Audio assemblage of Roy Kiyooka reading from "Summer Back Door Rain," "Trudi & I Talking," "No. 5 North," Shinkichi Takahashi’s "Snow Wind," "She Said She Tore the Veil Off the Face of…," and "Nevertheless These Eyes," compiled by Deanna Fong.
This auditory accompaniment to Roy Kiyooka’s “Pacific Windows” issue of The Capilano Review layers a selection of readings and field recordings from Kiyooka’s archive, held at Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections. The archive includes 404 audio recordings produced in a variety of formats—reel-to-reel, cassettes and mini-cassettes—produced between 1963 and 1988. They capture conversations, readings, music, personal musings, and ambient noise, creating a rich autobiographical soundscape. In translating from visual to auditory media, the “windows” of image-text become durational rather than spatial—an event framed between pause buttons.
Each window superimposes audiotext over environmental sound, pairing the following recordings:
1) "Summer Back Door Rain" / "Trudi & I Talking" (June 26, 1982) Selections from Kyoto Airs, read at Sir George Williams University (December 2, 1966)
2) "No. 5 North" (June 29, 1978) Shinkichi Takahashi’s “Snow Wind” from After Images: Zen Poems (June 29, 1978)
3) “She Said She Tore the Veil Off the Face of…” (Date unknown) “Nevertheless These Eyes” read at Sir George Williams University (December 2, 1966)
A full recording of the 1966 reading is available on SpokenWeb.
— Deanna Fong
Deanna Fong is the Audio/Visual Intern at The Capilano Review and a PhD Student at Simon Fraser University. She is the co-director of the Fred Wah Digital Archive and a member of the SpokenWeb team.
