folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)
I was the poetry emissary from the University of Victoria where I was teaching, to the Feb.1980 Words / Loves writing conference in Prince George, and this was where I first met Barry. For some of it, I was a bemused spectator at readings where male northern poets addressed, argued with and praised each other by name in their works. I didn’t mind it, but I didn’t get the point. Robert Creeley, the ‘main’ poet invited, was great and I had long liked his work, but it was a relief, and it was inspiring—maybe especially in that context - to hear Audrey Thomas read an entire world into being with a story. Barry invited some of us to his and Joy’s house. While there, talking poetry and poetics, browsing the library in the garage, seeing some of the work Barry was printing and publishing, I glimpsed the scale of the cultural project Barry and others were undertaking. It was not going to be easy. I knew Prince George – I had family there and had worked in the I.B. Guest book and stationery store when I was a student. One hot, dusty, soulless afternoon I had gone into the then-main library and asked the librarian where the poetry section was. He said, “You’re the first person who has ever come in and asked for poetry.” I don’t know if that was true (it was the late 1960’s) but I found a volume of Gregory Corso’s poetry and also took out a copy of Dante’s Inferno. It is because of Barry’s much later interest in Dante that I mention this here. What stayed with me at the time was Barry and Joy’s kindness and hospitality and Barry’s commitment to a life in poetry and to his students: in sum, he was a person of generosity of mind and spirit. This never changed over the decades of our irregular keeping in touch, although to these qualities I would add courage – perhaps integrity is the best overall word for what I saw in him.
Our last correspondence, some time ago now, followed a long conversation about Dante after a TWUC meeting. After years of writing and teaching, I felt I was coming to the end of something and so did Barry. He quoted Creeley’s, “Happy in hell” - an echo, I thought, of Milton’s Paradise Lost - and an Al Purdy anecdote connected to Creeley’s line, “When I know what others think of me / I am plunged into loneliness.” I had found what I felt was Dante’s prescription for writing (and life) in the beginning of the Divine Comedy: it is a Muse – a love that lasts through life and death; a Literary Guide; and Memory in the sense of Memory, the mother of the muses in Greek mythology. This is not new, but I had only recently read it as a recipe. It seemed to me to be a good way to approach a book or a difficult life passage. In retrospect, it was of course a conversation about being in The Dark Woods well on in middle age and needing a map.
Barry’s fine polemical/lyrical poem Into the Blind World inhabits Dante’s in-between space of seeing as a living soul among the dead. In his afterwords to Parts I and II, Barry disavows a “return to the bright world”- “to look once more upon the stars” tending more to believe Robert Creeley who writes “‘the darkness surrounds us’ - yet within it we must live and experience whatever range we are given or decide.” There are lyrical moments that, for me, situate this outlook better, one in an email where Barry speaks of the excitement of working on this project, “just when I thot ‘the end’ – as in, at this age, all that will not be experienced again, I get the surprise. a virgil, a Beatrice, or the thing that was always there. a complicated way of saying I feel like I did as a kid, early on, standing in a farm field with butterflies in my stomach.” Then, being a writer, he worries, “how close is sentimentality to sadness.”
A moment in the poem which fixes, for me, where Barry stood as a poet, and maybe concerning the life he had made in the north are these:
I trudged thru snow
snow/ to a darker globe /beneath pins of stars
This prompts me to my own afterword which may help tie some of this together. It was when I read W.S. Merwin’s book The Mays of Ventadorn where he discusses his exploration of 12th century Provencal troubadours and writes his appreciation of Dante for naming troubadours and quoting their lines in his work - and so saving them for us – that I understood that writers referring to each other as did some conference poets back in 1980 and throughout years of friendships and disagreements, just as the troubadour poets did with each other in their songs, was a means of survival and cultural continuity as well as a declaration of territory. The questions Barry raises in his life-long poetry walk in the snow remain worth trying to answer - Who has the right to sing? And where? And of what? And for what? And to whom? And when if not right now?
Marilyn
Bowering
May
27, 2024
Marilyn Bowering is a poet and novelist who lives in Victoria BC. Her most recent book is the non-fiction literary investigation and memoir, More Richly in Earth, A Poet’s Search for Mary MacLeod (MQUP 2024). She was the winner of the 2023 Ruth and David Lampe prize for poetry. Marilyn is also the librettist for Marilyn Forever (Gavin Bryars) and the author of essays in publications including the anthology Green Matters: Ecocultural Functions of Literature (2019). She has been short-listed for the world-wide Orange Prize, long-listed for the Dublin Impac Award, twice short-listed for the Governor-General’s Prize for poetry, and received the Dorothy Livesay, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Ethel Wilson and Pat Lowther Prizes as well as several National Magazine awards.
