Special
Features / April 2004
A
Verse from Country Roads
Irene McKinney, Poet Laureate since 1994. |
By Pat Lawrence
The title ‘poet laureate’ somehow suggests trailing
ivy and white teacups, but West Virginia’s state poet is more
green beans and a sturdy mug. Irene McKinney has been West Virginia’s
poet laureate since 1994, appointed by Governor Caperton to a position
generally held for life. She still lives on the Barbour County
farm worked by seven generations of her Dad’s family. “I
like being known as a ‘bookish hillbilly,’ she says.
Irene is one of only six poets to serve as WV Poet
Laureate since the post was created in 1927. With annual earnings
of $2,000 a year, it’s an honor not a livelihood, though she
made 400 official appearances since being appointed.. “But
poetry isn’t about making money. I live on my teacher’s
salary. I never have much money, but I indulge in books, she
said” There are books everywhere in her house. As a
child, “I read constantly, almost indiscriminately. It didn’t
matter if the book was about repairing tractors or stories by Poe;
anything between the covers of a book was magical. I still
read all the time,” Irene added.
Married at 17 and the mother of two, Irene graduated
with a BA in English and education from Wesleyan when she was 29.
“When my second child was about nine months, I suddenly remembered
I had a mind. I started reading and educating myself. I realized
I could go to college and I started writing again.”
She met with poetry groups, contributed to literary magazines and
shed an unsupportive spouse along the way. “My husband
was against it, but I knew it was crucial in my life. I knew it
was something I had to do.” She developed her first friendships
with serious writers while working on her Masters and earned a Ph.D
from the University of Utah in 1980 with a poetry dissertation.
“Of course, shortly after that, I saw all the flaws in those
poems so it was never published!”
Now Irene teaches English and creative writing at
Weslayan College. Her courses range from basic composition and fiction
writing to women’s literature, world literature and contemporary
poets. She hosts creative writing workshops all over, and
has taught at Western Washington University; the University of California,
Santa Cruz; and New York’s Hamilton College. She’s
been a visiting writer-in-residence at Alderson-Broaddus College,
in a Utah prison, South Carolina, and at the University of Kerala
in India. Co-founder of the Santa Cruz Women's Writers' Workshop
and editor of a poetry journal, she was assistant editor of Quarterly
West, and has published more than 60 poems in magazines, journals
and anthologies nationwide.
McKinney has published four books of poems, received an NEA fellowship
and awards from the Utah Arts Council, the Kentucky Foundation for
Women, and an Alumni Achievement Award from WVU Eberly College of
Arts and Sciences.
She has come a long way from the uncertain days as
a struggling wife and substitute teacher, when, like the woman in
Stained, “I must have looked like what I was- a woman
who had lost her bearings and refused to admit it.”
But, all the roads have led back to the steep hills of the Barbour
County farm where the free-spirited country girl of the poem Atavistic
“wanted to sleep curled in the smell and scratch of hay”,
where the affirmed “scavenger child” of Fodder picked
flowers and carried coal.
Irene sees no problem with being a natural person
as well as an intellectual. “Being a person who thinks and
reads doesn’t negate our natural humanity. Learning and experiencing
poetry makes you pay close attention to language, but like all humanities,
it increases empathy with other people and expands our world.”
In her poem, Deep Mining, from Six O’Clock Mine
Report, Irene describes “a vein that runs through the earth
from top to bottom and both of us are in it”. Clearly
tapping into that vein, Irene is writing a prose memoir of
“a place in Barbour County, a small spot on earth, but with
unique people and items and events.” It is about a place very
like the one where her parents were raised, where her grandparents
cleared the land, a place she has loved all her life. The
Poet Laureate of West Virginia is at home again.
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