Writing home with Professor Michael Prior, a mid-sabbatical check-in
by Callisto Martinez ’26
This academic year, Professor Michael Prior will be on sabbatical from the English Department after receiving tenure! The Words reached out to talk with Professor Prior about his projects so far. Read on to keep posted about the new poetry collection Professor Prior is working on, his time in New England for the Amy Clampitt Residency, and more exciting updates.
Could you share the most exciting news or experiences from your sabbatical?
Well, the most exciting and generative experience for my sabbatical so far was the six months I spent in Massachusetts as the Amy Clampitt Residency Fellow. The biannual fellows get to stay in the late poet Amy Clampitt’s house, and while there you have time to write, a huge library at your disposal, and you’re paid a salary. The house is in Western Massachusetts, a part of the country I’d never been to before. It was so lovely to be among Clampitt’s books and knickknacks and to be able to work on my next manuscript of poems and a few editorial projects.
That’s beautiful. So, I’ve heard about this new manuscript you’re working on. Would you mind talking about how it started and what it’s growing into right now?
The manuscript is thinking through the legacies of the incarceration of Japanese Canadians and Japanese Americans during the Second World War (my maternal grandparents were incarcerated in a camp in Canada). I’m trying to explore the responsibilities younger generations bear in the caretaking of collective memory as older generations, the survivors of the camps, pass away. What sort of things might younger Nikkei generations do to caretake, shape, and recontextualize inherited memories in a way that’s personally, communally, and even ethically significant for our current moment? The book is also interested in the ambiguities and tension of being mixed race in a world — or in a part of the world, at least — where racial categories/positions are often treated as if they’re stable, even though we know they’re not, that they’re discursive and constantly shifting. I think this is especially interesting to consider from the position of someone who is mixed race (and the majority of Japanese Canadians and Japanese Americans of my generation are mixed race). Of course, the book also contains poems about art and love and animals and the places I’ve lived.
Yeah, going off of that, when I read Burning Province, I was really struck by how it conceptualized place so vividly, both in terms of environment and in terms of also like the people who fill like the places we inhabit. How does your new collection conceptualize ‘place’ differently or similarly than in past collections?
I think part of what this new collection is really interested in, connected to place, is the idea of home and where home is. I’ve lived in six cities and two countries in a little over a decade; notions of belonging and community are very complex for me and feel often like they are constantly being challenged by the circumstances of my professional life. So, I think that’s something the book is trying to unpack. We carry places with us, and we transpose place on top of place as we move, and I feel like I’m often able to write about a place only after I’ve left it or spent some time away from it. I grew up in Vancouver, and so I see in the Midwest another kind of oceanic landscape, even though there is no actual ocean here — though, 10,000 years ago, this area was covered by a sea of ice.
If we could go back to your time in New England at the Amy Clampitt residency, what were some of the highlights of your time there — some of your favorite things you saw or specific memories that really stand out to you?
Well, New England was the home for many of my favorite writers. I got to visit Emily Dickinson’s and Elizabeth Bishop’s graves to pay my respects. They are two of the poets who are most important to me, so that felt very meaningful. But the Clampitt house is in a very rural, quiet place, and my time wasn’t marked by specific, definitive events. What I mostly remember is a general feeling of serenity, like I was at a slight remove from the world, which allowed me to better reflect on not only my family history but also about what’s happening in this country now and how it’s connected to what’s happened here in the past.
Other than being apart from the world and being able to take space, are there specific things about New England, [or] a specific specific way that the environment and the world around you there influenced your writing at all?
I’m not sure. I think that answer to that will become apparent in the future, perhaps when I look at the drafts I wrote there, because I like to set things aside for a long time. I think there’s a way in which the novelty of the environment inspired comparisons between where I’d been and where I was at the time, and so perhaps that played into things. New England is very different from the Midwest, and it’s certainly very different from the Pacific Northwest where I grew up. New England is, in many ways, where America, the colonial, imperial state begins. And so that very visible patina of the past over everything certainly made me think about the patterns and oppressions of American history.
Is there anything else you’d like to mention or discuss?
I’m editing an anthology of Japanese Canadian creative writing, the first multi-genre, multi-generational anthology that’s ever been assembled. A selection of my poems are coming out in a month in an anthology from Haymarket books, edited by Brandon Shimoda and Brynn Saito, called The Gate of Memory, which features poetry from the descendants of the survivors of the Japanese American and Japanese Canadian incarcerations. Finally, I’m honored to be serving as the poetry editor for Epoch, Cornell’s literary magazine this year, too–it’s been great to work with the brilliant graduate student poets on each issue.