I originally did this interview with Prince George poet Barry McKinnon for the Prince George issue of filling Station. The piece was posted in four sections on the filling Station blog (one, two, three and four) as an online extension of the recent Prince George, British Columbia issue, but I thought it might be worth posting the entire interview here as well.
this
interview was conducted over email from October 16 - 30, 2012
Barry
McKinnon was born in
1944 in Calgary Alberta, where he grew up. In 1965, after two years at Mount
Royal College, he went to Sir George Williams University in Montreal and took
poetry courses with Irving Layton. He graduated in 1967 with a B.A. degree. In
1969, he graduated with an M.A. from the University of British Columbia in
Vancouver, and was hired that same year to teach English at the College of New
Caledonia in Prince George where he has lived and worked ever since.
Barry
McKinnon’s The the was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for
poetry in 1080. Pulp Log was the winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry
Award for the B.C. Book Prizes in 1991 and Arrhythmia was the winner of
the bpNichol Chapbook Award for the best chapbook published in Canada in
English in 1994. His chapbook Surety Disappears was the runner-up for
the bpNichol Award in 2008.
rob mclennan: In her review of your most recent trade collection, In
the millennium, in The Bull Calf, Gilliam Wigmore wrote that “In
the millennium is a continuation of Barry McKinnon’s lifelong project to
process the meaning of making a home in an essentially inhospitable place.” How
do you feel about that description? What does it mean to you as a poet, or even
as a resident of Prince George?
Barry
McKinnon: There are
several levels to Gillian’s statement that interest me; at first it looks
accurate but also seems too general given my complex relationship with and in
Prince George and given the writing
this place has inspired via its “essentially inhospitable” surface. I think
wherever I find myself, I’m always confronted by complex particulars and as a poet
any sense of “making a home” may seem close at hand, but paradoxically also far
off. I feel at home perhaps most in New
York City with all that’s available there that interests me, and then at some
point sitting in a bar in the Lower East End, begin to miss the mountains of
Tumbler Ridge.
I was once
asked by a professor if I was interested in being a writer in residence at the
university here. He later informed me
that the Canada Council added a new rule that a writer in residence could not live in the same city. I
facetiously said: I don’t live here! but also felt this odd insight: the detached
necessary sense of exile that can often prompt the poem. This echoes for me,
also, William Carlos William’s line that for the poet there is the literal place,
as say, Patterson, but that: “only the imagination is real.” So if one works
from that metaphysic, where do Gillian’s statement and your questions take me?
The truth of my experience is in the poems: The
Centre, The Centre: Moving North, and
In the Millennium. With regards to the question here, “Prince George: Part
One” is an autobiographical piece that might provide an answer of sorts –
fragmentary particulars of my experience in the early days (1969 and on).
But for a
literal background, the sociology of Prince George seems simple enough. I’ve
been writing a prose book, Chairs in the
Time Machine, about my first years here, and a period through the 1980’s
when the arts got gutted by a “new vision”. At the college where I used to work, those with the power and the new management team to
carry out their mandate, wanted polytechnic trades training – anything technical. Poetry and the arts didn’t fit with this
thinking, so we found ourselves clinging to the handful of arts courses left –
and limped onward into the hostile 80’s. This is the story I’m working on now –
the nasty confrontations after my layoff on the grounds that creative writing
was redundant), pressure to
reinstate me (Brian Fawcett and Pierre Coupey got 50 writers to write letters
in my defense), another 12 years of survival under the same “management”, and
my obvious but paranoid revelation that some of us caused so much trouble to
the system in an attempt to save what we valued that I would never get hired
anywhere else.
To go back. In
1969 my initial sense that the place was,
if not inhospitable, at least suspicious, driven by the lumber and pulp
industry and populated by mill workers, loggers, and “hewers of wood” (as the
clichés have it) and populated by a
public initially very suspicious of the proposed college and of the bunch of
outsider eggheads who were going to either threaten or change the established order of things. The mayor at the time
felt that the trades school was good enough. A college would be a big tax
drain. Later on during a referendum for a new library, he quipped: “libraries
are for loafers!” The welcome-mat was not exactly out: in the first weeks here an absentee landlord
kicked Joy and me out of our first apartment because of my moderately long
hair.
I was aware
that in 1968 it had taken two referendums before the city finally voted for a
junior college that would offer its citizens, for the first time, university
transfer courses. Simply, the town
movers and shakers as they’ve been called – those politicians, business men,
& assorted other local professionals and managers – wanted, from what I
could see, to determine and define a city and its “real needs” in what they
claim is the “real world”. But the second vote won. In the fall of 1969 the
college faculty moved temporarily into the high school to teach the range of
arts and humanities courses, and open a new possibilities for hundreds of
curious, bright, and a motivated students. So it seemed that at least some
people] did want poetry, art, music,
the social sciences, history, geography, geology, and the range of literatures
we were hired to offer. The college, to
use D.H. Lawrence’s phrase, became the creation of a “new little habitat”
within the larger community. We started a student newspaper, a literary
magazine, a small press, a reading series that included over 100 writers
(Atwood, Ondaatje, Purdy, Livesay etc – a series that prompted Earle Birney to
say that “Prince George is the poetry capitol of B.C.!” ). All of these
activities along with our university courses prepared our students for transfer to North American colleges and
universities - and the larger world beyond.
If
the idea of home is too static & what that concept might sentimentally
imply, I feel okay to say I have, as the poet Lissa Wolsak once put it, “a very full life” here as a poet and citizen
– within the wide range of all that
living implies.
rm: What is it about the form of the long poem that still appeals
after all these years?
BM: This is a Note I wrote for Sharon Thesen’s The
New Long Poem Anthology, Coach House Press, 1991.
In the spring of 1970 while revising a short,
unfinished poem, I sensed that the subject was too large for the kind of lyric
I was in the habit of writing. The urgency, impulse and push of its untold story
kept me writing steadily for the next three weeks. The route this little
fragment opened seemed to say: you can sum up your life to this point if you
keep at it. Yet, I was afraid that this emerging long poem with its complex set
of elements and conditions (fragments, images, ideas, and memories based on a
series of my grandfather’s photographs and stories about his life at the turn
of the 20th century) – would fail and
end nowhere. The pleasure of the writing, however, was to be in a poem with
such a large context of space and time – to be in a form that, paradoxically,
gave me new energy and confidence. I didn't know what I was doing but I was
doing it. The result was the book-length poem, I Wanted to Say Something.
Since then I've been writing the long poem
/serial sequence, a form that gives me the necessary range in which to
articulate the poem's central truth from various and variable angles and
perspectives.
I would like to add that during a conversation
with Rober Kroetsch some years ago – always a taciturn experience until the
beer kicked in – I asked if it took a long time to write a poem that is also
relatively short in length, does the temporal measure qualify it as “ a long
poem”? I can’t remember if Bob answered but do remember his slight smile as
some kind of agreement. My new work Into the Blind World runs about 6 or7 pages
for each of the 2 sections. Two years of reading Dante, thinking, and writing
words on post-it-notes got me a total of 13 pages. A long poem?
A Note On Arrhythmia for Sharon Thesen’s
The New Long Poem Anthology, Coach House, 2001.
When I started writing at the age of 16, I
wrote fast, filling boxes with quickly scribbled lyrics dashed off with a sense
of excitement and risk. I never knew what I was about to say or where the page
was to take me. Now I’m 68 and the
energy and pleasure of the writing process hasn’t really changed, but I wait
much longer between poems. I’ve had to learn patience. Much writing and
thinking for me is practice in preparation for the event when the poem arrives.
I’ve also learned to live with another paradox
of its activity: The poem simultaneously identifies its writer to the world,
but only comes into being when the writer, so to speak, is out of the way. What
a strange occupation and process that requires obliteration of self at the same
time that it reaffirms it. I think I knew this early on.
When I wrote the sequence, Arrhythmia, I
literally had the sensation that my time on earth was shortly up. Arrhythmia is a condition of irregular heart
beats (“glandular prosody” as I joke in the poem) that, in my case, created a
great sense of anxiety that didn’t lift until I was diagnosed – thus the poem’s
final line of release and relief:
“knowing is paradise”. Poetry, in many ways, has saved my life, given it
to me.
The composing principle for Arrhythmia,
and I hope all of my work, was in line with W.C. William’s dictum that each
poem must sum up the poet’s life to that point. I wrote Arrhythmia daily with
the sense that if I had anything more to say I’d better get at it. If the word “subject” is still in the
post-modern lexicon, I believe the poet’s subject is time – and that language
discloses the actualities therein. Emotion is the poem’s fact.
I’ve always needed the accumulation of experience
and a push from some unexpected angle (a political/ social/personal condition,
the corporeal – a heart condition) to throw me into the process of the
poem. A woman I met in Hamilton asked me
at a reading if I wrote traumatic monologues. I had to agree, instantly, yes!
and therefore with her slip on the word dramatic, created a close description
of what I do.
As D.H. Lawrence writes: “We’ve got to live no
matter how many skies have fallen.” I believe the poem helps us live because it
also contains our affirmation, hope, and joy.
rm: You originally moved to Prince George to teach at the College of New Caledonia. What have you
learned over the years as a teacher, and what benefits has it brought you as a
writer? Obviously, Prince George is a rough town, but I know there have been
writers that have emerged from your classes over the years. How does that add
to your experience or knowledge of writing?
BM: When I
arrived here in July of 1969 fresh from UBC, I was in a panic for many
reasons. Prince George looked rough and
the air stunk. Joy wanted to turn around and go back to Vancouver, but I don’t
think the 57 Plymouth would make it. The so-called college consisted of a few
portable trailers in a muddy parking lot behind the local high school. The first
principal had a “vision” inspired by high art and high purpose that seemed
appealing, but his “passions” turned out to be narrowly defined. He fought with the Nazi’s in WW11, spent time
in a prison camp, moved to Canada after the war, and was eventually hired to
run a college back east. He was an interesting man, but insistent in a way that
rubbed most of us, and the town, the wrong way. We were called “masters” and
had to follow a strict dress code – jackets and ties and were often reminded to
get out hair cut. He insisted on a formality that didn’t fit the place or the
time. After a reading I gave to the new
faculty – we were all asked to give an informative talk – he bluntly said to
the effect: “I didn’t think you wrote
poetry like that!”
I had never
taught before so was confronted with developing a syllabus for 3 courses, and
the anxious question of how to teach,
stay ahead of the students and appear that I knew something. What might have
saved me is that my diffidence was misread as me being laid-back. In reality, I was an emotional mess. Before my first class I vomited. Charles
Boylan, also hired to teach English and to become a close friend, walked me to
that first class and said: “You’re a likeable guy, you’ll do fine man!” And I
did, despite my nerves, do well because the students in most of my classes
sensed that my lapses and stumbles were an invitation for them to talk,
discuss, go off topic, and take-over. I liked them and got to know them better
as friends during the many nights we went to the Inn of the North bar after
class. In “The Barn” the class conversations continued: art, poetry, school and
town politics, world affairs, gossip and questions like: “What’s up with the weird principal?”
I started to
see that the lyric mode I was practicing wasn’t adequate for what I began to
experience in Prince George. The town
was once described as “peeled back”; beyond the surface I began to see what
realities it revealed; it became visible via its many dimensions: social, political, economic etc. and that
many of us as writers, academics, and students now had the job of defining and
revealing what we saw and felt beyond the Chamber of Commerce clichés. The
college was changing the town in important ways. The students wrote articles
about the local pulp mill pollution, reviewed the poetry readings, published
student poetry, protested the Vietnam War, started a literary magazine, and
overall shit-disturbed the established order. I think, too, that the town
sensed that things at the college were out of control. Too many lefties,
hippies, artists, and troublemakers. The College Board fired the principal at
the end of his second year. Life at the college somewhat calmed down as we
entered the more benign 70’s, but got worse, beginning in the early 80’s – a
complicated and unhappy decade ahead that I’ve begun to document in detail in Chairs in the Time Machine.
Many
students became friends. They wrote and published chapbooks, helped me organize
the poetry readings, and run the Caledonia Writing Series Press, kept me on my
toes with their intelligence, curiosity, and tenacity. Names that come to mind,
the poets and writers Harvey Chometsky, Bill Bailey, Alice Wolzak, Connie
Mortenson, Meryl Duprey, Sharon Stevenson, Barbara Munk, John Oscroft, Randy Kennedy,
Steve Stack and many many others I could list. Two other writers I need to
mention became dear friends and colleagues that kept me straight on the writing
path: The great Western American poet Paul “Red” Shuttleworth who taught a
course with me, and John Harris whose books Small
Rain and Other Art tell the
college story in all of its ironic, humorous and dark dimensions. I need to add
that anyone interested in Prince George must read all of Brian Fawcett’s books.
Whatever
tradition there is for writing in Prince George now continues with the many
writers and artists I’m glad to hang out with: Graham Pearce, Matteus Partyka,
Alex Buck, Arianwen Geronwy Roberts, Ryan White, Greg Lainsbury, Sarah de
Leeuw, Paul Strickland, David Ogilvie – and
the many other writers who read and participate in Graham Pearce’s yearly Post North series of readings.
But, yes, those first years were exciting and
inspiring and provided content for various poem/sequences. I’m referring to the long poems in The the. that bpNichol published at
Coach House Press. The town for me
became a kind of chimera, an interesting tattered muse. Later in the 80’s
during the darkness described earlier, my writing became as W. C. Williams once
said – a way to ease my mind. Writing The
Centre saved me at the time; it was a daily articulation of a kind of
breakdown, but also a poem that defined for myself the irony, ambiguity,
cruelty and hypocrisy of the college administration. I think the metaphor it
projects is a large one and includes the larger world. Pulp Log during this same period became a log in 52 parts that
again traced the daily shifts, changes and confrontations I found myself
in. My “subject” was the institution
itself and what it was, beyond what
it appeared to be.
rm: In the afterward to Into the Blind World, you write:
This poem/fragment is based
on a selection of lines sent to me by Arianwen Goronwy Roberts, a young
student, poet, and artist who I jokingly referred to as Virgil one night when
she soberly drove me home after a drunken literary event in the fall of 2009. I
got Arianwen curious to read Dante’s Divine Comedy & at some other
drunken literary event asked her to send me the Dante lines or sections that
she liked or stood out for whatever reason. This she did from an on-line
translation (http://www.readprint.cm/work -7/inferno-dante-alighieri: The Divine Comedy: Hell
- no translator given). Within those stanzas, verses, and narrative
fragments I could see certain words/phrasings and images that prompted my own
“translation” and improvised responses.
How did you approach the shift of “translating” the poem into a
piece by Barry McKinnon? Did you approach it as a rewriting, akin to George
Bowering’s Kerrisdale Elegies (1984)? How important was it for you to
keep some of the original ideas and cadences?
BM: It’s interesting that writing poems for
me can be prompted by a range of various conditions and sources. Here is my
introduction for The Centre: Moving
North.
The eleven sections in this collection contain experience and language
informed by a range of places in this urge to reveal a world in relation to all
that is / was to become a life: family, work, sex, friendship, health, the
politics of person and place – these large complex inaccurate dissolute human
categories as prompts for whatever the poet is given to reveal. The particulars
of these contexts and places I hope I partially found / made visible – as they
sought me in the poems that follow.
Into the Blind World began capriciously with an odd request
for Arianwen (“Virgil”) to feed me lines from Dante’s Hell via email for what then became a serious writing/collaborative
project. This was the first time I’d ever put another person to use for the
possibility of writing a poem. I would read each of the Hell cantos, think/meditate, and if I could see a connection to my
own thoughts and emotions, scribble a note in the margins or on post-it-notes.
Arianwen’s lines, in most cases, would throw my mind from what I was thinking, into other considerations
– make me risk what became fast and often puzzling lines. If they rang true and kept me wondering about
what the hell they meant, I kept them. Here’s an example of my
decision-making: I wrote the early line,
“some corrupt” and was bugged by how soft it was. What are those moments worth for a poem when
you say fuck it! and revise to : all
corrupt! – the divine comedy for all time that we have lived in.
W.C. Williams
once said that each poem must sum up the poet’s life to that point. Into
the Blind World was both solipsistic, a “translation” from English to
English, and a summation of whatever
it is one can “know”. Here is Bob Hogg’s
email to me that might partly answer your question (underlines and italics
mine):
Liked the play you did
with Dante’s Inferno, drawing his diction
in translation into your own voicing,
wch it very much fits in the short fragment rob sent along to us all.
Rilke in Kerrisdale? Why not Dante in Prince
George. You gotta see, also, the bold presumption and humor in all of this.
In the Millennium ·
Prince George (Part One)
for George Stanley
a man in himself is
a city – (W.C.W)
beleaguered/belied the entrance (himself,
he enters
canyons
in Hade's hot air
.
memory of
that travel
fear to a sense of life ahead: the literal city
busted
out -
clearing forests/ water/ air
not form
but what
shapes
the city a body
to its
soul
-
.
down
town tribes
-
in their
source of
detachment,
begin to be
themselves
again - hunt/
history, the
millennial weight: no clear stream/or abode
exists:
these bulldozed souls
no pity or
remorse to equal what’s imagined
handouts on
3rd/ the giveaway suits
that clothe
them.
oh forest, oh
bear - vestigial illumination / the
grins
in simple light
they see
.
what do we
see so clearly in its lack
to see without image / articulation - a reason
malls
fill/downtown empties /history (capital / frontier
without human hope:
this is the end, we sing ( crows peck puke, buckles in the side
walk/holes of asphalt, piles of blood
.
the man, the
city - what parts in
the
metaphor, this way of dreaming - is the heart a down
town? 1969:
the routes (bakery, bread, meat
balls, a
pickle and up 4th to
the Astoria
(beer - to the Bay, the Northern, Wally West, I.B. Guest &
down to the
corner - 2nd & George, the Canada, the blues,
beer,
the sense of here/not here - this
want of places to
be,
enter & make
sagacious.
.
libraries
are for loafers
no blame to
local realities. nothing in the way of
what doesn't exist,
in the
simple mercantile presumptions
the smell of
money - the brushcut hero who could make
it
the local
ethos: up
before the
rest went to bed /
with his bulldozer.
and in a dream of this world woke to
every one/every thing: fuck
or be fucked
.
man a
city: the female forest -
to imagine
the hard/the soft (winter, cycles to summer spring & fall
bleeding to
the genderless human want of tenderness.
root hog or
die
when a city
becomes its coldest hearts
we live in
the illusion of its habitat:
the
invisible/visible: the city you see/ did
good in
becomes an
old cliché in the toxic mill cloud that fills the bowl
and drifts
with the winds - a swirl of stink in the citizenry /penetrates the corpus while
the corporate, that most visible as the source, least accounted for in the
non-existent public square.
I can't
breathe
a man must speak,
to the threat dismissed, diminished,
coerced by
need and want
to sing
: they think they
do me no harm.
.
the
they. the who, the us in the
disintegrated
disintegration - nothing can be known;
its own hopeless
statement -
the north /everywhere (but not revealed -
in this what?
will we only know the hot day in mid
July 69 into
the stink, the heat, the Fraser
bridge / 57
Plymouth packed,
I want to go back
to what
humans imagine a version: here / the
beer
& coming
out of the Barn into that heavy light decide
that moment,
to stay.
the
apt/penthouse - top floor Trojan Manor $300.00
where do you
think you're going? don’t want youse
types here.
moved to
1902 Queensway across from Marty’s Cafe (shack - 100 a month ( now Assman's funeral
home -
the city: a
world
you entered
- sensed body/parts
missing in
the civic need the forces disallow - & that called specious
what saves
us - a clarity / conditions born of fog/
suspicion
the
love and hate of uneasy
marriage
(man/woman - a city unto themselves
.
what is the
source of this thinking? ambiguity,
contradiction
power, that
hidden, conspiracies, pushed
buttons and
cliché, until our bodies demotion to banishment.
a shit hole.
.
when are you
going to write something good?
.
its activity
is also its own resistance: what
to say: what subject, or image - what body part
contain
the life
/ what weakness is strength when
the whole
body vomits in nadir (the weakest
now culled
once defined: a man vomits
in shame
that now the city can not be made
this
rotten dark soul, a man
a metaphor,
a language convinced of its own rhetoric easily believed (men (the city
its self /
fooled
by little
stakes/little power (that those governed
men will
thrust their outlines - will sacrifice the rest. will
save
themselves
others
(those sickest
grin
at any
scheme sabotaged by its own impossibility - know the inventors require such
false faith and fear
.
the city
exists / knows itself/ cannot change
easily
oh corpus of
belched noxious gas
oh corpus of
the fruitless/oh corpus of malignment oh
generous
corpus of the material world oh
industrial
corpus behind the corpus oh corpus of the beautiful
& gentle
wind oh corpus in our misaligned prayer oh corpus
of promise
and care
oh grid of
light, muscled male
.
stomp the
tourists head into the walk - that part psycho
path - the
city staggers in a hoedown dance/wild
in iconic
illusion of how it sees itself - dressed
to kill any
thing in sight
.
arms of the
suburbs to father illusion: conglomerate homo unity: turns place /
to no place
/ same place
to exist
only in our attempt to define it
.
(off
Queensway embarrassment, then disgust - teen hookers to cross through
the riven
world displayed by its line between: us
and them
little
girls, the man, a city - /homeless
.
why did you
stay?
the density
of context peeled was revealed to a momentary
sense of
simplicity, that it could be known, and therefore, the man
could know himself, being a city: unto himself, -
its maps and routes, the air it breathed, capacious unbalance to imply the need
for its
opposite: nothing to go on - knowledge without proof
/its energy.
to work
a language
in its attempt to equal
the anxious
swirl in an angular world of charts, graphs - the
gizmoed
patter claimed & believed as real - that any power required
subservience
to its whacko notions, be revealed as public sense: not
agreement,
but truth of ones condition faced:
bloody head in its
second of
consciousness under the killer’s boot -
in metaphoric
drama
be allowed
to live.
.
in the
city: Nechako, Fraser
Husky, Canfor, PG Pulp, Northwood,
Intercon, Lakeland, CN,
city core
body is thought
through
parking lot, plumes
/ trees,
/ polis / man
