You Must Hand Each Other the Cup
Remembering
Irene McKinney
Poet Laureate of
West Virginia
1994—2012
PREFACE
As I read over this gathering of remembrances, I can’t help but smile to think about what Irene might have made of us and our remembrances of her. I like to imagine she would be touched, of course, since she was a fine and generous person. But I also think she would be amused. I mean this in only the best of ways, but I do think she would be plain tickled that we all found so many different ways to like the poems and to like her. Really? I can imagine her saying. Really? And, of course, that is surely part of what we loved about Irene and will go on loving: her disarming self-effacement. I hope, as you read through these warm and insightful recollections, you’ll find yourself nodding and smiling and saying, yes, Irene, we’re all smiling with you now. As for the sadness we feel at her passing, she’s already told us how to go on: “you must hand each other the cup.” We will, and hope for her blessing in return.
~Marc Harshman, WV Poet Laureate
I miss Irene McKinney. I am pleased that The Kenyon Review, where I serve as Poetry Editor, published some of her last poems in both our print and online versions of the magazine. But I miss her: bright red hair, husky laugh, a deep down hunger and intelligence for poetry, and an arm-wrestling aptitude to shame all comers. Really, she could put you down in a few seconds, as I found out the first night I met her, at the Twilite Lounge in Salt Lake City, 1979. I was twenty-four, just starting my doctoral studies there at the University of Utah, and Irene was like a big sister to us—older, already with a daughter of her own, tougher, wiser, and entirely kind when she wasn’t arm wrestling or poem workshopping. One of her book titles gets it exactly right. She was a “vivid companion.”
Irene’s poems are like the person. Direct, experienced, no-horseshit, and with a distinctive music; wise, regional, even local (“I am a hillbilly,” she wrote), but with a wide grasp and a massive sympathetic reach. There’s no small touch of James Wright in Irene McKinney’s poetry, and their respective home grounds are only a hundred or so miles apart, as the Ohio River flows.
Irene did not dumb-down her rhetoric by trying to sound like hill folk, nor did she pander to academics by fancifying her lived images and narratives. If in one poem she might depict “four wild turkeys walk[ing] / stiff-legged at the edge of the leafless woods,” in another she’d give voice to a figure from 1848, a woman as tough as “strong coffee” hand-shelling corn, and in another she’d imagine Toulouse-Lautrec, “that little freak.” In this last poem, in fact, “At 24,” she shows some of her own fixed-jaw self-reliance: Even “while the baby slept,” the speaker knows that her need to write poetry “was writing to save my life as I knew it / could be.” And while she might not know then what her life would hold, that young woman, she knew already what it would not hold: “Dear Mr. President, I said. Dear Dean, / Dear Husband, Dear Our Father, Dear Tax Collector, / you don’t know me. I don’t know what I am, / but whatever it is, you can’t have me.” Honesty, independence, and fire, that’s Irene McKinney.
Irene did not take much part in the po-biz of our day. She rarely went to AWP. She did not tweet, facebook, network, pander, or panic. She did not hang out. She did not forge her friendships mostly from among other poets, but rather from her neighbors around Barbour County, West Virginia, where she lived back in the country. She did not review her poetry pals so they would review her, nor participate in the self-fulfilling, self-awarding system that stinks up our literary world these days. What Irene did to be a poet was to read and write poems.
Here is one, “Fame,” which I love for its clarity, wit, self-awareness, and indictment of all things untrue:
That I would become known;
that someone would know me.
I would be recognized, and not
pitiable; and I would remain
as strong as I was, if not stronger,
and overcome my circumstances
through sheer will, and that
others younger or less talented
would not become known,
or at least not until I was.
Then, that recognition would
reward me for all I’d undergone,
my bravery of thought, my refusal
of dishonest love, and my goodwill
would be returned to me manyfold,
after the years and years.
And I would not be bitter, nor petty,
nor would I act on selfish interests,
nor suppress my generosity.
And none of this was me.
Exactly so. Vivid companion.
~David Baker, Granville, Ohio
Irene was a very special poet who grew stronger as she got older and super strong as she lost her strength.I honor her as a person, as a friend and as a poet.I just re-read the statement I made for her final book and I want to repeat the last sentence: "What this book is is consciousness on fire,dream come true -- 'plangent, like a bell.'"
~ Gerald Stern, Lambertville, NJ
From the late 70’s to mid-80’s, a few poets, writers, and artists in Elkins published a newsprint journal called “Backcountry.” Irene gave us her poem, “The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying.” We were minor-leaguers and Irene played in the bigs, though she would not have put it that way. We were all looking for surprises in our own writing and what we read. But Irene was farther along. The longer we knew her, the more she offered of her life and death. No one could be like Irene, and that was the point. We each have one holy life. “The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying”: she wasn’t kidding. She was outrageously funny and at the same time as serious as anything you can think of, even multiple myeloma. In her last years, nearby friends were torn between respecting her solitude and sensing her need for company. Then, another surprise: she gave us yoga lessons. Honor the body, this fleeting gift! She adorned hers with every shade of red. “What is the word for fire / in your language? In mine / it is orange, flower, burden.” She wrote, “If I knew then what I do now . . .” Irene knew. She knew.
~Hugh and Ruth Rogers, Kerens, WV
Irene McKinney. I knew her in a late late night Kanawha City motel room where she, Maggie Anderson, Colleen Anderson, and I read poetry and prose to one another in a numbing haze of cigarette smoke, as ecstatic and unbalanced as the speaker in Irene’s poem “At 24.” I knew her teaching yoga at Water Gap Retreat in Elkins, following her diagnosis and treatments, following her limber body and especially her breath and spine, following her strange and ancient “Lady of the Iguanas.” I knew her for a night in a Morgantown hospital room cell I had to enter by washing my hands three times, watched over her body and exchanged words with her as her bone marrow was transformed.
~Faith S. Holsaert, Durham, NC
It was Irene's diagnosis with Multiple Myeloma that allowed me the good fortune to know her better. Before that, she was my friend mostly through her writing, and her public self. Her illness she gifted to me, an invitation to be intimate. I liked the way we played with it.
She had a way of letting the phone ring without answering if she felt like being alone. She had the habit of propping her feet up in the kitchen onto the hutch, leaning from the cherry red chair at the end of the spring green counter, conducting oratory and commentary on the world, her latest poem or the book that was haunting her just now.
She appreciated surprise visits too, and notes left on her closed door, and letters and cards and messages. One wouldn't be surprised to find her wrapped in a shroud, or lounging in an old muslin nightgown, bending in the garden, or painting toenails outstretched with the grace of a practiced yogi. One just never knew.
I liked the way she would go on and on for hours, her mind full of opinions and impressions and critique, without asking a question, and then pounce on you like a cat, going after the dark and hidden and moist. She invited bravery and inquisition and creativity. She would say yes to some, and no to others.
“The unknown buried in the known” her poem rang out. The echo of that truth still manifests endlessly every day for all of us, with and without her. I've got her Kali-faced lunch box on top of my kitchen cabinet, in the same way it sat perched on top of her hutch, her red tongue sticking out laughing, with the same serious play that Irene encouraged in all of us, as a reminder.
~Barbara Weaner, Montrose, West Virginia
For many years, working to build a career as a writer, I had heard of our poet laureate, Irene Mckinney. Within any writing community, you know who its stars are. Beyond her title, though, I knew only her public photos: gorgeous red hair and genuine smile. I finally got to meet her when I wrote an article about her for Wonderful West Virginia magazine. I spent four hours in her self-designed, light-filled home in Belington, WV., which sits on ancestral land. I learned she’d traveled far and wide for her own education and in her teachings. She told me she was a Buddhist and that she owned 3,000 books.
Irene was a learned, witty woman, a realist. I admired Irene’s clarity for who she was and where she was from. Her courage in the face of grave illness was astounding. She said to me: “I can endure pain more easily than most.” I think pain is something she learned to cope with through her writing. I think courage became the thread she wove through all her poems. Irene was more than a laureate, though that title denotes an extraordinary individual. I believe the very essence of her being is what will continue to inspire us all.
~Cat Pleska, MFA, WV State University
Irene McKinney—as anyone who knew her or her work knows—was a straight shooter. Whenever I read an Irene McKinney poem, I felt like the page disappeared and I was listening to her speak—direct, strong, passionate. Her writing about West Virginia and its people inspired me and gave me the confidence to continue writing about my place, Detroit. I read so much poetry today where I don’t know where the heck I’m at. In her poems, I always knew where I was at, and who I was listening to, and I knew to pay attention because she was telling me some important thing that came from her heart. When I think of her and her poems, I think of that one word: heart.
~Jim Daniels, Carnegie Mellon University
I like to think of Irene McKinney, Maggie Anderson, and me as the “WVU Triumvirate,” since each of us in turn studied poetry under Winston Fuller at West Virginia University in the last decades of the twentieth century. I’ve been teaching Irene’s wonderful poems in Road Scholar (Elderhostel) classes and in my Virginia Tech creative writing courses for years.
My memories of Irene are few but vivid. We met in the 1980’s, during an informal poets’ dinner at Ali Baba, a Middle Eastern restaurant in Morgantown. We shared a road trip to Pittsburgh, where she introduced me to my first Indian food. I interviewed her at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and that long talk was included in Her Words: Diverse Voices in Contemporary Appalachian Women’s Poetry, edited by Felicia Mitchell. I hosted her in Blacksburg, Virginia, where she gave a poetry reading at Virginia Tech and I fried her up ramps and eggs for breakfast the next morning. We read together at the annual meeting of the Appalachia Regional Comprehensive Center at the fancy Umstead Resort and Spa in Cary, North Carolina (and the next morning at breakfast, when the pretty young maître d’ told me I’d need to take off my baseball cap, I refrained from vulgarity for Irene’s sake).
Best of all, my partner John and I visited Irene in her home in Barbour County, a small house in the woods on the very farm where she grew up. She was ailing by then, but just as cheerful, stimulating, and thoughtful as ever. Talk about strength in the face of adversity. And so many books! Reading, writing, and living close to the countryside: now that is a life gloriously well lived. For me, Irene will always be the exemplar of the Appalachian artist.
~Jeff Mann, Virginia Tech
In 1976, at the University of Utah, I taught my first-ever graduate poetry workshop. It included such future star poets as Bruce Weigl and T.R.Hummer, and others now distinguished as American writers and teachers. Irene McKinney quickly became the managing director of this troupe, her trenchant wit, her unsparing truth, her refusal of anything less than best effort made what she said the gold standard, and made her poems models for us all. Thirty-seven years from that time and I still remember specific things she said and that lovely reddish hair tossing as she got that formidable intellect in full operation. I have told a story about her to every class I have since taught. I thought
there would always be such a guiding light in every class but almost forty years of teaching have proved how rare she was, how lucky we were to be with her, how good it would be to have a drink with her, to tell her we'd see her next class, and thank her again for all she did and all she was.
~Dave Smith, John Grisham Writer-in-Residence, University of Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi
Though I had been writing poems since I was a child, I didn’t begin to study the craft of poetry until I retired from teaching British and Irish Twentieth Century Literature at West Virginia University. At age 65 I entered the Low-Residency Program in Poetry at New England College, graduating two years later. Part of my inspiration was Irene McKinney, whom I had heard read at WVU several years earlier. Frank about the illness that would end her life, McKinney clearly enjoyed her audience’s response to her poems. I loved how she presented herself in bright pink high tops and red pony tails pulled to each side of her head.
Irene McKinney taught me that I could take myself seriously and also enjoy my position as an already-old person entering an MFA program whose students were decades younger. And what an inspiration she was when, knowing she had very little time left, she planned, campaigned for, and initiated West Virginia Wesleyan’s own low-residency program in creative writing.
~Susan Shaw Sailer, Morgantown, WV
I wish I could remember the year, maybe 1990, I went to Buckhannon to interview Irene McKinney while she was teaching at W.V. Wesleyan. She read from her definitiveSix O'Clock Mine Report. As we sat in the last light of the afternoon I thought "I will never in my life think of West Virginia without thinking of Irene McKinney." I thought that then. I think that now. She made West Virginia immortal through the beauty of the ordinary.
~Grace Cavalieri, The Poet and the Poem, Library of Congress
I met Irene in 1984 at Womens Voices, a month long writing workshop for women only in Santa Cruz...The OLD lovely hippy Santa Cruz, before the downtown went down in flames. It was in that town's lost original coffee joints that she and I began our espresso benders, benders that went on in a multitude of cities for the next thirty years. We talked poetry for hours, pumped more by the words than on any residuals of caffeine.
The workshop drew legendary writers, Audry Lorde, Irena Klepfisz, even Adrienne Rich stopped by to say hi to friends and give a workshop. But it was Mz. McKinney, as I called her, who captured my imagination, with her thick West Virginia drawl, and her faraway gaze. It wasn't that she was disinterested in what you were saying, it was simply that she was perpetually, persistently, preemptively preoccupied. She was always ALWAYS pulling at the elusive thread of her next poem. It was hard to keep Irene nailed to a conversation unless it was about poems. It was her lifeblood and her passion. It was infectious. Irene had close to a thousand books crowding the stairwells in her little West Virginian house. I know she consumed every one of them, and more than once. I miss her every day.
~Ally Acker, Reel Women Media
In 1997, while a student at WVU, I was asked by Irene McKinney if I would be interested in covering her fall classes while she was on leave. It was an unexpected boon for me, a rare opportunity to teach creative writing. The commute from Morgantown aside, I couldn’t have been happier. I was given her corner office to work from, and it felt just right, just the place for a writer to be. WV has tended to be like that for me, a place where possibility is always, seemingly, right around the corner. I miss the place. I’m glad to be welcome there still, and that my wife is a West Virginian. Often, I go to the poems of Irene McKinney to remind me of these things.
I can‘t remember exactly when I first met Irene. I think it was at a Kestrel Festival of the Arts at Fairmont State College, but I saw a lot of Irene during my WV years. She was always kind to me, supportive and friendly. We had both studied under Dave Smith as students (she at Utah, I at Virginia Commonwealth University), and it always seemed a special bond we shared. I feel privileged to have been able to publish her work as an editor, to have cherished it as a reader, and to have heard her read from it on numerous occasions. Irene symbolizes what it means to be a West Virginian. She was tough, resilient, down-to-earth, practical, smart, and she did not suffer fools easily. She was made of the rocky soil of the state she loved, and it showed.
I ran into Irene at the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs convention in Washington, DC in 2011. She looked quite frail, and so I knew then that the cancer had finally won. We shared some words and laughs in the book fair room, and I gave her a hug before we parted. I suspected it would be for the last time. It was.
My last act as an editor of Kestrel was to assemble, along with Mary Stewart, the Kestrel Anniversary Anthology in 2008. Irene, of course, was one of the first names we thought of as we began the process of putting the thing together. Her contribution was a long poem, “Home.” It’s a poem that pulls no punches, taking WV to task for what it too frequently does to itself even as it marks a return to her ancestral home in the hills. As she writes in the poem, “To retreat to the country // you must have something / to retreat from, fleeing / the beloved, to the beloved.” It seems apt to think of those lines now, to consider her return to that soil and that place she called home. In that Anniversary issue of Kestrel, there is also a poem from our mentor, Dave Smith, “House Next Door.” The final line of it serves as all I have left to say as I think of Irene today: “What next? Last words. Thanks. Goodbye. Echoes.”
~John Hoppenthaler, East Carolina University
I first met Irene McKinney, not in person, but appropriately enough through poetry. Maggie Anderson had asked her to judge the Wick Poetry Chapbook competition, and Irene selected my submission, The Lazarus Method, as the last in the Wick Chapbook Series I. I would read her books, most notably Six O'Clock Mine Report (my Scottish ancestors worked in the Energy Mine in Herrin, Illinois, and took part in the bloody Herrin Massacre of 1922), but it would be almost ten years before my late husband, Bob Fox, introduced me to her at the Ohio River Book Festival, where I was finally able to thank her in person. It would be another five years--at her tribute reading at the 2013 AWP Conference--before I learned that William Matthews, who provided a "blurb" for The Lazarus Method, was the person who first introduced Maggie Anderson to Irene, proving once again the world of poetry is a small world indeed. Scottish poet and artist Robert Montgomery once emblazoned these glowing words on a billboard:"The people you love become ghosts inside of you and like this you keep them alive." If this is true, Irene McKinney is alive and well in all of us, which makes her unbearable loss almost bearable.
~Kate Fox
This pigtailed poet encouraged me in undergrad Advanced Composition, then twenty years later, saw enough in my scraggly writing to give me a shot in the MFA program at WV Wesleyan. taught me to be real, and even more importantly, taught me to not be ashamed. "Past Lives" she writes, "Whoever takes us by the hand and sets us on the path to the temple must be trusted." you, dear Irene, for taking my hand.
~Shauna Hambrick Jones, WV Wesleyan College
I first met Irene when I was a visiting professor in nonfiction during the launch of WV Wesleyan’s low-residency MFA program in July 2011.I knew right away she was a force, she was someone completely lacking in pretense, and she was a delight—in my all-too-serious correspondence with her in preparation for my visiting-professor role, Irene slipped me a poem she’d been working on, “just for funsies,” and I found out later from people who knew her well that this spark, this spirit of generosity, was Irene’s way of being in the world.Irene worked hard, in the midst of her illness, to lay the foundation for a thriving apprenticeship-model graduate writing program that made an MFA possible for nontraditional students in this region.I sensed that summer of 2011 that this was a writing program like no other, helping to strengthen the voices in a new chorus of not only Appalachian writers, but also of solid writers for the national literary scene.I knew I wanted to be part of this program, and I took the director’s baton from Irene the following year, diving in alongside all of the wonderful faculty to fulfill Irene’s vision for a vibrant program.I am humbled by the role and ever grateful to her to bringing me into this community.
~Jessie van Eerden, WV Wesleyan Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program
When I was a young writer, just on the cusp of being published, I met Irene McKinney. Although she was a poet, rather than a novelist, she became a role model for me. She guided me through the ins and outs of the life that comes with writing: the workshops, the readings, the book signings. She introduced me to other writers, especially West Virginia writers. That was Irene, who wrote her own marvelous work, but also tended the community that is a group of writers, alone with our work but in need of being in touch with each other.
~Denise Giardina, Charleston, West Virginia
I was excited when, years ago, I got Irene's manuscript for "Six O'Clock Mine Report." I thought--and I still do--that her poems for West Virginia and its people were akin to the poems in praise of working people by the great American poet Muriel Rukeyser. Not that Irene (or Rukeyser) was ever sloppily sentimental. In her poem "Visiting my Gravesite: Talbott Churchyard, West Virginia" she talks about flying low over the gravesite "when I looked down at the church,/ the trees I've felt with my hands, the neighbors' houses/ and the family farm, and I saw how tiny what I loved or knew was/ . . . .this unknown buried in the known." She looked at things steadily and with a hard gaze, but with a warm heart.
~Ed Ochester, Editor, Pitt Poetry Series, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press
I didn't come to know Irene when we were both living in West Virginia, but after I became a poet living in Kansas, a place so unlike West Virginia.And she came to me through my gradate school poet friend, Dave Adams, who was at that time teaching in Maine, long after we had both gotten our MFAs at a school in Ohio.
When he asked me if I knew her work, and I said no, he gave me his copy of The Girl with the Stone in her Lap, Irene's first book from the 1970s.It was tattered, coffee-stained, and looked like it might have fallen out of his ocean kayak at some point and been rescued before it drowned.Dave didn't know he was giving me one of the most important gifts I'd ever received.
Many poems and many experiences later, I finally got to meet Irene when we were both Fellows at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts,She was everything I had hoped she would be, a poem of her own: curious, assertive, rib-crackingly funny, irreverent, poignant, spiritual, smart, intense, and above all, kind.
And so much West Virginia, which I had come to miss achingly in my middle age; being with her was being home.I can't say that about many people.And years after that, she took me and my students from Michigan State University into her home on our annual trips to West Virginia.She poured us tea, she introduced us to her friends, she read us poems, she talked about the masks hanging on the wall and how she overcame her fears.She changed all of our lives.I regret that I didn't get to know her when I was the age of my students.But I am grateful for the years I did have in the company of her person and her poems.
~Anita Skeen, Director, Center for Poetry, Michigan State University
When I arrived at Marshall in 1988, Irene McKinney was already a poetry legend in the state. Hearing her read her poems made unmistakable why. Coming from a rugged land of irrepressible people, she sang of beauty and misery merged. Her utterly distinctive poems brim with a spirit that makes of life’s severest moments a path to grace and lightness.
~Art Stringer
In February of 2010, I had the chance to spend a whole week with Irene McKinney. We were in East Lansing, Michigan, where she was doing some workshops and readings. One day, she told me about growing up in a household without many books. She said that whenever her family took her to visit anyone, she would immediately ask, “Do you have any books?” And if they turned her loose in a stuffy attic or a moldy basement, she would read—indiscriminately, whatever was there. She was that hungry for words. She later wrote one of my favorite poems, “Fodder,” from that childhood experience.
When you read or hear a poem for the first time, it can surprise and delight you. But when it’s the tenth time, or the hundredth time—if it’s a good poem, it becomes deeper and acquires layers of meaning. It gets more powerful. That’s what Irene’s poems are like. You can go into them and into them, and they just get better and deeper. These days, when I read “Fodder,” the mystery of its ending moves me so much, the image of those “swollen pupils/reading themselves to death, and up/beside it, and into it.”
~Colleen Anderson, Charleston, WV
Irene McKinney embodied a deep profound sense of the feminine body and feminine archetype in the context of a time and place: West Virginia in the latter twentieth century. But she is not onlyregional writer except in the best sense in that she shows how each particular land is rooted in the cosmos. Irene's work was also rooted in an artfully occluded eros and in history. It has a clarity and elusive eccentricity, a ringing specificity of object and form and meaning.
Lindy Hough and I first met her when we read at Keyser State in 1972, an occasion set up by Winston Fuller from West Virginia University. We later published her in Io and two books with North Atlantic Books, The Girl with a Stone in Her Lap and Quick and Slow Fire.
~Richard Grossinger, publisher, North Atlantic Books
There is no way to talk about the energy in a body that was Irene McKinney. She was electric in her power, forthright in her speech, and wild in her unlimited ideas. As a woman, she was someone I admired—for her deep will and courage, and the way she appeared as herself: bold, often dressed in red, and ready for adventure. I liked her dirty jokes, the willingness above all else to be real. Her poetry could move earth, and the mountains that she loved so much. She made the physical body come alive in her poems, in ways that few writers do. The body and the land, the animals she loved, the sex and the sex. Her courage was palpable, as she taught us how to live and how to stay alive through the dark times. Her laughter was pure joy. I was lucky to have known that moving energy, that untamed life of Irene McKinney.
~Jan Beatty, Pittsburgh, PA
I first met Irene when Richard Grossinger and I were traveling in West Virginia and gave a reading at Keyser State in 1972, arranged by Winston Fuller. I was avid to meet other women poets and writers. She was rooted in her soil, strong in her teaching career, and her work was tough, thoughtful, lyrically quicksilver attentive to the land she grew up in, its problems and richness, and to the inner world of person meeting polis, how we bring ourselves out into the world without losing the individuality which makes us who we are. She had a strength of wit and vivacity, and must have been an amazing teacher; she could listen not only to the poem coming from her and manifest it, but help others do the same. She treasured what other people had to say, and helped them feel supported in their own gifts. We published her work in the Earth Geography Books of Io, the literary magazine Richard Grossinger and I published from 1965 through the 70s, which was followed by North Atlantic Books. I was proud that we published The Girl With A Stone in Her Lap and Slow Fire early in her career. She went on to publish many more beautiful books. I regret that I didn't get back to seeing her again in our later life, to see the older women we'd become. We lose much by losing Irene—her lightness and kindness, her ability to change dilemmas into promise and hope, her steadfastness. Her voice and spirit have inspired not only the students she taught, but many readers who admired her work.
~Lindy Hough,. Desert Island, ME
I see and hear her as she sits laughing on the porch swing in Barbour County, in the early seventies and spends a winter night, or two, or three, well, once a whole winter, in our farmhouse, writing of the winds in the pines, the body of Helen of Troy, her hound dog Kiefer’s claw marks on the walnut door, trying to keep our old furnace lit, and partying; as she drives the winding roads to all those writing workshops in all those schools all over the state, astonishing everyone with that line about “your metaphysical stutter,” in “What This Poem is About,” from The Girl with the Stone in Her lap, especially kids in Belington Middle and Kasson and Flemington High who know all about that stutter and more; as she listens, in the Grafton storefront public library, to Louise McNeill read from Paradox Hill, and says, flat out, “no voice ever like the voice of this place, right here. ” I see and hear her giving us anew this place, in such pungently ordinary, strenuous and beautiful details, from the “animal oils” of her first book, and the “wasps at the blue hexagons, ” to the room smelling of “wet moss and crushed herbs/from the soles of my shoes/where I walked in the shadow/of the crow’s flight” in her last, that she has consecrated this place forever with her exclamations, “O you sweet birds,” with her classic description of all landscapes, intimate, universal, “the unknown buried in the known,” with her paean to the night sky, with all her laments and contradictions, “kiss my possum,” with her wild, exhilarating honesty – remember she writes “Monkey Heart” after the woman in Virginia says some of her best friends are hillbillies? I see and hear her as she walks the stones in Ireland, “I love the rooks in the rain,” and reads to the Dubliners of the fires in the mines, and, among musicians she loves, to a Mountain Stage audience stirred by Allen Ginsberg, of spiritual yearning and the woman who sings like a chicken flung in a pan on Sunday morning. I see and hear her in the kitchen, redolent of her daring sojourn in India, reading that biography of Keats, on the cover his face in the painting in the Cincinnati museum, “how beautiful he is,” talking about her mother and father, the farm in winter, the treat of a trip to Elkins to the old planetarium, about the Dadaist Baroness flouted by Carlos Williams, about Blake’s vision, about Emily Dickinson’s dog.
I hear her say “Hello, dear girl,” on the phone or outside my office and read her latest, “Dancing to the Mohotella Queens,” maybe, or the brilliant and painful “Stain,” in the plain, familiar voice of a sister and artist, speaking with all her elegance of mind, all strict attention and amusement and vulnerability, to the artist in us, cutting through pretension, convention, intellectualizing, to the living word in the mouth and under the hand. In an early poem, “At 3 a.m.,” she holds the unnamed reader(s) hand against the bark of a tree, then on the very ground, saying, “grass, this is grass,” and finally on her own eyelids, saying, “warm, alive, don’t go away.” We can’t, ever.
~Devon McNamara, Philippi, WV
Irene McKinney and I took a number of long car trips together, mostly driving to readings or conferences, and these car rides were hothouses for some of the most thought-provoking conversation that I have ever had the pleasure of being a part of. We would often talk about our collective (if not shared) memories of living as West Virginians in Salt Lake City, and about how easy it is to feel torn between wanting to see the world and wanting to stay right where you are from. Another recurring conversation concerned how easy it is as a writer, to portray yourself in your own work as something more than you are, as something better.
Irene believed that poets must resist the temptation to make the “I” in the poem nobler, smarter, more admirable. She thought that poets, of all people, should look hard at the things that cause them shame and embarrassment, and stare them down, and not blink. You can see this impulse in so many of her poems: At 24, Fame, Stained.
In her absence, what continues to resonate for me in Irene’s work is this unblinking focus on the actual rather than the ideal. Whether they be about her home-place in Barbour County, or Roy Orbison, or coal miners, or road-side weeds – her poems are firmly rooted in glorious, complex, sweet, difficult, broken humanity. They remind us that we are all screwed up, we are all in pain, and yet: we persist. I find hope in that.
~Doug Van Gundy
I moved to West Virginia in 1994 to accept a teaching job at WVU. I was a young professor restlessly in love with all things related to poetry: the slim books I bought for a few dollars at Stilwell Bookshop on Pleasant Street, the way a pen felt between my fingers as I worked a phrase into the latest poem I was trying to write, the gossip offered up over beers by visiting poets passing through town to read and gossip and drink beer. I read every poetry magazine I could track down, every new volume of verse published by Wesleyan University Press or Ecco Press or the Pitt Poetry Series or the University of Georgia Press or Carnegie Mellon University Press—the leading publishers of poetry at the time. I consumed poetry anthologies like fast food, wedging them into place on my overstuffed shelves and returning to them again and again as lines buzzed through my head and I spun around in my office chair trying to remember who’d written them. I’d arrived in Morgantown knowing next to nothing about West Virginia: Coal and feuds and ancient mountains cut through by old rivers (one named New, I soon learned). And Maggie Anderson. And Irene McKinney. Maggie and Irene were familiar to me long before I knew I’d be moving to the Mountain State. I’d read their poems in journals, owned their early books. I had a map in my head of America, and each state was represented by its best or best-known poets. So I knew about Irene. And within a month I met her in person.
One morning my office phone rang, a rare occurrence given how few people I knew in Morgantown. The voice on the other end of the line spoke slowly, even carefully. “This is Irene McKinney. I was wondering if you’d like to come down to Buckhannon next week. I’d like to take you to lunch.” And that was that. A voice I’d known on the page was suddenly filling my ear. Irene was reaching out to the new poet in town (so to speak), and offering up a little space in her life.
We ate lunch the following Wednesday at C.J. Maggie’s on Main Street. I can’t remember what either of us ate, though I think we recognized the poet in each other and decided to have beers with our meals, regardless of the early hour. Within minutes the gossip started, the stories. We had plenty of friends in common, even a few mentors, though Irene had met some of my heroes when they were still on their way up, and she had more than a little bad behavior to tell me about. I loved it, loved watching her lean in conspiratorially, smiling as she remembered a wild party in Salt Lake City, a late-night crawl through the pubs of Seattle. She told me secrets, some scandalous, some hilarious. There were sweet stories too, quite a few about the generosity of fellow poets, those who had offered to read her early manuscripts, suggest publishers, even help out with the rent. I was young and foolish, but I had the sense to recognize that Irene, in that moment, was adding to my own collection of stories, to my list of generosities received.
Later we drove out to her house, where she showed me her favorite first editions and talked to me about what she was working on, a new series of poems she hoped to take further. I asked questions but mostly I listened. As I said, I was young and foolish but I knew when to shut up and listen. She talked to me about her life, which seemed to me rich in ways crucial to the making of poetry. I heard details I remembered from her published work. It’s one of the great pleasures of meeting great poets: that sense of a life in language suddenly lifting into the air in front of you. One of her cats sat on my lap for most of the afternoon as Irene moved from table to bookshelf to chair, picking up books and manuscripts to share with me. When it was time to go I went out to my car to find a cow leaning against it. Irene laughed from the doorway behind me. “She’ll move when you start the engine,” she said. She waved and disappeared into her house before I’d closed my car door. She was right. The cow moved.
~James Harms, WVU Dept. of English
Irene was my first teacher, the first to tell a fifteen-year-old high school girl that "people will try to bury you, but you mustn't let them." she was a role model, a friend, a colleague, but always a heroine. last night of her life, I slept on the floor near her bed. wakened me to say, "She's gone." know she is gone but the old Victorian phrase, "she is not gone, she is just away" stays in my mind with images of Irene. left home and so lived far away from her, for so many decades;
I feel now that nothing haschanged; she still lives far away: she lives at home.know what she would say in so many situations, and I see her expressions so easily. is present.
As we move further and further from her death, she is more and more clearly in her work, and we turn to her there to hear her voice. ? McKinney is the poet of risk, unafraid, unhindered, unbound, unvanquished. world as we know it may vanish, but Irene's work defines what she knew and keeps it alive. is the vivid companion, the girl with the stone in her lap. Her wasps dart and knock against the windows; they know the hexagons are blue.
~Jayne Anne Phillips
In 1987 IIrene read "Visiting My Gravesite: Talbott Churchyard, West Virginia"; its honesty and wry humor were her hallmarks.
YearsIrene and I paid ato the Pancake family'sin Milton, West Virginia.Author Breece D'J Pancake's plot is there beside the sites of his father and. It felt right to be there.
Last year I visited Irene's gravesite.Just as she, it'sbykin. Next to her gravesite is atombstone etched with an image of the Durrettancestral farm.It felt right to be there.
Writing through hope, grief and pain,usamazing andfinal collection, Have You Had Enough Darkness Yet?Itsteaches.Itshelpsthe loss of a unique poet laureate, scholar, teacher,friend.
~Phyllis Wilson Moore, Literary Researcher, Clarksburg, WV
Fragments account for my early knowledge of Irene and her poems. Our first meeting was in Maggie Anderson’s doorway on Fork Ridge a few weeks after having moved back to West Virginia from grad school. Soon after, I discovered her poems which I found refreshingly honest and written with a voice that stayed in my mind long after I’d read them. A few years later my wife and I hosted Irene at the Moundsville public library for a reading from Six O’Clock Mine Report. Irene’s rich and comfortable voice mesmerized the folks gathered in that little basement room. I can see her bending to be eye-level with my young daughter: Irene to be her first poet, her first poetry reading. And next the usual too short encounters over the spanning years. And then? And then, too quickly, the illness and I find Irene several years in a row in the green room at the WV Book Festival and we talked as if, well, as if we had hours of previous friendship when, in fact, it must have been more like minutes. We talked Buddhism, children’s books, friends, weather, politics, and, out of it all, I recall most such genuine warmth and interest in . . . me. Me? She was that kind of person, that kind of friend. And remarkably she was that kind of poet – accomplishing in a few seconds that deep trust with her readers that compel them to follow her words which were not only frank and stunning in their insights, but were to become poems you felt were written just for you. I count myself lucky to remember Irene with such fond clarity and to know that “Now she’ll go on like this / without any help from us.”
~ Marc Harshman, Wheeling, WV
I was fortunate to know Irene McKinney as a writing student at West Virginia Wesleyan College and, later, as her colleague in that same English department.She was a rare poet and a rare person, one whose first duty in public and private life was to the honest expression of experience, not the polite or politic version.That quality made her a consummate pain to those who preferred easy answers to difficult questions, the administrators and representatives of order who counted on their authority to quieten dissenting voices.She also challenged those of us who’d never thought of back-talking authority, but she challenged us differently, with love and care. Irene knew how difficult a process it was to begin speaking, to keep speaking, when it was clear that no one had any interest in listening.Irene knew how precious that voice was—the real one, the true one that spoke what you knew from your own private and earned experience—and she knew how early, and how completely, it could be silenced.
Early on, as she once noted in an interview, she knew she might as well say exactly what she wanted, since no one was going to listen anyway.About that last part, she was happily wrong.But that instinct for self-preservation, that attunement to the lifelong process of developing it—for me, that’s the central lesson of Irene’s life, and work.I never knew anyone so determined to cultivate a real life utterly like the one she desired for herself.
We loved her.It’s as simple and as complicated as that.We love you, Irene.
~Dr. Eric Waggoner, WV Wesleyan College
“It was always a pleasure to be Irene’s colleague. She was good-humored, wise, an excellent teacher, a tireless advocate for poetry. West Virginia was lucky to have her.”
~Mark DeFoe, Professor Emeritus, West Virginia Wesleyan College
Irene was a full, creative event. She always liked to say she was just an ordinary person, but sorry, Irene, you weren’t. She overlapped ordinary. When nobody was around, she padded around at home on her family farm in bare feet and ponytails and no makeup, lounging in her red chair with her feet in the air, wandering outside to dig in the garden. But when she slipped into poet or teacher mode, she was formidable, blurting out insights and connections most people don’t make.
Most people don’t have more than 5,000 books packed into their houses. If they do, they haven’t read them all. Irene had, or at least she said she had, and I never pulled one from her shelves or piles that she couldn’t talk about. When I stopped by, she’d often lend me one, introducing me to the next poet, inserting slips of paper to mark poems that shouldn’t be missed.
She was a world-class poet who deliberately bypassed the New York fast-lane poetry world to live in her beloved West Virginia, to hear the birds every day, to stand on her porch and watch the moon, to walk over to visit with her mother.
Poet Maggie Anderson said she dreamed Irene showed up at a poetry event, screeching up in a van, asking what was going on. Maggie reminded her she had died. Irene laughed and said “Oh, that!” That is so Irene. If only it could be so.
~Kate Long, Charleston, WV
Irene McKinney was, among many other remarkable things, one of the world's great talkers. my more than forty-year long conversation with her, we covered a lot of ground -- laughed a lot, formed strong opinions and changed our minds, argued, and sometimes enjoyed the companionable silence that only long friendship allows. use the past tense, but luckily for all of us, Irene's voice is indelibly inside her poems. Every time I read one of her poems, I hear her speaking it, and so she is always and inimitably present to me and to all her readers -- those who knew her in person and those who will hear her first on the page.
~Maggie Anderson, Kent, Ohio
Making documentaries is in some ways like cooking - you always want the best ingredients.Collaborating with Irene on several projects was like adding a single, remarkable ingredient that was at once the finest main course ingredient and an exotic/complex spice, satisfying, sinful but good for you.When she took me up on my offer to record an open-ended number of memoir/essays for West Virginia Public Radio, I coolly accepted anything she had to offer - of course.Irene did not like gushing and I don't like to gush. Every so many months, I would find myself in a recording booth, not knowing what would come out of her mouth next.We loved each other for our similarities and differences, and I think I was a welcome break from her other worlds.We had more work we could have done.I'm one of the many that deeply miss her.
~ John Nakashima, Morgantown, WV
I used to run into Irene McKinney at literary conferences and celebrations, and she always lit up the space around her.She was someone I liked to see and talk with. I always figured there’d be plenty of time to get to know her better and enjoy her company. That was, of course, a bad calculation on my part.
It was only after I’d known her a while that I began to read her poetry, and I was struck by how fine it was: literarily sophisticated without ever losing touch with real people, real feelings, the real farms and hills and mines. When I heard she had been named Poet Laureate of West Virginia, I had a wonderful sense of security: someone we could depend on was going to represent us. I wish I had told her that.
~Meredith Sue Willis
I first met Irene at an AWP conference in Norfolk, Virginia. She was wearing a little black dress, her shiny red hair and sparkling eyes. Full of stories about yoga class, traveling to and living in India, her voice made me long for adventure. Our table was inside a carousel; the entire evening was magical. We sat in a circle, six hungry women, chewing, talking and listening. Irene fed us. We went to our separate rooms and slept. We went back to our lives and work. Over the years I got to be with Irene a few more times, and always her poetry and wisdom made me feel like I was back in Virginia eating something I needed, listening to an ancient soul.
~Jeanne Bryner, Newton Falls, Ohio
We would like to thank each and every one of you for the role you played in today’s ceremony. Whether it was a contribution to this booklet, providing items that were made specifically for Irene, sharing your thoughts through presentation, or simply by your presence. We honor and remember a great woman today. Irene McKinney will be missed, but her work will live on forever.
A very special thank you goes to Barbara Weaner and Thabo Letsebe for creating and sharing the image/ collage that is used on the front cover.
For those who would like to see Ally Acker’s video tribute to Irene, please go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz3pLcLcCZA
A TRIBUTE
REMEMBERING IRENE MCKINNEY
SEPTEMBER 15, 2013
WV CULTURE CENTER