the countercultures within which he circulated. Throughout the period covered in Transcanada Letters, Kiyooka’s exploration of his Japanese ancestry was doubly bound up with a critique of the consumer economy and the post-war liberal democracy that was the common form of government in Canada and the US. Kiyooka’s reworking of the
Trans-Canada Highway as a symbol of nationhood therefore draws upon visions of “the west” (and the Pacific Rim) as it simultaneously inhabited the countercultural
imagination. Caravans of “tripping” mobile travelers (some of them, war resistors) engaged with “utopian dreams” in their rejection of the Vietnam War, post-war consumer capitalism and the technocratic organization of American society.206 In this sense,
Kiyooka’s first-hand experience of a message of national unity and cosmopolitanism conveyed through the Expo ’67 World’s Fair contrasts strongly with his admiration for the working-class politics of the Québec separatist movement. Likewise, his participation in the Expo ’70 World’s Fair in Kyoto, Japan, generates observations upon the
inconspicuous role that Canadian art and culture played on the world stage in comparison to the global influence of American pop culture. But the “Americanization” of Japanese culture also leads Kiyooka to caution that independence for Québec would expose the fledgling nation to the effects of American hegemony. This anti-imperialist sentiment also surprisingly echoes in his use of the term “branch-plant” to describe the Nova Scotia College of Art in Halifax, where Kiyooka taught alongside dissenting American
conceptual artists.
Unimaginable nations and poetic communities
Kiyooka’s book of correspondence was conceived of as a “twin” publication for Roy K. Kiyooka: 25 Years, the catalogue for a touring exhibition organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery.207 As a survey of Kiyooka’s career to date, this exhibition and its two
publications marked his success as an established Canadian artist. Transcanada Letters has led some authors to reflect upon the multi-layered complexities of the Asian diaspora in relation to Canadian citizenship and national culture. Roy Miki has described
206 Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner, West of Centre: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977, ed. Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), xxx.
207 The exhibition travelled from The Vancouver Art Gallery, 21 November - 16 December, 1975; to University of Calgary, January ,1976; The Art Gallery of Windsor, 20 February - 28 March, 1976; The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, April 1976. Talonbooks was the publisher of Transcanada Letters, and is also listed as the printer for the exhibition catalogue (published under the imprint of the Vancouver Art Gallery). This combination of commercial printing and in-house publishing was a common mode of financing for the press before its financial restructuring in 1975. It also reflects overlaps between visual art and literary worlds that are less visible if only referring to the bibliography of authors published under the Talonbooks imprint.
Transcanada Letters as the “contrary geography” of a Nisei reading the country from west to east, a negation of the traditional Euro-Canadian narrative of settlement, east to west.208 Responding to Benedict Anderson’s notion of a nation as an “imagined
community” constituted through linguistic standardization and the centralized production of printed matter, Smaro Kamboureli has looked to Transcanada Letters as an example of how Canadian literature might instead produce an “unimaginable community...
constituted in excess knowledge of itself, always transitioning.”209 For Kamboureli,
Transcanada Letters is an example of how to take a recognizable symbol of national unity – the Trans-Canada Highway – and divert its use value from social, cultural or trade policies enacted by those institutions that regulate identity in a national context. I want to argue that Transcanada Letters is a conceptual book-work, which reflexively moves between image and text as an expression of conceptual nationalism. I also want to explore aspects of the book that are “polymorphously perverse” in their exploration of the erotic drive and mutable identities, and therefore not so directly related to questions of “Asian Canadian” identity as it has been articulated as a political project through the critical histories of social movements and cultural activism.210 In order to do this, I will
use terms such as “diasporic subjectivity,” “pacific nation” and “poetic community,” which describe affective experiences of national belonging that do not correspond to representation within a geo-political nation-state.
Transcanada Letters communicates an ambivalent sense of place that hovers in- between shifting psychic states. This mutable sense of identity is also reflected in the fragmented and process-based intermedial forms (such as the conceptual book-work) that Kiyooka works within. Identity shifts and media overlaps are consistent with
Kamboureli’s description of an “unimaginable community” predicated upon different temporal and spatial relationships than that of centre-to-periphery, and the parallel effects of linguistic code switching that informs diasporic subjectivities.211 In this respect, Lily
208 Roy Miki, “Tom Thomson as/in Roy Kiyooka” in The Artist & The Moose, A Fable of Forget (Burnaby : Line Books, 2009), 143.
209 Smaro Kamboureli, “Preface,” in Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature, ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki, vii-xv (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007), x. 210 Alice Jim, “Asian Canadian Art Matters,” Diaaalogue. (July 2010) Asia Art Archive.
http://www.aaa.org.hk/Diaaalogue/Details/863 (accessed 20 March 2016). 211 Smaro Kamboureli, “Preface,” in Trans.Can.Lit, xii.
Cho has explained the affective experience of diasporic subjectivity as it conflicts with citizenship status as an “agonized relationship to home…the perpetual sense of not quite having left and not quite having arrived.”212 I understand this to mean that
disidentification, for Kiyooka, occurs where cultural traditions locating identity in an ethnic heritage originating “elsewhere” intersect with an understanding of the body as a discursive site produced according to cultural norms reinforced through print or
electronic media such as television or radio. This means that at the same time that Kiyooka forms part of the reading public participating in the national imaginary
anthologized in Margaret Atwood’s Survival: A Thematic Guide To Canadian Literature (even though he rejects her premise, he has nonetheless read her argument), Kiyooka also participates in the counterculture’s adoption via Marshall McLuhan of a post-national “tribal” identity conceived of as mobile, small-scale collectivities undefined by territory, but linked together via communications technology.213
These late 1960s countercultural “tribal” formations could be considered as a continuation of an earlier avant-garde counterpublic, cultivated in the 1950s through the open form poetics of projective verse and the intermedial, prototypical “Fluxus
happenings” developed at Black Mountain College while under the direction of Charles Olson. According to Stephen Voyce, Black Mountain poetics and related intermedial practices are not simply “a set of principles to be adhered to, but… a set of flexible strategies to be adapted” for the creation of affective bonds of poetic community as a counter-measure to Cold War nationalisms.214 These strategies persisted within the
countercultures of the second half of the 1960s and early 70s due to their subsequent use and adaptation over time by multiple authors, including Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder (each of whom, save Duncan, is named by Kiyooka in Transcanada Letters). Voyce explicitly ties this concept
212 Lily Cho, “Diasporic Citizenship: Contradictions and Possibilities for Canadian Literature,” in Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature, ed. Smaro Kambourelli and Roy Miki, 93- 109 (Waterloo, Ont: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007), 99.
213 Mark Watson discusses the wide-spread influence of Marshall McLuhan’s theories upon countercultural community formations in, “The Countercultural "Indian": Visualizing Retribalization at the Human Be-In,” in West of Centre: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977, 208-223 (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
214 Stephen Voyce, Poetic Community: Avant-Garde Activism and Cold War Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 40, 89.
of “poetic community” to the Vancouver scene by addressing the Tish poets.215 Lara
Halina Tomaszewska has similarly described the “pacific nation” as a social imaginary that links Vancouver artists and poets to an American neo-avant-garde through the shared practice of projective verse and intermedial performance. Tomaszewska further argues that the inclusion of Vancouver within this west-coast imaginary was crucial to making it a transnational space that extended beyond the boundaries of the US. So-called after the Vancouver-based magazine, Pacific Nation (1967-1969), edited by Robin Blaser and Stan Persky (fig. 14), Tomaszewska has argued that this transnational social imaginary, like other national imaginaries, took form as individuals identified with specific codes and practices conditional upon language and territory, although the “family apparatus” was materialized through myths of artistic and poetic affinities rather than kinship bloodlines.216 Friendship networks become the means to decouple patriarchal family
structures from origin myths. Kiyooka’s adaptation of open form poetics and intermedial practices while in Vancouver can be considered as his own right of passage for
participation in the social imaginary shared by this pacific nation.
As part of Kiyooka’s expanded practice of the time, Transcanada Letters operates at the intersection between the literary and visual arts. In this respect, George Bowering noted at the time of publication that “this book made of thousands of words offers the most accurate pictures of the country ever presented by one of its major artists. By one of its finest writers.”217 If one considers Kiyooka to be primarily a visual artist, as he was at
the beginning of the series of letters in 1966, one could analyze his turn to poetry and photography as a negation of his practice as a painter. If one considers Kiyooka to be primarily a writer, as he was at the end of the series of the letters, it could be analyzed as a pivotal point for his voice as it developed through open form poetics. However,
215 Stephen Voyce, Poetic Community, 89.
216 Lara Halina Tomaszewska, “Borderlines of Poetry and Art : Vancouver, American Modernism, and the Formation of the West Coast Avant-Garde, 1961-1969,” (PhD diss.,Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2007). In a letter from Robin Blaser to Roy Kiyooka, Blaser discusses two issues of Pacific Nation he will mail to Kiyooka to help him prepare an introduction to Blasers’ reading as part of the Sir George Williams Poetry Reading Series in Montréal. Letter from Robin Blaser to Roy Kiyooka,