folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)
One of my favorite Barry poems is called “Radio On”—from his collection In the Millenium. In the poem, the radio is on and he’s thinking about writing a story about gardening; then, after wondering where an outside noise came from, he writes the conjunction OR, and says he’s thinking about David Phillips “out in the mud of mid-life”—and that it’s 30 below and he should go outside but he must constantly think about the “stink of polluted air”. There is no hope, he writes; yet, “live daily and sing the body electric.” He returns to the gardening image and realizes he’s not that good at gardening, since a neighbour, “old Tom” who smoked and bowled, had advised him to “make little piles” (presumably of raked leaves?) and “don’t work so hard.” But Barry says he knows he is likely to make a big pile. Something keeps him working too hard “in this foliate world”—this “tyranny of systems.”
He also states in the poem that on that day he “won’t do school work” — marking papers and preparing classes. In the interview with Paul Nelson in Cascadian Prophets, he talked about taking his kids to the ski hill on the weekend, but rather than go skiing with them, he had to sit in the car marking papers (he had an overload of classes at the college that term). He said he felt bad about this. In the poem, he wonders “in this task how to get out of the way of what breaks in.”
Barry never got out of the way of what breaks in. Reading his work recently I’m more aware than ever of the italicized words, phrases, and sentences that break into the meaning or sense of the line being written. And which can seem to the reader to come out of left field. Expository coherence was never an interest of Barry’s —he was not a story-teller. He was a composer, a musician, a drummer, a listener and thinker conscious of the expression of his own perceptions. Sometimes a word or phrase from the radio would come in, either from the CBC, that frustrating cultural spouse, or the local station, CKPG. Barry liked the Bay Day ads and the “Problem Line” and the twice daily “Messages” broadcast to outlying areas asking people to bring certain things with them to town on a Friday night, absurdly coded, such as “a few cords of wood.”
Barry, as a newcomer in the mid-sixties to a rough and tumble logging town in north central BC, assumed the townspeople didn’t really care for people like him. He found he was wrong about that; and despite bureaucratic pushback at times, he and the other English Department instructors at the college introduced a couple of generations of working people to modern and contemporary literature and poetry. Barry was an enthusiastic host and organizer of public readings. Prince George, in the middle of nowhere, was treated to readings by famous Canadian and American writers, from Al Purdy to Margaret Atwood to Robert Creeley. The hostility toward Barry, ironically, came from the academics at the newly-built university. An annual Barry McKinnon Chapbook Award was cancelled. Barry’s writing, as well as that of some of his colleagues at the college, failed to meet their standards of political correctness, punishing not only Barry himself, but also the young local writers who would have been vying for a popular and valued award. Barry’s work always held to a conscious moral standard; in fact his arguments with himself about language and conduct were always being worked out in his writing. Being cancelled in his own home town was profoundly demoralizing and stressful for Barry and created lasting rifts in what was once a lively and inclusive local scene.
The winning chapbook manuscript would have been beautifully published by Barry’s Gorse Press— the Gorse St. basement site of a significant production of chapbooks, broadsides, pamphlets, and folios that Barry designed and printed. This was part of his generosity and his democratic spirit—and was also another mode of artistic and aesthetic expression. In these sometimes large and always beautifully printed manuscripts there is something of the ancient prophetic. Barry would construct folios of work he admired, alongside his own work, as if to record forever an astonishment of friendship in poetry. It is deeply unfortunate that the organizers of the Literary Prince George tours boycotted Barry and Joy’s Gorse St. home—repository not only of the press, but of the McKinnons’ hospitality toward writers, artists, and poets from across the country, who had been hosted when they came to the city to do readings, talks, and workshops. (Yes, Margaret Atwood slept there.)
There was something really special about Barry, a charisma, a sweetness, a politeness. He loved to drink and talk. He had an exquisite sense of the absurd. He was a loyal and considerate friend and it is from the perspective of our long friendship that I try to remember him here, and realize how little I really knew about this quiet and thoughtful person, this gentle poet.
Sharon Thesen graduated from Prince George Senior Secondary in 1963. In 1966 she married Brian Fawcett and their son Jesse was born in 1970, when they were both poetry students at Simon Fraser University. Author and editor of many books of poetry, Sharon is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at UBC’s Okanagan campus.
