Random Access File

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

Random Access File shows the confluence of three radically unrelated
sets of interests. The title suggests one of them (computer technology
and the jargon that goes along with it); the other two are postmodern
poetics and the internment of Japanese Canadians, including the poet,
during World War II.

Computer technology is emblematic of the physical realm; postmodernism,
of the mental/analytical. Miki’s personal story represents the realm
of inner selfhood. Or, to use a very traditional approach, the book is
about the body, the mind, and the spirit, as well as about their
inseparable interrelatedness.

Computerese is just one example of the cold, utilitarian use to which
language is all too often put in our society. It creates a false sense
of security and a false sense of scientific objectivity. It is part of
the same mindset that could write a memo describing the internment of
Japanese Canadians as “the first episode of the saga / of an
industrious people / lifted from the fields of activity / to which they
had been accustomed / & placed in comparative / idleness in interior
towns” ( “in conclusion”). Postmodernism gives the book its
experimental look (some poems remind me of bissett and Nichol), its
techniques of line ending, and the cerebral wit that lightens what could
otherwise have been an all-too-gloomy collection. The reference to his
personal experience as a Japanese-Canadian child in the war is what
gives the book its significance. In his book, Miki reminds us that
feelings and human suffering are the true sources of meaning in
life—not mind or body, but spirit.