folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)
In 1995, while in Prince George visiting family, I noticed an advertisement for a poetry reading. I’d never attended a poetry reading before. If memory serves, Roo Borson read first, then John Donlan, and then Barry. When Barry came up to the podium, he said, “I should warn you. I’m a sad poet.”
His poems didn’t strike me as sad so much as an exposition of human frailties told with compassion and vulnerability. When I saw he was teaching a poetry workshop in Wells, BC that summer, I attended, and the next year too, this time with my friend Emilie Mattson. At one of the after-hour coffee houses, Emilie got kicked out for being too boisterous in her conviction that we too could organize such an event. A few months later, the first Sweetwater 905 Arts Festival, a multi-disciplinary festival that would go on for nearly 20 years, was held in Rolla. At that first festival in 1997, Barry was our feature poet.
In poetry, Barry introduced me to Robert Creeley, in music, to Abbey Lincoln and Miles Davis. It was with Barry and friends that I first visited New York, going to the Blue Note, the Village Vanguard, Birdland, Smalls. When the clubs closed for the night, we’d all cram into a cab and go where Barry knew they’d let us in after hours to hear musicians play, chairs stacked up in the corner, bar and food services shut down.
I’ve often thought that some of the things Miles Davis said about music could have been said by Barry about poetry, things like, you don’t get to the heart of something by feeling, “you go on a feeling.” Both created a tone all their own, their aesthetic uniquely theirs.
In his own words about his method, Barry wrote that he attempted to “articulate the poem’s central truth from various & variable angles & perspectives.” To do this, Barry wrote the long poem, “ … a way to log my experience & to record what I value most in a context of forces, subtle or not, that threaten those values.”
Barry cared deeply about threatened values, and he was often caught up in one threat or another, real or perceived – the lyric poem, the College principal, the wrong aesthetic influencing our retreat in Tumbler Ridge, the red light seen through its living room window (“Surveillance,” said Barry. “Nonsense,” said I), the “Poetry Wars” in which some Prince George poets pitted themselves against others.
I worry now that I made too little of those threats, that I dismissed how important they were to Barry. Once, after Barry recalled an incident where grown men, poets, tried to throw each other out of Second Cup, he wrote to me, “I know you think this is a schoolyard fight, but this stuff is very serious to me, because of the harm it’s done to poetry and the real community that could have emerged as a force, disparate or not.”
Around 2000, Barry and Joy, along with me and my husband at the time, bought a house in Tumbler Ridge – 139 Kiskatinaw Crescent (this pleased Barry, nine being a number he sometimes applied to poetry, part of what he called his “numerological hangups.” “If you’re going to explore ghazals,” he once wrote, “write nine of them.” And 13? Barry was born on a Friday the 13th, and his last birthday, just a few days before he died, was also on a Friday the 13th. I think he would have liked that).
With the purchase of the house, Barry and I created the non-profit society Writing on the Ridge. What wonderful times those were. Barry was one of the funniest people I’ve ever known, and in his company one wanted to stay up all night just to keep the conversation and the laughter going, and we often did.
Eventually, we sold our half of the house to Barry and Joy who continued to fill the space with family, friends, and writers while I carried on with the non-profit society. For over 20 years, Writing on the Ridge supported readings, festivals, retreats, writer-in-residence programs and artist camps.
Our poetic sensibilities did not always align, and I know my writing sometimes threw Barry into despair. “Okay, I’m depressed and confused,” he’d sometimes say, after reading the poems I’d sent him.
Barry didn’t trust the lyric, but I was never sure what the lyric was. I think Barry might have defined it as being driven first by form – a sonnet perhaps, end rhymes, metered stanzas, whereas the “anti-lyric” (a term I first learned from Barry), is when the emotion of the poem drives the content, and the content then drives the form. Many of our late-night debates circled these ideas.
Barry always used “Barry here” as the subject line of his emails. The last time I emailed him was on his birthday, October 13, my subject line “Happy Birthday!” I didn’t hear back until just a few days before he died when he replied (this time without changing the subject line), “Donna. I’m quite sick. one more test today. will let you know.” It would be Joy, not Barry, who let me know.
Barry was one of my greatest writing friends, and I will miss him so much. But as Barry’s long-time friend John Harris said in a recent interview, when he misses Barry, "We read his poetry and he comes right back to us." When I am struggling with the process or the politics of poetry, he comes right back to me too, “Cheer up,” I hear him say. “You’re a poet. The poem is a struggle but what a lot of fun too.”
Solecism (from Erratic, 2007)
for Barry
At the feverish height
of our debate which began
with jazz and Elvin Jones
who played an 18-inch drum
not out of an aesthetic
but because it fit
in the cab that took him
from gig to gig and led
to the question of poetry –
should form drive content,
or content, form. Certain
we were nearing the heart of it,
I rushed to the car for a book,
our voices aloft, your shoes
by the door. Without hesitation,
my feet slipped into their collars,
beneath their unlaced vamps,
touching down on the imperfect
match of your soles and stopped:
a sudden wildness.
The habits of your muscles, their expand
and contract, the weight of your intentions
grooved into leather.
My own feet made strange, made
tender.
Donna Kane is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Asterisms (Harbour, 2024). Her previous book of poetry, Orrery (Harbour, 2020), was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. She is also the author of the non-fiction book, Summer of the Horse (Harbour, 2018). Her poems, short fiction, essays, and reviews have been published widely in journals such as Today in Science, Scientific American, The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, and The Malahat Review as well as in several anthologies. She divides her time between Rolla, BC on Treaty 8 Territory and Halifax, NS in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and traditional lands of the Mi’kmaq people.
