folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)
Sometime in 1981, probably in the fall, I found myself in a pickup truck with two other college teachers heading east along an empty Yellowhead Highway. One of the others was Barry McKinnon, my new colleague at the College of New Caledonia where I had recently been hired. The other was an English teacher from a different northern college who was taking up the offer of a ride to Castlegar for a BC colleges articulation meeting. This was all new to me, as were my fellow passengers on the long journey.
Conversation circled for some time around college politics, around the fate of poetry among the sawmills and snowmobiles of the north, around where West Coast poetics was headed post-TISH, around the illiteracy of students, and so on. I listened to it all as one does to narratives in a language imperfectly understood, till at some point, though god knows how the subject came up, Barry started talking about chainsaws. I had just bought one but Barry had had one for some years, partly for utility but partly also because, well, he lived in a town that was all about wood. So we got tucked into it. We compared manual versus automatic chain oiling, discussed the flooding of carburetors, how much slack to allow in a chain, even the choice of spark plugs if you can believe it. I realized I liked Barry. Here was a guy who could drink beer with Robert Creeley and discuss poetics all night, but then buck birch in the morning for firewood.
The other fellow in the cab thought we were crazy. No way he wanted to sit through a five hundred mile road trip talking about sharpening teeth. We were poets so we should talk about poetry (the “we” of course including him and Barry only). Well, I guess that made sense, except that in some profound way he was mistaken. Barry was thinking about poetics. He may have ended up living in a coarse, lumbering, fundamentally vulgar town covered in woodchips and smelling of stale beer, but it was a town about raw material, its grain and heft, how it resists, how it can be fashioned into a life. And that fashioning – difficult, hesitant, often pained, and dangerous too should attention and honesty lapse – is what I believe poetry was for Barry. A running chainsaw, a mind, the courage needed for the task.
George Sipos was a colleague of Barry McKinnon’s at the College of New Caledonia through much of the 1980s. Later, he owned Mosquito Books, an independent bookstore in Prince George for 17 years. He finished his working life as a performing arts administrator in PG and on Salt Spring Island. Along the way, he published three books – two collections of poems and one prose memoir. These days he counts the years as they go by and contemplates both what’s ahead and what’s behind. It’s been at least twenty years since he last used his chainsaw.