NOTES     1F.R. Scott, "W.L.M.K." Collected Poems, 78. 2In 1981 Barry McKinnon's book The the was named to the short list for the Governor General's award for poetry in English,which was ultimately won by F.R. Scott's Collected Poems.was the winner. McKinnon, an English instructor at the College of New Caledonia in Prince George, B.C., was served with layoff notice in the winter of 1982. The reason given was the removal of Creative Writing from the College's course offerings even though enrollment for the two Creative Writing courses that he taught was at an all time high when the layoff was announced. In truth, McKinnon had incurred the wrath of the College's administration for criticism of proposed changes to the institution's educational orientation which were intended to downplay the liberal arts and other traditional university courses and to promote a more vocationally based curriculum. His nomination proved something of an embarrassment for those who favoured this change, raising the liberal arts component of an obscure regional college to national prominence at a time when administrators would have preferred it to go quietly. McKinnon was the senior member of his department and had been with it since the founding of the college in 1969, but long term service and loyalty appeared to hold no value for his superiors. News of his firing raised quite a stir in the Canadian literary community, and the lumber mill executives appointed to the College of New Caledonia Board of Governors by Bill Bennett's Social Credit government were soon inundated with letters of protest from prominent writers and critics including Margaret Atwood, Earle Birney, Phyllis Webb, and Michael Ondaatje. By the spring of 1982, McKinnon's layoff notice was rescinded and he was reassigned to teach in the Developmental Studies Centre, a newly created unit of the College where first year students who had failed a placement test were sent for remediation. The Centre was designed to be self-paced, modularized, and objectives based. Students who met its inverse entrance requirement were "diagnosed" and assigned a series of upgrading modules, the number and specific nature of which were dependent upon the particular "symptoms" unveiled by the placement test. At the end of each module a student was to write an objective test. McKinnon's job was to mark the tests and assist students as they worked their way through the modules. Happily, after a year at this work McKinnon was reassigned to his old job, although it would be a few more years before Creative Writing was restored to his department's offerings. 3Although McKinnon has been writing for about thirty years and his work has been anthologised in such collections as The New Long Poem Anthology and The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, many readers of this piece might not be familiar with it. John Harris has written a small book on McKinnon's poetry. Although it was published before "The Centre" appeared, it highlights three characteristics of McKinnon's poetry that are very prominent in that poem: indirection of approach to the subject, moral and social commentary without reference to "-isms" or religion, and stripped down, often dislocated sentence structure. Harris says that McKinnon seldom speaks of a subject directly or bluntly. Instead, "he approaches his themes and subjects in a circumspect manner, writing around them, presenting a pattern of thoughts and emotions and allowing readers to fill in their own story and draw their own conclusions." (1) Although he practices the art of indirection, McKinnon does have a message. Harris concedes that his poetry can be "evasive or ambiguous," (2) but he insists that McKinnon "is not at all evasive in presenting the immediate details of consciousness and a complex but inevitably conventional 'message'" (2). In "The Centre" the message comes through in flashes, at unexpected moments and epiphanies. A truth is not preached, but it is revealed. McKinnon's writing is spare and often breaks with standard English syntax. According to Harris, McKinnon characteristically lops adjectives from nouns, adverbs from verbs, prepositions from their following phrases and clauses,subjects from immediately following predicates and predicates fromimmediately following objects. This slows the reading of the poem, makes it hesitant, and creates a contrapuntal emphasis on those words at the beginnings and ends of lines. (8) McKinnon's indirection and reticence are perfectly suited to the subjective meditative approach of"The Centre". 4In recent years the name has been changed to the Centre for Student Success.   5Contrast McKinnon's first line with the epigram from Robin Blaser with which he prefaces the poem: "All around the poorly loved/their lives follow back/into stone and they dream/a sweeter consonance at the centre" (45). To be "at" the center of a thing or phenomenon implies an involvement and acceptance to which McKinnon does not wish to lay claim. To be "in the centre" merely places someone in a room. 6See the "Panopticism" chapter in Discipline & Punish, especially "This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located [and] examined" (197) and "All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy" (200).