Author, poet and teacher Michael Prior read poems from his most recent award-winning book “Burning Province” at the Ulrich Museum of Art on April 28. Prior came to Wichita for just under a month to help teach undergraduate students and graduate students in the Master of Fine Arts program.
“I cannot speak highly enough of the very generous and talented and brilliant students,” Prior said. “I think mentoring other writers and teaching other writers are part of one’s responsibility as a writer in some way.”
The MFA in creative writing program allows students who are either fiction writers or poets to have a dedicated program to hone their skills while getting their master’s degree.
“Every year we have a poet or writer who’s well published come here for a month and help coach and teach the students,” associate professor Margaret Dawe said, “This year we were able to get Michael.”
Prior read five poems from his third and latest project, which has the work-in-progress title of “Wartime Measures.” The book explores the effects of generational trauma through poetry. The book has a specific focus on the effects of the internment camps that Japanese Canadians were forced into during World War II.
“This is a picture of the camp where my grandparents were in the past … There were about 5,000 people there during the war, and they lived in these shacks,” Prior said.
He uses his poetry as a way to make sense of the impact that this history has had on his family.
“My grandparents were hesitant to talk about this time in their lives. They rarely mentioned their experiences directly,” Prior said. “Sometimes they looked at pictures of them in passing, and I really didn’t receive anecdotes about this time in their life until I was older.”
The first poem he read was about his late grandmother, whom he describes as having an incredible life. Her biological family gave her up in the camps because they didn’t have enough resources. When the war ended, she stayed with the family that adopted her in the camps until after the war ended, and her adoptive family chose to be deported back to Japan by the Canadian government, while she stayed behind to work through high school as a live-in nanny. She eventually ended up pursuing a career as a nurse.
“She was very stoic, and she was very funny. She had a lot of patience with me, and she was also very superstitious,” Prior said. “Near the end of her life, she told me she felt she had lived an unlucky life. And I think her belief in luck, her search for it, was her way of coping with some of the things she had experienced.”
Prior goes on to describe how his grandmother left him a photo album, and through the course of the poem, he describes his thought process as he flips through its pages. The poem recounts the significance of the four-leaf clover in his and his grandmother’s relationship and how each time she found what to many people would have been a sign of good fortune, she was instead reminded of the hardships she had overcome in her life.
The second poem he reads is about his experience growing up as a Canadian residential alien. He explores his own struggles while wrestling with the tragedy that past generations of his family suffered at the hands of the Canadian government.
“This poem is a song, and in thinking in the ways in which form might serve as a metaphor, the pictures of the song suggest many of the spaces which my grandparents were confined to during the war,” he said.
The poem paints a picture of how uncertain being ripped away from your home at such a young age must have been.
Throughout the other three poems that were read, he explores themes of familial relationships, relationships to one’s heritage, and how complicated these relationships can be.
“A good poem can explore a question, and not just that it can lead you to better questions,” Prior said.
With his remaining time in Wichita, Prior is mentoring students in the MFA program. He talked about how much he enjoys working with other writers, saying that it inspires him and makes him want to write.
“It’s a part of how you give back, and I really love and think it energizes my own work,” Prior said. “Reading all these student (poet) works inspires me and makes me want to write more.”
