folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)
As my poetry friends die off I usually bundle their publications from my bookshelves so I can spend some time collating their textual life in memory, surveying the times and the poetics thereof. Barry McKinnon’s bundle is a wonderfully lush map of about 50 years of poetic innovation, exploration, and involvement in a large literary community. And it’s not just a neat bundle of “poetry” books; its gestural activity is initiated through the chapbooks and broadsides of his own Caledonia Writing Series and Gorse Press. These smaller publications were very much Barry’s working ground, part of a compositional process of modelling and discovery.
I met Barry in the 70’s after first reading him in the magazine NMFG (No Money from the Government). I was teaching at Selkirk College in Castlegar and he was teaching at the College of New Caledonia in Prince George, very much mirroring our jobs and the smell of the pulp mills. I did a reading at his college (and met his wonderful wife Joy), and he came to the Selkirk and read there. Our discourse was grounded at the time in a kind of west coast-Coach House-Canada Council environment. We overlapped often at readings in Vancouver and at the annual provincial college creative writing “articulation” meetings where we shared a lot of friendships with other Community College writers. One of the most memorable of these meetings was the one Barry organized in Prince George (late 70’s early 80’s?) to which he had invited Robert Creeley. These were always party events with readings and launches. I think he printed his broadside “the organizer” for the event:
I am Jack the organizer. I wear elevator
shoes and
am responsible for everything – the
trophies, the paper plates
must choose those who win. assume all else
is
lost. I drink alone
poetry won’t allow all to be told. this is a fact. stew
is stuck to my pants. 60 cents a drink. it’s hard
to be humble when you’re great. in my own way, I love
you all.
He was a great listener and had an attentive ear for contemporary voices. Eg. he introduced me to Cecil Giscombe’s wonderful Giscombe Road, a poet and a text he honed in on for an extensive dialogue about poetry, history, and place in his project “in the millennium”. A lot of his writing responds to the work of local writers in his community such as Sharon Thesen, George Stanley, Ken Belford, John Harris, and many others.
I’ve engaged with all of Barry’s writing as a true testament to the poetry writing process. The range of his attention, from biotext to travelogue to the poetics of place, is always incisive and serious. What strikes me most is that his stance seems consistently interrogative, always in the context of curiosity, searching the light found between words. His 1994 inquisition into his own health, Arrhythmia, is a very personal and powerful use of the poem as a place to explore for answers.
to feel alive. to be alive.
tired. know odds – a silent gap
between diagnosis and advice. what should
I do? yr heart she sd, beats in couplets
and triplets. glandular prosody, I
joked, - but I’m glad to know, but afraid to ask for a printout, a xerox. afraid
I’ve wasted my time. life’s a worry, a
life boat – an exaggeration of what’s imagined – the lost child returned from hiding. it was to show something happening as
speculation worth a cure.
it’s still. it’s there.
Barry’s generosity to the poem and to his community - it’s still there.
Fred Wah is a B.C. poet who been writing and publishing since the early 1960’s. His early work is collected in Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962-1991. More recently is a collaboration with Rita Wong, beholden: a poem as long as the river and a series of improvisations, Music at the Heart of Thinking.
