folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)
In 1995, while in Prince George visiting family, I noticed anadvertisem*nt for a poetry reading. I’d never attended a poetry reading before.If memory serves, Roo Borson read first, then John Donlan, and then Barry. WhenBarry came up to the podium, he said, “I should warn you. I’m a sad poet.”
His poems didn’t strikeme as sad so much as an exposition of human frailties told with compassion andvulnerability. When I saw he was teaching a poetry workshop in Wells, BC thatsummer, I attended, and the next year too, this time with my friend EmilieMattson. At one of the after-hour coffee houses, Emilie got kicked out forbeing too boisterous in her conviction that we too could organize such anevent. A few months later, the first Sweetwater 905 Arts Festival, amulti-disciplinary festival that would go on for nearly 20 years, was held inRolla. At that first festival in 1997, Barry was our feature poet.
In poetry, Barryintroduced me to Robert Creeley, in music, to Abbey Lincoln and Miles Davis. Itwas with Barry and friends that I first visited New York, going to the BlueNote, the Village Vanguard, Birdland, Smalls. When the clubs closed for thenight, we’d all cram into a cab and go where Barry knew they’d let us in afterhours to hear musicians play, chairs stacked up in the corner, bar and foodservices shut down.
I’ve often thought that some of the things Miles Davis said about music could have been said by Barryabout poetry, things like, you don’t get to the heart of something by feeling,“you go on a feeling.” Both created atone all their own, their aesthetic uniquely theirs.
In his own words about his method, Barry wrote that he attemptedto “articulate the poem’s central truth fromvarious & variable angles & perspectives.” Todo this, Barry wrote the long poem, “ … a way to log my experience &to record what I value most in a context of forces, subtle or not, thatthreaten those values.”
Barry cared deeply aboutthreatened values, and he was often caught up in one threat or another, real orperceived – the lyric poem, the College principal, the wrong aestheticinfluencing our retreat in Tumbler Ridge, the red light seen through its livingroom window (“Surveillance,” said Barry. “Nonsense,” said I), the “Poetry Wars”in which some Prince George poets pitted themselves against others.
I worry now that I made toolittle of those threats, that I dismissed how important they were to Barry.Once, after Barry recalled an incident where grown men, poets, tried to throweach other out of Second Cup, he wrote to me, “I knowyou think this is a schoolyard fight, but this stuff is very serious to me,because of the harm it’s done to poetry and the real community that could haveemerged as a force, disparate or not.”
Around 2000, Barry and Joy, along with me and my husband at thetime, bought a house in Tumbler Ridge – 139 Kiskatinaw Crescent (this pleased Barry, nine being a number he sometimes applied topoetry, part of what he called his “numerological hangups.” “If you’re going toexplore ghazals,” he once wrote, “write nine of them.” And 13? Barry was bornon a Friday the 13th, and his last birthday, just a few days beforehe died, was also on a Friday the 13th. I think he would have likedthat).
With the purchase of the house, Barry and I created the non-profit society Writing on the Ridge. What wonderful timesthose were. Barry was one of the funniest people I’ve ever known, and in hiscompany one wanted to stay up all night just to keep the conversation andthe laughter going, and we often did.
Eventually, we sold ourhalf of the house to Barry and Joy who continued to fill the space with family,friends, and writers while I carried on with the non-profit society. For over20 years, Writing on the Ridge supported readings, festivals, retreats, writer-in-residenceprograms and artist camps.
Our poetic sensibilitiesdid not always align, and I know my writing sometimes threw Barry into despair.“Okay, I’m depressed and confused,” he’d sometimes say, after reading the poemsI’d sent him.
Barry didn’t trust the lyric, but I was never sure what thelyric was. I think Barry might have defined it as being driven first by form –a sonnet perhaps, end rhymes, metered stanzas, whereas the “anti-lyric” (a termI first learned from Barry), is when the emotion of the poem drives thecontent, and the content then drives the form. Many of our late-night debatescircled these ideas.
Barry always used “Barryhere” as the subject line of his emails. The last time I emailed him was on hisbirthday, October 13, my subject line “Happy Birthday!” I didn’t hear backuntil just a few days before he died when he replied (this time without changingthe subject line), “Donna. I’m quite sick. one more test today. will let youknow.” It would be Joy, not Barry, who let me know.
Barry was one of mygreatest writing friends, and I will miss him so much. But as Barry’s long-timefriend John Harris said in a recent interview, when he misses Barry, "We read his poetry and he comes right back to us." When I am struggling with the process or the politics ofpoetry, he comes right back to me too, “Cheer up,” I hear him say. “You’re apoet. The poem is a struggle but what a lot of fun too.”
Solecism (from Erratic, 2007)
for Barry
At the feverish height
of our debate which began
with jazz and Elvin Jones
who played an 18-inchdrum
not out of an aesthetic
but because it fit
in the cab that took him
from gig to gig and led
to the question of poetry–
should form drivecontent,
or content, form. Certain
we were nearing the heartof it,
I rushed to the car for abook,
our voices aloft, yourshoes
by the door. Withouthesitation,
my feet slipped intotheir collars,
beneath their unlacedvamps,
touching down on theimperfect
match of your soles andstopped:
asudden wildness.
The habits of yourmuscles, their expand
and contract, the weightof your intentions
grooved into leather.
My own feet made strange,made
tender.
Donna Kane is the author of four books of poetry, mostrecently, Asterisms (Harbour, 2024). Herprevious book of poetry, Orrery(Harbour, 2020), was afinalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. She is also the author of thenon-fiction book, Summer of the Horse (Harbour, 2018).Her poems, short fiction, essays, and reviews have been published widely injournals such as Today in Science, Scientific American,TheWalrus,The Fiddlehead, andThe Malahat Reviewaswell as in several anthologies. She divides her time between Rolla, BC onTreaty 8 Territory and Halifax, NS in Mi’kma’ki,the ancestral and traditional lands of the Mi’kmaq people.
