Roy Kiyooka
Former residence, 600 Block, Keefer St.
"this house this small house we three thrive in is
mostly wood, paper and words"
From Pear Tree Pomes
Roy Kiyooka and his then-partner Daphne Marlatt moved into this address soon after he published his first book, transcanadaletters (Talonbooks) in 1975. It’s where he finished Wheels, wrote The Fontainebleau Dream Machine, Pear Tree Pomes, the early draft of what later became Mothertalk and his subsequent limited-edition chapbooks, which Roy Miki collected in Pacific Windows. He was revising work for Pacific Windows when he died at his computer in 1994. Marlatt still lives in the neighbourhood. Although UBC professor Warren Tallman is generally credited as the father figure for the onset of post-modern writing on the West Coast, Roy Kiyooka had a reciprocal influence at the Vancouver School of Art (1960) and later at the UBC Fine Arts department (1973-1991). After a Robert Creeley reading at UBC in 1962 and a poetry conference orchestrated by Tallman in 1963, Kiyooka switched more towards literature and photography from painting. Spoken word ‘happenings’ organized by Kiyooka and others gave rise to Intermedia Press and non-academic poets such as Gerry Gilbert, bill bissett, Ed Varney, Al Neil, Judith Copithorne, Maxine Gadd, Dwight Gardiner and Mary Beth Knechtel, some of whom became associated with the Western Front.
