Irene McKinney as remembered by Marc Harshman
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 of all 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.”
Poems – Irene McKinney
Visiting My Gravesite: Talbott Churchyard, West Virginia
Maybe because I was married and felt secure and dead
at once, I listened to my father’s urgings about “the future”
and bought this double plot on the hillside with a view
of the bare white church, the old elms, and the creek below.
I plan now to use both plots, luxuriantly spreading out
in the middle of a big double bed. —But no,
finally, my burial has nothing to do with marriage, this lying here
in these same bones will be as real as anything I can imagine
for who I’ll be then, as real as anything undergone, going back
and forth to “the world” out there, and here to this one spot
on earth I really know. Once I came in fast and low
in a little plane and 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,
it was like my children going on with their plans and griefs
at a distance and nothing I could do about it. But I wanted
to reach down and pat it, while letting it know
I wouldn’t interfere for the world, the world being
everything this isn’t, this unknown buried in the known.
Irene McKinney, “Visiting My Gravesite: Talbott Churchyard, West Virginia” from Unthinkable: Selected Poems 1976-2004. Copyright © 2009 by Irene McKinney. Reprinted by permission of Red Hen Press.
Personal
None of this is personal, not the way you'd think.
The moon keeps on traveling and I can see it
from my balcony each night and each night
different but it's not my own, not like we want
things to be our very own. But it sways me
nevertheless and stands in for certain losses
and gains and for even that much I'm grateful.
I stand at the back door and stare.
"Personal" by Irene McKinney, from Vivid Companion. © Vandalia Press, 2004. Reprinted with permission.
Unthinkable
I am age, I am later,
I’m wider scope, the blue note
in the barn, the sister of hope,
the broad-based axe of dream.
I am time-slotted for relief,
the torn-down home,
the bright angle confused
in the sun, the shirt of pink,
the fragranced wrist, the hub.
Genealogy of nights, the faded
ancient rug. The endless drone
of accumulation, the months
and years stacked up like dice,
like blocks. The going-on,
the going away, diminuendo.
Erosion then, the hanging-on.
“Unthinkable” by Irene McKinney, from Have You Had Enough Darkness Yet? Copyright West Virginia Wesleyan College Press, 2013