Photo: Graham Pearce
Barry McKinnon was born in 1944 in Calgary, Alberta where he grew up. In 1965, after two years of college, he went to Sir George Williams University in Montréal and took poetry courses with Irving Layton. He graduated in 1967 with a B.A. and in 1969 with an M.A. from U.B.C. (Vancouver), and was hired that same year to teach English at The College of New Caledonia in Prince George where he has lived ever since.
McKinnon writes primarily in the form of the long poem/serial sequence, a form that gives him the necessary range in which to “articulate the poem’s central truth from various & variable angles & perspectives.” In his own words, he sees the long poem as “a way to log my experience & to record what I value most in a context of forces, subtle or not, that threaten those values.”
As D.H. Lawrence writes: “We’ve got to live no matter how many skies have fallen.” McKinnon has been an active editor/publisher/designer since the late sixties. McKinnon’s recent work includes The Centre (Talonbooks, 2004) and In the Millenium (New Star, 2009), a thirteen-part collection of his poetry drawn from a ten-year period.
Awards
bpNichol Chap-Book Award, 2004. Bolivia/Peru
bpNichol Chap-Book Award, 1995. Arrythmia
Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, 1992. Pulplog
Governor General's Literary Award, 1981 (finalist) The The
— The McKinnon Homestead
— Father and son on root cellar door
(circa 1944/45)
Living in Alberta
do you expect poems
of giant grain elevators
and miles of golden wheat
or would you rather have
the rushing rivers
and tales of mountain ghosts
when I was six I would visit
my grandmother’s farm and trek
to the coulee a mile away always
watching for the coyotes
said to eat explorers who bathed
in this prairie gorge
I could tell of the red
elevator to the north
and the worn gray fences
that would end in sunsets
further towards the city ...
— from ‘The Golden Daybreak Hair’, 1967.
— Billy Bridges (Guitar), Bob Larratt (Bass) & Barry McKinnon (Drums).
Mount Royal College, Calgary (circa 1963)
“
I began writing poetry and playing drums when I was 16. This was in 1960 Calgary Alberta- when the mention of poetry and jazz raised a curious suspicion, at least in my family. To them I was unusually quiet and inward and beyond what might have seemed normal for a boy of working-class farm-stock. They were worried and I sensed it, but any pressure to conform in those days, in most instances, only increased my resolve not to do so.
”