Photo by Vic Burkhammer

W.Va. poet laureate Irene McKinney pleased her audience with many poems at the 2007 W.Va. Book Festival last weekend.

Here’s one called “At 24″ from her most recent poetry collection, “Vivid Companion” (WVU Press).
1:49 minutes

At 24

At 24, I had written and read until my eyes were bloodshot,
spending nights and early mornings in a fervor
of page-filling while the baby slept.
I was writing to save my life as I knew it
could be. I was writing to inscribe my body
on a stone tablet, writing in defiance and silence.
Nothing could stop me, I kept saying No
to the paper, I kept saying you can’t have me
to the Junior League, to the tiny streets, to impossible
jobs and prissy motherhood. I was certain
there was another way that didn’t involve
slavery, another way to love and work than the
simian forms evolved so far. One morning I drank
eight cups of coffee and wrote four poems
and I didn’t even care that my head was bursting
and I was lurching around while I scrubbed the bathroom.
Another time I left the children with my mother
and lay in bed all day reading a biography of van Gogh
and groaning. What a life, what a life.
I thought about Toulouse-Lautrec, that little freak.
I was a freak myself, but only in private.
I stared at his bronzes and terra cottas and oranges
until they pulled the color nerves out of my chest.
That was a long time ago and now I know that
I knew nothing then, and if I had I wouldn’t
have gone on. 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.

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