He
was 74 and had been ill with several illnesses for several years but there was
something about him that just felt…eternal. It’s a sorrow. He was a working
man, a labouring guy, with strong hands and a gentle heart. Totally
unpretentious and intelligent in the way that shapes one’s life to swerve in
precipitous angles, such as abandoning the city and living in the woods. He was
one of the few big men who refused to be a Big Man, was frank about his disgust
for entitled and sexist guys, and he lost lots of “friends” over that stance.
He
wore work clothes. Plaid and jeans. Boots. A guy who always had a pencil on
him. He was extremely well-read and in the lines, if you know what I
mean. These are two of his many books.
They
look so delicate here. He did love beauty and recognized it in odd places,
which is a trait I respond to like an elephant hum miles away.
Ken
had an earnestness-fearlessness about him I loved. We met because he published
with a local press and I knew him by reputation. His books were so intriguing
to me; I hadn’t read much poetry yet and I had a billion questions, and he was
patient. This poem from Decompositions I hear in his voice and also in
my own internal voice. Not all poems can do that.
When I asked him in 2014 if he would come write with us at Thursdays Writing
Collective, the Downtown Eastside writing program I ran, he gave an immediate
yes. He couldn’t come down to the city for months and when he did, it was with
the tail end of pneumonia. I wasn’t sure how it would go. I didn’t know him
well, and the table of writers was always dynamic, with very different needs
and opinions and reactions. He immediately captured everyone. They could tell
he was no bullshit and knew what it was to work. He talked about living along
the Nass River and being a guide in Gitxsan territory for years, and his years
of manual labour and why he thought of his writing as landguage, and what it
meant to be in those woods as a white man, relating to that land. He earned
their respect, this table of survivors and people chewed up by the system. They
fight to make space for two hours a week of writing together and he knew what
it costs. He respected the deep knowledge they acquired through surviving.
He
and I began exchanging emails after that. He was an emotional writer in his
correspondence, very generous with his reactions. He wrote long and he wrote
funny. He didn’t shy away from complex ideas or self-implication. I was always
amazed he took the time to respond to me so well. Our friendship was coming up
as the MeToo movement was brewing and it really did me good to engage with him.
He told me a lot about how CanLit works.
This
morning when I learned he died I went to my inbox to reread our emails that
began in 2014. I could only recover his responses to my emails, not my own.
This is a bereavement mystery. I was working on two books related to health
issues and we talked pretty frankly about the procedures he was undergoing. His
voice is a bell. He was trying to send me some bureaucratic form and it turned
into a boondoggle and he sent me this:
“I quit. It's 3:30 in the morning and I can't get that fucken
printer to listen to directions. But then, I was reading something about the
germination of wheat, and before you knew it, a poem formed at the tip of my
complexity.”
But
my favorite email from Ken exists with no provocation or explanation or trace
of what I must have sent him to provoke it.
It
reads, in its entirety: “I miss my overalls, too.”
Elee
Kraljii Gardiner
is the author of the poetry books Trauma Head (and a chapbook of the
same name), serpentine loop, and the anthologies Against Death: 35
Essays on Living and V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
She founded Thursdays Writing Collective, a beloved non-profit organization,
and through its ten years she edited and published nine of its anthologies. She
is an associate director of Vancouver Manuscript Intensive and the non-fiction
editor at Chapter House, the online journal of the Institute of American Indian
Arts where she is an MFA candidate in poetry. eleekg.com
Photo
credit: Paul Joseph
