b'Makuuchi defied expectations. He refused the labels of quiet American andtaught at the University of Ife in Nigeria, where his son would visit him during the model minority that journalists of the 1960s used to explain what theysummers. But Makuuchi rarely kept his friends or his jobs. No wonder he found perceived as Japanese American docility and success in the wake of World Warhimself living in a used Frito-Lay truck for a while. No wonder his family considered II. 3Makuuchi knew too well and felt too deeply the social and psychic costs ofhim a rebel. 8incarceration, and he could not keep quiet. His sister, Harriet, remembers, he was different. He went to art college, and he decided he was going to do hisIn the late 1980s and early 1990s, Makuuchi produced a 258-page typescript of artwork about his childhood and internment. 4Curator Aprile Gallants essaypoems entitled From Lake Minidoka to Lake Mendota and Back to the Northwest in this volume discusses the evolution of his printmaking. Besides working inSea. Divided into sectionsbeginning with Camp Image, detouring through visual media, for which Makuuchi is better known, he represented and contestedFood Image and Fish Stories, and ending with Homecomingthe version of the mass incarceration of his people in poetic form. Far from being quiet or athe typescript held in Smith College Special Collections features a foreword model, he considered himself a protestor and a prophet. 5In the poemby Asian American literary scholar Amy Ling. 9Ling lavishes special praise for the Foaming Demon Dragon, Makuuchi declares, it takes noise makers (like me)Camp Image poems and calls Makuuchi an original. The title alone attests to call out oppressors and call for resistance. to the volumes natural hip-hop rhythm. 10In fact, Makuuchi was primarily a self-taught poet, who took only one class on the subject and wrote without much Makuuchis contemporary, Lawson Fusao Inada (born 1938), also defied expec- conscious craftsmanship. As he explained in an interview, It was like a catharsis tations, but today he is a canonized figure in Japanese American literature. Likeof imageryof an old man going back to childhood memories, and it just flowed Makuuchi, Inada was a child P.O.W., albeit in a different camp. After the war,out of me for two or three years, day and night. Makuuchi suggests here that he he too wrote poetry. 6Location and luck led Inada, however, to join forces withwrote automatically from an almost dreamlike state. In the poem Dreamings, Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan, and Shawn Wong, who collaborated with him onhe comments on his artistic process:recovering and promoting Asian American literature. All four men were living on the West Coast at the time, and Inada was discovered from a picture whenIn my entranced states Chin, Chan, and Wong were looking for Japanese American poets. 7Chin andof creative activitiesInada also shared a publisher, Coffee House Press, that championed their works . .Moreover, Inada had the Pulitzer Prizewinning Philip Levine as a mentor forImages from withinhis poetry. These circumstances nurtured Inadas writing. Hence, both Inada andmeet on a 2-D surfaceMakuuchi chose to write about the injustice and impact of their camp experiences,from way out therebut while Inada found a community to develop and promote his endeavors,or way in here.Makuuchi often worked as a lone voice in the wilderness.His footnote to this poem directly references the automatic ballpoint air drawings Like most prophets who challenge systems of power, Makuuchi could not thriveof fellow artist George Anderson. To some degree, then, Makuuchi practiced within them. As a result, Makuuchi lived an itinerant and unstable life as heautomatic techniques to access the multidimensional realms of his inner life and articulated his defiant visions. After incarceration, Makuuchi worked in a varietythe outside world in order to render them as two-dimensional prints and poetry. of jobs (from farm hand to hospital orderly), served a stint in the army as aIn doing so, he may have been influenced by Beat poets like William Burroughs, chaplains aide, and trained as a visual artist, earning a BA in art education fromTed Joans, and Bob Kaufman, who were, in turn, inspired by Andr Bretons the University of Colorado Boulder, an MA in printmaking from the UniversitySurrealism. Breton believed that art ought to resolve the dialectic between of Iowa, and an MFA in painting from the University of Wisconsin in Madison.reality and dreams, the conscious and the unconscious. Automatic writing and While studying in Iowa, he met and married an undergraduate student, Evelynpainting, Breton explained in The Surrealist Manifesto, were techniques used Faye James. They had a son, Jamie, in 1963, but their marriage lasted only ato facilitate unconscious expression. 11little over a year. For the next several years, Makuuchi moved from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania to Iowa and back to Wisconsin. To make a living, he taught draw- Makuuchis opening poem, aptly titled An Introduction, not only explains ing, painting, and printmaking and created his own art. From 1978 to 1984, hethe purpose of the collection but also gives us a taste of his automatic style. In 114 115'