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.