I wanted to say something.
“I wanted to say something is a major poem, a discovery of the possibility of regaining the pioneers’ innocent strength, to sing for the land to return with its gifts of simplicity.”
“The simple truth is... prairie poetry would have been far different and poor without McKinnon’s “I wanted to say something”. A lot of us would have been a while longer in getting inside that place called the long poem.”
I wanted to say something
Red Deer College Press. 1990.
Published originally in a limited circulation letterpress edition, I wanted to say something has become a contemporary classic in its influence on Western canadian Poetry. It is at once a history and a memory of the closing of an era on the last frontier — the rural Prairie West with its vast geometry of land and sky. With its promise of freedom that lured a generation of pioneers who broke the land and were broken by it and who lived to see the next generation moving out.
Beginning with the lives of the poet’s maternal grandparents, this poem cycle follows three generations of the family, culminating in the life of the writer himself, whose among the fragments of memory leads him to what Robert Kroetsch would later term “the imagined real place”. To the remembered place arrived at only through language. To the origins of a poetry that ripples with the sensuousness of prairie grasses. To the something Barry McKinnon wanted to say.
