"despair? the warmth of it?
I haven't written a snow poem yet!"
– Roy Kiyooka, “For Rhoda, Dec. 17/ -68” Published in TCR 4.5 Dedications
Dedications opens with two letters to Roy Kiyooka’s former students, Linda Ohama and Rhoda Rosenfeld. “to celebrate Linda Ohama’s coming of age as an artist,” Kiyooka urges,
now, let the years swiftly pass. let them pass into, the shape of a grown woman who carries the image of her grandmother enbedded in her. begin once again. begin simply by imagining that woman as an artist. & presto! –you have all these hard won prints in front of you. prints, through which, the two of them speak a single tongue, one that would tear away, all the abysmal years of silences (5).
To Rhoda: “do your own thing. that ALL we can do” and “dig yr photos & yes, why not double or triple-expose ‘reality’ etc. it is, after all a complexity, is it not?”
Kiyooka’s own photos and words that wind the “continuous ribbon” he calls “Pacific Windows” were published in full in TCR 2.3 (1990). While most recently reprinted in part in our 2022 50th Anniversary Issue 2/3 as first entry for that glossary’s “P” queue, “Pacific Windows” appears reframed at many moments throughout TCR’s prints and printings: in ti-TCR 12, a web folio edited by Brook Hoglum, there too in discussions with Pierre Coupey and rob mclennan, and in “From the Archives / On Family Lines” guest curated by Fred Wah in 2021, who draws together selections from Kiyooka, his own work, Oki Sogumi and Mercedes Eng. Pacific Windows would be published as a full posthumous collection by Talonbooks, edited by Roy Kiyooka’s dear friend Roy Miki. Thus double or triple exposed, as “sequential narrative” in Coupey’s 1990 Preface and “Printed on Sea Gull Paper and endlessly recombined to shape a kaleidoscopic narrative,” in Kiyooka’s own intro, “Pacific Windows” continues:
P.W. evokes Photography’s bitter-sweet, past-tense, poignance. The more The Globe & Mail touts the big brass of the multi-national Corporate World the more I want to burrow into the particulars of a ‘place’ I can see touch and smell.
Snow poem or no, this season stimulates such burrowing. So we offer you here a look back through these particular pages (panes, and pains) to continue this kaleidoscopic narrative, its endless recombinations, and of course, its Dedications. Kiyooka dedicates “Pacific Windows” to Kiyo Oe, his mother, and Mariko, Fumi, and Kiyo, his three daughters. In our current issue, Rhoda Rosenfeld’s own text, “My understanding is that the social world . . .” is dedicated to Roy Miki, and quotes Michael Ondaatje: “Things happened and went out like matches.” Looking, like Rosenfeld, at “Plume clouded waters. / from the sea of Obscenity” here in so-called Vancouver “where eagles take the spires” and at the end of this year, Kiyooka’s original epigraph for “Pacific Windows” from French philosopher Henry Corbin resounds, ringing true: “Everything that the indifferent call the past comes forth only in direct proportion to our love, itself the source of the future. One must have the courage of one’s love.”
– Emily Fedoruk, Literary Editor
Issue 2.3 (Fall 1990) Pacific Windows
“Like the rain-spattered pages of a Romance novel left behind on a holiday beach: All the photographs of windows and doors, all the lintels, ledges, unspoke captions, no longer belonged to him.”
Issue 4.5 (Fall 2025) Dedications
“dig yr photos & yes, why not double or triple-expose ‘reality’ etc. it is, after all a complexity, is it not?”
