folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)
I’ve said how challenged I feel when I try to think critically about Barry McKinnon’s poetry, and have described it as phenomenological without subjecting this assertion to a more strict examination.
The basic tenets of phenomenology mesh well with the post-imagist, post-lyric, poetics of McKinnon’s early works. The arch-phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, argued for a subjectivity that was not beholden to the psychologism that dominated thinking at the beginning of the twentieth century, one that did not rest content with “mere words … meanings inspired only by remote, confused, inauthentic intuitions. We must go back to the things themselves.”[1]
Brian Fawcett wrote that in Northern BC “the global screwup” is best addressed by “an open-minded phenomenology … focusing on local particularities.”[2] And John Harris hints at what I’m getting at when he claims in a review of “Sex at 31” that McKinnon’s poetry … is … close to what fiction will be as it grows more sophisticated in the delineation of consciousness.”
So–now, for example, take this poem[3]
from The the, published by Coach
House in 1980:
The poem seems to announce a relation to a then-nascent movement in BC poetics (work poetry), but in its open field minimalism, its stripped-down diction (that might be called “ordinary language”) momentarily interrupted by a speculative-referential elevation “congenial & benign,” that “old Buddha / like” beatnik syntax (the slash does not adequately convey the weight of the shift in its open form orchestration) straight out of Heart of Darkness wants to let things speak for themselves.
I imagine that many have had that feeling, of sitting in a chair, in a room, trying to conjure something out of nothing but impulse and/or intention, and coming back and/or down to what is right in front of you–which in the analog world of my late adolescence, contemporary with McKinnon’s mid 30s, would be a hand holding a pen.
What is the significance of this most
basic of modern gestures, this being poised to capture some thing? This is
where the phenomenology comes in, as the creative intention must overtake the
tension inherent in creativity, the moment of coming-into-being of some thing
that is not nor has ever been there, wherever that “is.”
The phenomenological reduction is “a radical modification of reflection allowing for a subjective focus that helps us to grasp essential structures … beyond the interior data given in imagination or internal images in consciousness that are indirectly dependent on real but subjective conditions.”[4] The turn inwards is viewed by Husserl as “a deepening of the full sense of normal, worldly, object-taking conscious acts.”[5]
The worry is that
when the poet turns inward, away from LIFE, the only tensions are
aesthetic, linguistic, semantic, formal, etc. McKinnon seeks to engage with
LIFE via poesis, thus justifying the
erasure. It is an incredibly subtle business parsing the complexity of
contemporary life, of being-in-this-world, and as Donald Barthelme once wrote,
while some “run to conceits or wisdom … I hold to the hard, brown, nutlike
word. I might point out that there is enough aesthetic excitement here to
satisfy anyone but a damn fool.”
As McKinnon is working in poetry, there is much going on in the spaces between those words, places where the essential structures of consciousness might be captured momentarily abstracted from the endless flux of things, events and affects.
[1] Logical Investigations (1901).
[2] “A Poetry War in
Prince George,” Dooneyscafe, April 5,
2012.
[3] Available online at The the
— Barry McKinnon
[4] Ideas Pertaining to a Pure
Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Third Book. Phenomenology
and the Foundation of the Sciences by Klein T and Pohl W, Kluwer:
Dordrecht (§§ 31–32, 57–62).
[5] Tassone, B. The
relevance of Husserl’s phenomenological exploration of interiority to
contemporary epistemology. Palgrave
Commun 3, 17066 (2017).
GP Lainsbury met Barry McKinnon when the former moved to the north of BC in 1994, and for a couple decades they enjoyed each other's company, conversation, and encouragement in the largely thankless and uselessly beautiful vocation that is la poesie.
