“We can’t see what’s true without the light to find it.”
(Excerpted from Irene McKinney’s poem “Talking Softly Under the Ground.”)
As I’ve mentioned in my last few newsletters, I’m reading a lot of former West Virginia poet laureate Irene McKinney’s writing lately. In 2020, roughly eight years after her death, I picked up Have You Had Enough Darkness Yet? (West Virginia Wesleyan College Press, 2013). I read it, made some margin notes, and added it to my West Virginia writers stacks. I just finished Six O’Clock Mine Report (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989) and ordered Unthinkable: Selected Poems 1976-2004 (Red Hen Press, 2009) from eBay last night.
The more of McKinney’s work I read, the more I find it informing my pictures; both how I interpret images I’ve already made as well as how I make new work. My paternal grandparents, Cecil and Freda May, lived in a company house on Grant’s Branch in Pike County, Kentucky. Pawpaw May worked for Eastern for 42 years and passed away from complications from black lung in 1990 at the age of 61.
Above, is the empty lot where their house once stood. The head of the holler is now a small lake that was once a retention pond for mine waste. I will always carry within me the light to find where their house stood.
I have Pawpaw’s dinner bucket and mine foreman certificate (bossin’ papers). I wish I’d had more years with him.
Nearly everyone I know around home has a similar story related to coal. In this part of the country, everyone knows someone who was killed, maimed, or put out of work by coal. It’s true that coal has provided a lot of jobs and work for families for generations in these mountains, but it has always come with a cost. And that cost has always been borne by the least paid, most vulnerable, and hardest working.
Irene McKinney’s poem “Deep Mining” ends with this:
Listen: there is a vein that runs
through the earth from top to bottom
and both of us are in it.
One of us is always burning.
Have you read her work? Are there poems of hers that stand out to you?
As we get closer to actual summer, I’m looking forward to canning some of what we’re growing in our garden. I’m especially excited about making pickles again. We’re growing three different varieties of cucumbers and I’m looking forward to trying them all. I’m pretty much a cut and dry dill fan, but maybe I’ll add some heat to a batch.
I’m reading Why People Photograph by Robert Adams.
I’m listening to The National.
I’m watching as little TV as possible.
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I don't get back home very often these days. When I do, my car always seems to steer its way down the "proach" and travel up Pond Creek, through Stone, usually going as far as McVeigh.
They say time travel is impossible, but a ride up Kentucky Route 199 says otherwise.
First reading today, has me thinking of just finishing the emails and going outside.