Thursday, June 20, 2024

Lary Bremner : heart in place out of time for barry mckinnon

folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)

 

 

 

In the dozen or so conversations I had with Barry (over as many years, and mostly in Vancouver) he would inevitably retreat a half step, and eye me as if to see if I knew his work, but then engage me willingly, so swept away was he in the importance of writing. I found his readings to be almost like ‘writing on the spot’… not ad hoc but really working through the poem as if it were new to him in that moment. I liked that. And I liked, just as much, that when he reached the last line he didn’t try to sell it with some cadenced resolution (although it was musical and clearly the end) but let all the pieces hang there in some koan-like completeness/emptiness… if that is not overstating it. A life in poetry… is something.



heart in place & out of time
                         -       in memory of Barry McKinnon

 

may malls & malls of forest move
over what always ever-moved you.

somewhere in the center & north of the o,
somehow a sea-level view from pemberton

heights, someone within alternately audible
caterwauling & lowing of student cafeterias

sits the earnest beatboxing rhinestone cowboy, another
one among the stevedores of this our temporal heaven.

there & then, in george stanley’s gentle northern summer,
a cnr brakeman observes the culled patinas of a passing

skyline from pumpkin-seed-shell-strewn dull orange caboose,
as soon-to-be redundantly retired waiter places more foaming

headfuls of jack spicer’s mead upon circular
tables of de rigeur absorbent terry-towel red,

mumbling something in passing like
poetry, like let th’ real bartok talk talk,

in his also hoping,
hoping to be heard.

*

the sheaves, the proofs, the old whole earth
catalogues serve now as insulation between

the torn timber the ‘naturalized’
computer & the rarer notebook,

while our hands make minds unstill, ever-
exploring in the muck of dream mortality.

eventually you begin to realize the poets can do anything,
but no one of them (yourself included) can do everything.

there may be aurora borealis glamping in yellowknife
but there’s no ‘sugaring off’ in old meudon val fleury.

there are certain ski resorts in inawashiroko
or can you commit to years in soto eiheiji?

the poets are the few that (in
hard revery) remain to it true,

dissembling puzzles of each necessity,
long highways of orange traffic cone,

the deer that find
the ways to cross.

*

let me not a catchphrase killjoy be, but the
land we live in is the scattered ever-present,

(lake district einzelwanders packing plowman’s lunch,
you with thermos, serviceable boots, raindrop elixirs)
gone to the fonts of tourism
& the upholstery of industry.

adieu to the last of the jukebox cafes, to the
boomtown rats jumping ship, to huey lewis

singing old news, to cyndi lauper she bop, to
the 4 strong winds that still blow lonely ian :

poetry is jumper is shape-
shifter is also none of that,

a never to be pinned-down because
we are the always moving through it,

making money in makeshift institutional halls
while sun projects tree shadow upon mtn walls.

*

 

 

 

Lary Bremner is a North Vancouver poet living in Japan.