Jeremy Stewart : Introduction : Something – for Barry McKinnon

folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)

                                                           

 

Barry McKinnon was one of those needed poets who understand that the poet’s task is to advance poetry, not oneself. I am glad he’s in our world.
                George Bowering (October 31, 2023)

 

 

I’m listening to Art Pepper as I write this. Barry McKinnon introduced me to Art’s music when he was a guest on my campus radio show sometime in the early 2000s. The jazz I most loved then is not so different than the jazz I most love now—searching the dark clouds, high on holy fire. This does not at all describe the jazz of Art Pepper, which is way west coast, smart and breezy. Like a student, I listened patiently to Art’s music when Barry shared it with me, and what I can say for sure is that listening again now, I understand it and like it far better than I did then. Yeah—I can hear it now; I guess that’s jazz at 42 (versus 24).

It does feel like a lot of time has passed. This folio in periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics is a tribute to Barry McKinnon; it is occasioned by his passing in late fall 2023. In the days after Barry’s death, I was approached by the editors of Thimbleberry Magazine to edit a memorial folio for him in their print edition; however, difficulties they had prevented this from being realized. When it became clear that the issue would not be printed, I sent notes to contributors, among whom was Donna Kane, who encouraged me to explore other possibilities for realizing the folio. It so happened that I was at the same time corresponding with rob mclennan, who offered to host the folio in periodicities. Donna and rob took on the rest of the task of soliciting and editing submissions, and between the (very modest) work I had already completed and their (much more substantial) efforts, this folio is now ready to share with you.

Of course, there would be nothing to show you without the work of the incredible community of writers that are gathered here to pay tribute to Barry. This folio contains writing by Hope Anderson, Elizabeth Bachinsky, bill bissett, George Bowering, Marilyn Bowering, Lary Bremner, Sarah de Leeuw, Justin Foster, Solomon Goudsward, John Harris, Donna Kane, GP Lainsbury, Sid Marty, rob mclennan, Paul Nelson, Matt Partyka, Graham Pearce, Al Rempel, Clea Roberts, George Sipos, Red Shuttleworth, Jeremy Stewart, Paul Strickland, Sharon Thesen, Simon Thompson, Michael Turner, Fred Wah, and Tom Wayman. This is a truly distinguished company and I would have expected nothing less. Our immense thanks to you all.

I want to take a moment to especially thank rob mclennan for his generosity in hosting this work at periodicities—which, I suggest, is an especially relevant and meaningful home for it—but also for his editorial care and support above and beyond. Special thanks also to Michael Armstrong for sending me a Community Arts Council festschrift for Barry from decades ago. I want to thank Kara-lee MacDonald and Rob Budde for their attempt to assemble this folio, without which I may not have been involved in the same way. Finally, my humble thanks to my co-Editor Donna Kane, without whose hard work and persistence this work would never have been completed, and to whose credit, in my view, the project most properly belongs.

I don’t want to spend all that much time on the things everyone knows about Barry, but I will spend some; let’s take a look through these snapshots, as in a family photo album – dry yellow grasses rustling across the frame; at the centre, a hardy pioneer in a stern hat, and in front, a wispy girl child almost invisible between the sheaves. Overleaf, Barry at a Montreal house party with Leonard Cohen, who he didn’t know, when their mutual teacher, Irving Layton arrives with his vaulting pole and a bottle of sherry. Barry with his period-appropriate glasses as a poet and a reader and a friend to poets and readers. Drinking a beer at The Barn with a young Joy and friends. Barry as a character in the stories of John Harris (John gave Barry all the best and funniest lines). Barry as a winner of the bpNichol chapbook award, and as a poet bpNichol read and loved. Barry in his (and others’) stories about Al Purdy and Robert Creeley and the many extraordinary writers who comprised his international poetry community. Connecting them with Prince George. Barry standing where Purdy and Birney stood in the photo at Machu Picchu. Barry behind the kit as a serious jazz drummer and in front of his record shelf as a serious jazz listener. At a jazz club in Manhattan. Barry in front of a desk with an ashtray built into it, lecturing an unpredictable clutch of northern kids, knowing and teaching that academia is not better or smarter than the society it critiques. Add all these impressions and many more to the portrait of Barry reflected in the work of the contributors to this folio.

We all know it, but I’ll say it anyway: Barry was generous with writers, especially students. As I have related elsewhere, I took a class with Barry in my first year at the College of New Caledonia, straight from dropping out of high school. I showed him my earliest, truly terrible attempts at poetry, and he managed to be encouraging while carefully avoiding praising the work itself, which no one could have praised. Among the many things he taught me, I always come back to Barry’s story about his father, who told him, “root hog or die.” As an undergrad, I spent a fair bit of time sitting in Barry’s office, interpreting that teaching with him. Looking back, I might now like to respond to Barry’s father’s dictum with a quote from the poet and novelist Roberto Bolaño on the courage of poets: “no one else in the world faces disaster with greater dignity and clarity.”

Here’s something not everyone knows about Barry: he knew a lot, and taught me a lot, about success. In many ways, our earliest conversations always circled questions of success. Barry found or invented another kind of success far from the centre of the Canadian literary establishment and publishing industry, at the centre of poetry in another way. There’s the poetry you write alone and the poetry you read alone, but there’s also the poetry you read in terms of the poet who wrote it, through your relationship with them, more or less remote, and there’s the poetry community that gets together and reads and listens and gossips and drinks and gets up to all kinds of hijinks. Barry moved through all these poetries with wit, courage, and generosity. He understood that the indignities to which poetry, and poets, are subject in the north are funnier than they are cruel—but they are still cruel. He worked to make poetry and its situation less cruel and more dignified (but still funny). There are many Gorse and Repository books on my shelves, and I like to go through them every so often and notice whose names I do and don’t recognize, and who was actually pretty good, and think about how for these folks, Barry helped make poetry something more for them that it would otherwise have been. Those who envy other kinds of success more than they admire this kind of success have much to learn about poetry and success both.

I’m going to mention the so-called poetry war, if only because I can guess that some of you are thinking about it. I took a side; I sided against the group Barry sided with, because they were wrong. And I took my share of criticism (in 2014, people pointed me to a social media post where Barry said that by throwing an old, ruined piano off a building, I was destroying western civilization. Yeah, man! I knew you would get it!). I know that people remember some of the events differently. We will not use this folio to refight the poetry war, and that means leaving room for differing views. As Donna put it, “we are all grieving together regardless of how we remember things, and it is about Barry.”

What remains sad about it all, though, is that in the end, people are more than their ideas. Most of those who fought felt they had to fight, but I still think it would’ve been better if we’d all had a beer together afterwards. Barry is gone, Ken is gone, Brian is gone. (And bp, and Al, and Pat, and RK, and Andy, and, and, and…). But we’re still here, for now, and we remember them, perhaps even as they were; and when you and I finally go get that beer, let’s talk about them. And let’s take it back to the poetry if we can. Transcription of feeling, that’s what I thought years ago when I first read The Centre. Then I thought, transcription of thought, or notation of thought. Fidelity to attention.

The Art Pepper record has run out. I lift the needle off the record and switch the turntable to “stop.” I’m leafing through Barry’s books now—I stumble across the version of “Journal,” a poem dedicated to Pierre Coupey, that appeared in Last Repository (1971-1981):

think of limbo again.  the wages of sin, pretty high.  we’ll

die allright – stretched out & unconscious, will wish to speak to no one

sad & miserable.  this occurs in a dream.  what the poets knew,

as preparation for the last image of a tree.

[…]

the paintings, another

thing to fall into – movements of colour & something

other.

Barry, thank you for saying what you said – I think I’m starting to hear it better now. Thank you for breathing and listening in the spaces between the notes. Thank you for saying so much, and for saying it so well.

Jeremy Stewart (winner, Barry McKinnon Chapbook Award, 2007)
Surrey, BC
June 2024

 

 

 

 

Jeremy Stewart is the author of experimental novella In Singing, He Composed a Song, as well as poetry collections Hidden City and (flood basement. Stewart’s fourth book, I, Daniel: An Illegitimate Reading of Jacques Derrida’s “Envois,” is forthcoming in 2024.

Stewart lives with his family in Surrey, BC. He once dropped a piano off a building.

 

Ken Norris : THE ROMANTIC WORDS/RUBY WOUNDS PROJECT

 

 

 

 

When he was pushing thirty, Artie Gold began writing Romantic Words. He thought so highly of the manuscript that he called the book that came before it before Romantic Words.

For a number of odd reasons, Romantic Words never made it into print during Artie’s lifetime. Publishing became difficult and drugs became easy. That’s one way to tell it. There are a multitude of other ways. Long story short, when Artie died at the age of sixty in 2007, Romantic Words remained unpublished.

Endre Farkas and I discussed cobbling together a version of it and including it in The Collected Books of Artie Gold (2010). But we really didn’t have very much to go on. The manuscript was “lost.” In 2012 or 2013, Patrick Hutchinson, who was going through Artie’s papers to organize them for McGill University, found two version of Romantic Words in the literary papers. By 2015 or 2016, Endre, as Artie’s literary executor, had decided to ask George Bowering to edit Romantic Words. And so begins our tale.

By 2018, George had declined the job. He still had too much of his own writing left to do. I toyed with the idea of editing the book myself, and then declined the job too. It was going to be a tough, problematic edit, and I still had too much of my own writing left to do as well.

The pandemic arrives in 2020 and all of life changes. Late in the year, Endre and I hear from George—he’s working on Romantic Words. But he is not editing it—he is collaborating with it. In the life confusion that was plaguing us all, he had put on his writer’s hat, not his editor’s hat.

In this version of Romantic Words/Ruby Wounds, Artie gets the first page and George gets the second. And what George has going on his page is many things. Sometimes it is commentary. Sometimes it is revision. Sometimes it is translation. Sometimes it is a wholesale rewrite. Sometimes it is a moment in awe.

George’s openness as a reader/writer/editor/friend/fanboy allows many things to transpire. It’s a curious book, and there is a genuine dialogue happening between the Artie poems and the George poems. What the reader sees happening is certainly some version of admiration, affection and love.

I think the big question isn’t: why does this project exist? I think the big question is: why don’t we have more books like this? As it stands, it is unique in our literature, in our realm of writing.

Fencing, tennis—the metaphors are there for the back and forth the book produces. Artie, George, Artie, George—it’s an atmosphere of engagement and, occasionally, friendly competition. Sometimes George seeks to explain Artie. Other times he simply says, This is the way I’d do it, and here it is—done.

*

When Artie was working on Romantic Words, Joe Rosenblatt asked him for poems for Jewish Dialog. Artie sent him a batch of poems (as he was prone to do) and Joe selected the poems he wanted. When the issue came out there were all of these R.W. poems with numbers. I am guessing that was Artie's idea, but it might have been Joe's.

Artie gave me a copy of Jewish Dialog (he had spares) and I started flipping through it, saw all of the numbered R.W.s. "Ah, I get it," I said, "R.W.--Romantic Words." 

"It's also Ruby Wounds," Artie said.

"Ruby Wounds?" I asked.

Artie then started telling me about Frank O'Hara's poem "Ode To Willem De Kooning." I looked puzzled, as I often was when Artie was philosophizing about poetry. "Just read it when you get home," he said, and moved along to another life topic, probably involving food. 

When I got home I opened up my copy of The Collected Poems Of Frank O'Hara and found the poem. It's one of those wandering odes of O'Hara's where he is trying to show that he can do Abstract Expressionism in words. The payoff for "ruby wounds" comes at the end of the poem:

A bus crashes into a milk truck
                                                  and the girl goes skating up the avenue
with streaming hair
                               roaring through fluttering newspapers
and their Athenian contradictions
                                                     for democracy is joined
with stunning collapsible savages, all natural and relaxed and free

as the day zooms into space and only darkness lights our lives,
with few flags flaming, imperishable courage and the gentle will
which is the individual dawn of genius rising from its bed

"maybe they're wounds, but maybe they are rubies"
                                                                                   each painful as a sun

                                                                                                              1957

*

To be interested in poetry means, I think, to be willingly engaged in a certain kind of verbal difficulty. I say this as a poet who started out trying to be extremely accessible. But there is something in the abstruseness of a Margaret Avison or an Artie Gold that calls one to a different kind of mission. George loves engaging with that, when poetry threatens to start speaking in tongues. And when, at the age of twenty-four, I met Artie and started reading his poetry, it was something I really had to get used to.

Artie Gold is, by no means, an easy-to-read poet. He deploys vast elements of Surrealism—often. And his syntax is often programmed to confound the most astute grammarian. There are verbal tangles throughout his work. And there are numerous places to get lost in the hopes of being found, in the hope of poetry giving the reader that state of grace that only poetry can deliver.

At times, in this collaborative Romantic Words, Bowering seems quite content and happy to play second violin. He isn’t contesting the poetic space with Artie as much as he is commenting upon Gold’s negotiation of it. At times there is an opportunity to redirect the energy flow, or offer an older and wiser perspective on things (Bowering is eighty-five years old as he is working on the manuscript). George reconfigures some poems on his page as an act of generosity. Occasionally he illustrates a flaw. But he also bows to the flawless when it occurs, which is often. Sometimes only for a sequence of lines, sometimes for an entire startling poem (see R.W. 6)

There are times when I do, in fact, prefer “George’s version”—he has a lifetime of craft and crafting behind him. Sometimes Artie’s poems sputter—like Elmer Fudd trying to talk when he’s excited about something. At these times, George, as an astute reader, a gifted writer, can show a bewildered reader where the poem was trying to go.

There’s something almost arcane about poetry if you are doing it right. It’s shot through with mystery, and its moments of bright clarity are often totally mysterious. This is a great project for me as a reader. It takes me right down into the commas.

In the late 1970s, I knew Romantic Words/Ruby Wounds as a unified working manuscript. I knew it as something that was up for revision. And then, years later, I knew it as a mythic manuscript that had been lost and then was found in Artie’s papers. What it’s now become both mystifies and pleases me.

Under George’s hand, Romantic Words has been divided in two and multiplied by two and has quite possibly entered the realm of works such as After Lorca and Heads of the Town Up to the Aether. It used to be a friend of mine’s poetry manuscript. Now it’s become something else and something totally unique.

Toronto
June 16, 2023

 

 

 

 

Ken Norris was born in New York City in 1951. He came to Canada in the early 1970s, to escape Nixon-era America and to pursue his graduate education. He completed an M.A. at Concordia University and a Ph.D. in Canadian Literature at McGill University. He became a Canadian citizen in 1985. Norris is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maine, where he taught Canadian Literature and Creative Writing for thirty-three years. His latest chapbook, Echoes, recently appeared from above/ground press. He currently resides in Toronto.