The first real poet I met was Barry McKinnon. At first, I didn’t know he was a poet; I knew him as an English teacher at the College of New Caledonia. I was 18 years old and my idea of a Canadian poet was Robert Service. In a first-year composition course, Barry asked us to compile a bibliography of a Canadian poet. To my joy, I accidentally chose bill bissett. This was the beginning of my acquaintance with the living poetry of Canada, and the spark of my life within it.
I borrowed Barry’s books from the College library after I learned that he was a poet from the second real poet I met, which was Robert Budde, who I met through the first real story writer I met, which was Stan Chung. “The death of a lyric poet is living here,” writes Barry; I’ve written about the rich decay that accrues from this death. I had lived in Prince George all my life, but I never knew until I lived in its poetry—and Barry’s was the first. What kind of poets would Prince George bring not to death, but to life?
When something of mine won the Barry McKinnon chapbook award in 2007, I felt like I was being brought into a different kind of life. That slim text was dedicated to Barry, Rob, and the third real poet I met, which was Ken Belford. My remembered, imagined Barry and Ken push and pull even now as they transform my language; how it walks on the land, in the city, through an alien academia. Ken might read this thing I’m writing now and say “I don’t know, man, it sounds like an awful lot of white male academic boy goo.” Nedo[*] can only nod and shake his head, unable to answer in his own words.
It is right that the College of New Caledonia, with its clutch of small presses and reading series, would be the scene of these firsts, as it was for analogous firsts for so many others – and credit for that properly goes to Barry (first). (Not) everyone knows the stories about his relationships with Al Purdy, George Bowering, bpNichol, and other real poets, but that’s where I learned. Stan’s story of Purdy’s question to Barry would become one I carry with me always: “Barry, how do you combat your own likeability?”
Some years later, the first real critic I met, John Harris, would write (and speak) about how he and I had matched quotes from Barry’s poem “The Organizer.” When I was the General Manager of the Prince George Symphony Orchestra, John saw me seeing myself in the organizer’s shoes—as Barry writes, “you’re nothing Jack, in your elevator shoes. They chose you for no reason. But / they knew you could do it.”
Barry did it, and he did it well. For me, he did it first.
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Jeremy Stewart is a writer and musician. He lives in Vancouver with this partner and children. His book In Singing, He Composed a Song (U Calgary Press) was shortlisted for the 2022 ReLit Award. Stewart won the 2014 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry for Hidden City (Invisible). He is also the author of (flood basement (Caitlin). He once dropped a piano off a building.
